Irony is a highly complex phenomenon with varied forms of manifestation, occurring naturally in the most diverse scenes of communication. It is employed in everyday conversation just as much as in literary discourse, be it popular fiction or a more elevated form of literature. Public speakers are keen to exploit its convincing power, as are newspaper columnists intent on bringing their readers to ‘read between the lines’. In scientific discourse, it is especially prevalent in genres profiling a critical attitude (reviews, disputes), although in a subtle or covert way it also frequently appears elsewhere.

In general, linguistic irony makes available to the speaker, and invites the reader to recognize, a form of context-dependent implicit evaluation. By adopting an ironic stance, speakers express their self-reflective detachment from the representation brought under the scope of irony, questioning the appropriateness of its inherent vantage point, and implicitly offering a different one from which the situation in focus can be better assessed.

In the literary excerpt in (1), which is the first sentence in Antal Szerb's short story Cynthia, the speaker casts doubt on the appropriateness of rules that treat improper tie wear and engagement in immoral affairs as equally serious types of offence. However, as the quote comes from the fictitious narrator of a short story, irony may also be directed at the narrator himself.