Irony in news interviews: Dialogism and intertextuality

The article analyzes ironic interpretation in extracts from news interviews on British and Israeli television, specifically ironic criticism addressed to breaches of interactional conventions. In doing so, it elaborates on the notion of echoic mention of a prior utterance, thought or norm (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1981, Wilson & Sperber 1992), and highlights the intrinsic relations it maintains with dialogism (Bakhtin 1986) and intertexuality (Kristeva 1986). Given that irony involves criticism, in ironic texts at least two positions are brought together - the one represented by the echoed semiotic unit and the other represented by the echoing utterance - and their adjacency accentuates their mismatch. It is argued that the interpretation of irony may involve the re-coding of interactional and social norms, and that irony may thus be conceived of as a way to re-affirm and re-accentuate these norms.