184 Language and Literature 29(2)

approaches to literature. The other is related to theory of mind (ToM) or the mind-
reading ability of individuals with autism. Quoting from Baron-Cohen’s research in
1995, Kolaiti argues that autism is “linked to an impairment in ToM” (p. 105). This
proves to be inaccurate now. Current data show that people with autism have effective
mental state attribution abilities, and they even display capabilities to engage in literary
creations (see further Savarese (2015, 2018)). In short, with its systematic structuring
and logical theorizing, Kolaiti’s monograph contributes substantially to the de-
velopment of cognitive poetics.

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This work was supported by the 2019 Scientific Research Fund (No.
sisu201906) and the Fund of Cognitive Poetics Research Team (No. SISUTZD201901) of Sichuan
International Studies University.

References
Freeman M (2007) Cognitive linguistic approaches to literary studies: state of the art in cognitive
poetics. In: Dirk G and Hubert C (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1175–1202.
Savarese R (2015) What some autistics teach us about poetry: a neurocosmopolitan approach. In:
Zunshine L (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 393–418.
Savarese R (2018) See it Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers and the Schooling of a No-
Good English Professor. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston (eds.), Irony in Language Use and Communication, John
Benjamins: Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2017; 294 pp.: ISBN 978 9027209856, £95 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Xie Hang , School of Foreign Languages, Inner Mongolia University of Technology, China

In Irony in Language Use and Communication, Athanasiadou and Colston bring together
the contributions of an interdisciplinary group of scholars to address a topic of long-
standing interest to stylisticians. Readers are provided with a rich overview of the study of
irony in linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, and other disciplines. The volume is or-
ganized into four parts: ‘Interdisciplinary perspectives’, ‘Irony, thought, and (media)
communication’, ‘Approaches to verbal irony’, and ‘Approaches to studying irony’.
Book Reviews 185

The first part of this volume focuses on the basis of the connections between different
types of irony. In Chapter 1, for example Colston describes irony from a performance
and perception perspective, focusing specifically on verbal and situational irony. Readers
are reminded that there are pairs of schemata in communication that are contradictory
to one another and yet co-exist, and that these conjoined antonymous pairs can be found
in each of these types of irony. Colston states that inferential processes can both facil-
itate and hinder the processing of these antonymous pairs of schemata and may be con-
fused with many other factors like concreteness and referential distance. In Chapter 2,
Gibbs and Samermit explore the various ways in which irony presents itself in every-
day life. Reinforcing a view taken often in stylistics, they show how irony is not only
used as a rhetorical tool employed in communication but is also a fundamental lens
through which individuals interpret the world. The conscious realization of irony stems
from individuals’ assessment of a discrepancy between their general beliefs and ex-
pectations and their experience of the world; the authors provide the example of a financial
planner who ends up bankrupt. According to ‘benign violation theory’ (McGraw and
Warner, 2014; McGraw and Warren, 2010), when something threatens our norms whilst
itself seeming non-threatening, the situation may be understood as humorous. Willison
(Chapter 3) attempts to convince readers of the value of an ecumenical approach to irony
by illustrating the inadequacy and limitations of restrictivism. Case studies are pre-
sented to demonstrate that restrictive methods are limited in resolving some pressing
methodological controversies. In these examples, Willison illustrates three drawbacks
of restrictive approaches: inadequate addressing of the question of mechanism, limiting
interdisciplinary collaboration on a theory of irony, and displaying a non-compelling
argument for restrictivism from a scientific perspective. Ecumenical approaches to irony
are superior, he says, not only because irony can be affected and interpreted by both
pretense and echo but also because irony is operable across a wide range of media.
Willison concludes that ecumenical approaches can both accommodate irony’s diverse
range of applications and produce an account of an underlying principle for the different
forms of irony. In particular, Willison suggests that ‘an ecumenical approach to the theory
of irony has the potential to be fruitful in several of the respects in which restrictive
approaches are limited’ (p.77).
The three chapters in Part II look at the relationship between irony, thought, and
communication whilst also fostering links with the initial conclusions and observations
expressed in Part I. Chapter 4 examines a three-dimensional model of verbal irony: irony
in language, thought, and communication. Burgers and Steen incorporate various ex-
perimental studies on irony and metaphor into this model. By incorporating pretense and
relevance theories, it is proposed that the recipients of ironic discourse use both the
propositional and intended meaning to understand an utterance. Burgers and Steen ob-
serve that, with this shift in evaluative valence, irony can be defined as a contrast between
the literal meaning and the intended meaning. Chapter 4 is, therefore, connected to
Colston’s observations in Chapter 1 that people use irony frequently in situations where
certain stereotypes are violated. Chapter 5, by Batoréo, offers a case study comparison of
European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on irony in verbal puns. Two
case studies illustrate that both polysemous and homonymic expressions are among the
cognitive and linguistic mechanisms that trigger ironic puns. This chapter provides
186 Language and Literature 29(2)

researchers with useful insights into irony as a fundamental way of thinking about the
human experience and is in turn, therefore, connected to the observations of Chapter 2.
In Chapter 6, Musolff explores a corpus documenting ‘Britain’s place at the heart of
Europe’ to analyse the interplay between the comprehension of metaphor, irony, and
sarcasm. By and large, Musolff convincingly demonstrates how two opposing ‘metaphor
scenarios’ (Musolff, 2006) lead to different interpretative nuances. The first scenario
is closely related to conceptual meaning, which indicates that ‘the heart’ is a part of a
healthy organism. Based on ‘graded salience’ (Giora and Drucker, 2015), the author
takes the first scenario as the default version. The second scenario provides a sarcastic
connection between this affirmative proposition of Britain and the apparently negative
state of the EU, taken here as the non-default scenario. Musolff demonstrates through
this example that metaphor, irony, and sarcasm can not only come together but also work
against one another.
Part III investigates approaches to verbal irony, including pretense and fictively
elaborating hyperbole, cognitive modeling, and metonymic basis. In Chapter 7, various
case studies allow Barnden to test an approach to verbal irony and pretense in terms
of drama. Although there are previous studies on pretense approaches, what makes
this chapter unique is that it is the first to report the exploration of fictively elaborat-
ing hyperbole in irony. Barnden highlights a triangle of contrast in a drama’s world:
the distinction between acted characters’ beliefs and the real world, characters’ views
and the drama’s world, and the drama’s world and the real world. In Chapter 8, Ruiz
de Mendoza extends the study of cognitive modelling to metaphor, metonymy, and
hyperbole in the cognitive processes involved in irony. The notion of echo is treated
not only as a pragmatic task but also as a mental operation. The combination of echo
with other cognitive notions (e.g. concept-building and inferential cognitive processes)
leads to the creation of an ironic scenario. The echoing operation may include not
only content-based repetitions but also structural echoing. Ruiz de Mendoza takes this
theory as being complementary to relevance theory because of its advantage in tracing
the original attitude to the underlying cognitive activity in the cancellation of echoed
assumptions. Chapter 9 explores irony evocation through the support and contribu-
tion of metonymy, hyperbole, and simile. Athanasiadou reviews two types of con-
structions: the adjective noun construction and the like-construction. The opposition
between positive and negative values within adjective noun constructions forms the
basis of ironic evocation, whilst similes in like-constructions express irony through
comparison.
Part IV provides three different approaches to studying irony: default interpretations,
classical experimental approaches, and the eye-tracking paradigm. In Chapter 10, Giora
and Drucker (2015) examine the Defaultness Hypothesis and test whether defaultness
affects processing costs and pleasing effects significantly. To this end, they examine the
negative and affirmative idioms: ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ (negative) and
‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’ (affirmative). Owing to
memory and cognitive factors, default meanings are coded and prompted automatically.
The authors conclude that default meanings of familiar non-literal negative stimuli are
processed faster than non-default non-salient affirmative meanings. Chapter 11 aims to
compare the importance of laboratory-based approaches with other approaches to
Book Reviews 187

evaluating ironic cognition. In this chapter, Katz provides the reader with three dem-
onstrations of the classic experimental approach, in which irony has been studied in the
laboratory, to prove that it is still useful. The first demonstration focuses on the fun-
damental nature of an ironic context, the second argues that a no-reply condition can have
both positive and negative pragmatic effects, and in the third demonstration, Katz uses
a tree process approach to explore pragmatic effects in irony. His findings are that irony
often exploits multifaceted aspects of communication, for example the use of ‘funny’ and
‘cruel’ in a single statement. Ţurcan and Filik (Chapter 12) research the effect of echoic
mention in an eye-tracking paradigm on reading items of verbal irony. They test pre-
dictions from three theories of sarcasm processing: (1) Nonfigurative (‘literal’) comments
are processed faster than sarcastic comments, as forecast by the Standard Pragmatic
Model. (2) Based on the graded salience hypothesis, the processing of irony is affected by
familiarity with the comments. (3) Nonfigurative comments should be processed faster
than sarcastic utterances, which underlies the echoic mention theory. The authors report
that the echoic mention theory’s prediction received the most support from the experi-
ment; however, research results did not perfectly match any of the mechanism’s pre-
dictions. This result leads to a final appeal by the author for a constraint satisfaction
approach (Pexman, 2008), with its unspecified contextual factors that can have a sig-
nificant influence on sarcasm comprehension.
All in all, this volume not only provides several efficient and innovative frameworks for
irony research but also serves as a valuable academic resource for scholars and graduate
students who are interested in the study of irony.

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This review is funded by the Education Department of Inner Mongolia
through the Graduate Students’ Education and Teaching Reform Research and Practice Project
2019, “Research on the Cultivating of Course Study, and Research Ability of Linguistic Major
Academic Graduate Students” (YJG20181012806).

References
Giora R and Drucker A (eds.) (2015) Default sarcastic interpretations: On the priority of nonsalient
interpretations. Discourse Processes 52(3): 173–200.
McGraw P and Warner J (2014) The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
McGraw AP and Warren C (2010) Benign violations. Psychological Science 21(8): 1141–1149.
Musolff A (2006) Metaphor scenarios in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 21(1): 23–38.
Pexman PM (2008) It’s fascinating research. Current Directions in Psychological Science 17(4):
286–290.