Interpretation of Irony in Persian based on a Perceptual Perspective

Irony in the tradition of studying rhetoric refers to a word that has two meanings and the audience realizes its implicit meaning according to the circumstances. A look at the background of the study of irony shows that this device, which today is no longer limited to the field of literature and is generally used in everyday conversations of speakers, has always been confused with other processes such as metaphor, metonymy, implication, and so on. The present article, while referring to these overlaps, seeks to provide a clear and independent definition of irony, and, in particular, tries to provide an analytic-descriptive perspective with the help of various data from the in-context everyday sentences of Persian speakers. The perceptual approach lets us examine how irony is understood and interpreted. This study shows that speakers interpret irony by relying on perceptual context information, whether linguistic context (context A), situational context (context B) or pre-existing information in memory (context C). In the meantime, the existence of specific information in context C plays a major role, according to which, each sentence can be interpreted in its contradictory meaning.