Reactions to irony in discourse: evidence for the least disruption principle

This article examines the use of irony/sarcasm against a corpus of spontaneous spoken data. Unlike previous studies on the subject, our analysis takes into account the entire ironical exchange. We focus particularly on responses to an initial ironical turn, taking into consideration the issue of multi-turn ironical exchanges and unacknowledged ironical utterances. We also consider the effect of sociolinguistic variables. The naturally occurring data of our corpus broadly support the view that speakers tend to limit the extent of the violations of the cooperative principle, thus producing relatively few multi-turn ironical/sarcastic utterances.