The paper develops a speech act-based model of verbal irony. It argues, first, that ironic utterances are speech actions performed as conforming to a socially accepted procedure and, second, that they are best understood as so-called etiolated uses of language.

The paper is organized into four parts. The first one elaborates on Austin's doctrine of the etiolations of language and distinguishes between the normal or serious mode of communication and its etiolated mode. The second part discusses the dominant approaches to verbal irony and argues that the irony-as-a-trope theories can be viewed as attempts to describe ironic utterances as cases of normal speech, whereas the metalinguistic theories seem to treat them as etiolated uses of language. The third part proposes a set of felicity conditions for ironic acts and puts forth a hypothesis that echo and overt pretence are complementary techniques of linguistic etiolation used for ironizing. The fourth part uses the proposed model to discuss the social dimension of ironizing and argues that utterances intended as acts of ironizing may trigger the accommodating process of context-repair. The take-home message is that ironic utterances are essentially social actions: acts performed by invoking a socially accepted procedure.

本文开发了一种基于言语行为的言语反讽模型。它认为，首先，讽刺性话语是按照社会接受的程序执行的言语行为，其次，它们最好被理解为所谓的语言使用。

本文分为四个部分。第一个详细阐述了奥斯汀的语言黄化学说，并区分了正常或严肃的交流方式及其黄化。模式。第二部分讨论了口头讽刺的主要方法，并认为讽刺理论可以被视为试图将讽刺话语描述为正常言语的案例，而元语言理论似乎将它们视为语言的黄化使用. 第三部分提出了一套讽刺行为的幸福条件，并提出了一个假设，即回声和明显的伪装是用于讽刺的语言修饰技术的互补技术。第四部分使用所提出的模型来讨论反讽的社会维度，并认为旨在作为反讽行为的话语可能会触发上下文修复的适应过程。带回家的信息是讽刺话语本质上是社会行为：通过调用社会接受的程序进行的行为。