Xose A. Padilla García & Belén Alvarado Ortega

(Publicado en: Dale April Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano (eds.) (2010): Dialogue in Spanish. Studies in functions and contexts. Amsterdam. John Benjamins.)

The aim of this article is to link irony and politeness, two apparently contradictory pragmatic phenomena. This will be done by analyzing a series of colloquial Peninsular Spanish samples in which a speaker can be ironic and, at the same time, polite. As a consequence, the ironic speaker (henceforth, the ironist) does not always damage the public face of the addressee. 

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment. (Edwin P. Whipple)

I asked Kaitlin about irony and it turns out that only 20% of all human beings understand irony, which means that 80% of the world understands it literally.  I can´t imagine anything worse than that.  Well, just as this:  imagine that you read the newspaper and you believe that everything is true to a certain level. (Douglas Coupland)

Introduction

To carry out our objectives, the phenomenon of oral irony is described and related to the classical theory of politeness of Brown and Levinson (1987), followed by an examination of how it functions in a corpus of oral utterances produced by Spanish speakers in everyday situations.

This study will intended to show that irony does not always present damage to the public face, but rather that there can be positive irony whose function it is to strengthen friendship ties and to integrate the speaker and addressee into the conversational group. In this sense, irony does not have to be impolite nor pose a threat to the negative or positive face of the interlocutors. On the contrary, irony and politeness are perfectly compatible pragmatic mechanisms. Finally, it should be highlighted that irony is not only a mechanism with strong contextual dependence, but also, as the examples demonstrate, a series of indicators such as tone, laughter, the use of evidential markers or word order, serve to express it.