Verbal irony and the Maxims of Grice's cooperative principle

Abstract

This paper makes reference to Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory, and their treatment of irony as an off record strategy. These authors consider that different off record strategies violate or flout different maxims, and "being ironic" is labelled as a strategy violating the Quality Maxim. The main aim of this paper is to discuss how, by being ironic, a speaker or writer can flout not only the Maxim of Quality but the other three Gricean Maxims as well.