Redundancy, irony and humor

The goal of this contribution is to examine various cases of redundancy in source literary texts and in their translations, which serve as cues for the presence of indirect meaning and lead to an ironic interpretation. Redundancy is often interpreted as a flouting of the Gricean Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). However, I suggest that, under certain conditions and in certain ironic environments, redundancy can also be regarded as a flouting of other maxims of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, such as the Maxim of Manner (Grice, 1975).This flouting is regarded here as one of the cues that lead to the detection of irony as opposed to humor. A clear distinction is drawn between the use of irony and humor based on a comparative model which distinguishes between cues for irony and cues for humor in the context of source literary texts and their translations.