Paradox and Oxymoron Revisited

The study of paradox and oxymoron has been a matter of central concern within traditional rhetoric and literature, where the two phenomena are simply regarded as tropes or figures of speech. In this paper we shall approach paradox and oxymoron from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective in order to analyse how they are produced and understood. In fact, there is a scarcity of serious studies on how these two tropes work from this stance. In order to fill this gap, following Herrero (2009), we shall focus on the cognitive operations that characterise them and on their specific contextual effects.Moreover, we shall see how paradox and oxymoron can also co-occur with other conceptual analytical phenomena such as metonymy and metaphor (e.g. He is a stupid brain, to be dead living).