Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800

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Journal of Pragmatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Phrasal irony: Its form, function and exploitation

Alan Partington *
Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bologna, via Cartoleria 5, 40124 BO, Italy

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: This paper is an examination of the as yet little-studied phenomenon of phrasal irony,
Received 16 December 2009 defined as the reversal of customary collocational patterns of use of certain lexical items.
Received in revised form 4 October 2010 The first research question is how phrasal irony is structured. A second, very closely
Accepted 4 November 2010
related question is how, why and where writers use it, and a third question is how it relates
Available online 15 December 2010
to other more familiar types of irony.
During the course of these investigations it was observed that, occasionally, the ironic
Keywords:
Irony use of a particular phrase or phrase template is found to be repeated frequently and
Collocation productively and can therefore be said to have become a recognised usage in its own right.
Evaluation However, it was also noted that by no means all reversal of normal collocational patterning
Corpus linguistics is performed with an ironic intent, and so yet a further research question is how the
Corpus-assisted discourse studies circumstances when phrasal irony is at play might differ from those of simple counter-
instances to the statistically normal collocational patterns of use.
Corpus methodology is used to locate ironic uses of phrase templates for examination.
As Louw (1993) points out, before the advent of language corpora, detecting sufficient
instances of such use, which can be quite rare, was problematic, and this may explain why
so little previous attention has been given to these phenomena.
ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: defining irony as evaluative clash

Most studies of irony, whether literary, linguistic, stylistic or psychological, tend to take the object of study to be a
textual – or discourse – phenomenon, and tend to talk of an ironic ‘‘utterance’’ or ‘‘statement’’ or ‘‘proposition’’, depending
on the discipline the authors hail from. Almost all the various theories also see irony as bisociative (Koestler, 1964), in that
irony involves some form of ‘‘duality in terms of incongruency, incompatibility, opposition etc.’’ (Barbe, 1993:589); as
Middleton and Rowley put it, ‘‘ironia, that with one eye looks two ways at once’’.1 There are two general forms of verbal
irony, the explicit and the implicit. The following is a straightforward instance of an explicitly ironic statement or
proposition

(1) It is ironic that the majority of Quebecers favor constitutional recognition of their special and unique heritage,
yet have failed and continue to fail to treat native North American Indians with any special respect due to their
unique heritage. (Chicago Tribune 9/3/1990)
(Barbe, 1993:584)

* Tel.: +39 0532 249931.

E-mail address: alanscott.partington@unibo.it.
1
The World Tost (Tossed) at Tennis (1620:124).

0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.11.001
 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800 1787

in which the writer juxtaposes two narratives felt to be incongruous:

Narrative 1: Quebecers demand recognition of their own special heritage.

Narrative 2: Quebecers deny recognition of the special heritage of native Americans.

(Narrative is used here in a general sense to mean ‘‘an event or sequence of events which unfold from a particular perspective’’,
Partington, 2006:41). In implicit irony, on the other hand, only one of the narratives is present in the text (the dictum), whilst the
other (the implicatum) remains unspoken and has to be (re-)constructed by the audience, as in the much-debated instance (Gibbs
and O’Brien, 1991; Hamamoto, 1998; Sperber and Wilson, 1998):

(2) Mother (on entering her child’s untidy room): I love children who keep their rooms clean.

where the implicatum is that she is less keen on children (particularly the one in question) who do not keep their rooms clean.
Implicit irony is often humorous in intent (see the quotation from Reyner below)2 whilst explicit irony is rarely so.
Irony also implies a particular relationship between the two narratives; as Koestler makes clear there are many other
kinds of bisociative relations or dualities, from ambiguity, to contradiction, to reiteration (1964:27–29). Partington (2006,
2007) defines irony as enacting a reversal of evaluative meaning in the movement from one narrative to the other (frequently
there is reversal of propositional or ideational meaning too, but reversal of evaluation is seen as the driving force).
Evaluation is intended here in the dualistic, bi-dimensional sense of ‘‘the indication that something is good or bad’’
(Hunston, 2004:157), not necessarily in a strictly moral sense, but also as favourable or unfavourable in an almost infinite
number of wider senses: good can be intended as ‘profitable’, ‘enjoyable’, ‘sensible’ and so on, bad as the opposite of all these.
Evaluation is pervasive in practically all forms of linguistic communication. Apart from simple transactions (‘‘When is the
next bus to Pontefract?’’: ‘‘In 25 minutes’’), very few discourses are merely purely ideational and in all normal circumstances
speakers/writers both give experiental messages about the world and simultaneously express their own evaluative attitude
to it, approving or critical.3 On many occasions the evaluative attitude is in fact the core information communicated (‘‘What
did you think of Alison’s talk?’’: ‘‘It was both well thought-out and entertaining’’). Evaluation sits somewhere between the
ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of language, or better bestrides them, and is cohesive of the two. Much of
evaluation theory therefore attempts to describe ‘‘how writers/speakers approve and disapprove, enthuse and abhor,
applaud and criticise, and how they position their readers/listeners to do likewise’’ (Martin and White, 2005:1). When there
is this attempt to position readers/listeners, evaluation is also the engine of persuasion. Through it, speakers/writers
endeavour to convince an audience of what should be seen as right and proper and what not, and in this way persuade the
audience to think and conduct itself in an appropriate manner. Thus speakers/writers constantly both communicate their
own evaluative attitudes but can also seek to impose, overtly or covertly, particular values and stances. Irony is an indirect
and often fairly subtle way of expressing evaluative attitudes and, since the evaluation it expresses is very generally negative,
it is frequently used as a tool for persuasive censure and possibly control (see section 2 below).
Irony, then, depends upon a contrast, and the principal form of contrast in all types of irony is between good and bad
evaluation, between approval and disapproval of the entity or situation in hand; very often the contrast between expected
positive outcomes and real negative ones. For instance, in the example of explicit irony in (1) we find a contrast between the
positive evaluation made in the first narrative by the Quebecois of their own heritage with their blatant disregard (negative)
for that of native North Americans in the second narrative. The Quebecois are, of course, the object of the persuasive censure
mentioned above. Most generally, in implicit irony, as in (2), the dictum expresses a positive evaluation of some situation or
person, which is reversed – the real evaluation is projected as negative – in the implicatum.

2. Phrasal irony: evaluative clash with the phrase

In a seminal article Louw (1993), instead, investigates a particular phenomenon of what we might call language system-
internal irony (to distinguish it from the narrative-based kind of irony described thus far), a type occurring within – and by
means of – the phrase itself. He examines how speakers or writers sometimes, deliberately or otherwise, upset the normal
collocational (that is, combinatorial) patterns of lexical items. He notes, in other words, how they sometimes place together –
or co-select – two lexical items which do not normally keep company (that is, do not usually collocate) or, rather, which
normally in fact shun each other’s company, in order to maintain harmony of evaluation, which is the expected
communicative norm. He suggests that, when speakers do so consciously, it is usually with ironic intent. He quotes an
example from Small World by David Lodge:

(3) The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to
indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while apparently bent on self-improvement.
(David Lodge in Louw, 1993:164)

2
‘‘[. . .] recent work by Colston and O’Brien (2000), Dews et al. (1995), Dews and Winner (1995), Gibbs (2000), Kreuz et al. (1991) [. . .] shows that irony,
too, can elicit laughter [. . .] and lead to further joking.’’ (Norrick, 2003:1340–1341).
3
The terminology here: ideational, experiential and interpersonal is that employed in functional grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004).
1788 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800

Citing data from the Cobuild corpus (see Sinclair Ed., 1987), Louw shows that bent on very generally collocates with
unfavourable items – destroying, harrying, mayhem, and so on. Louw claims that, by choosing bent on to partner the evidently
favourable self-improvement, rather than more obviously positive or neutral terms such as, say, seeking, hoping for, and so on,
Lodge is searching for an ironic effect. The item bent on displays a negative semantic prosody (Morley and Partington, 2009
prefer the term evaluative prosody) definable as the attitudinal or evaluative meaning – positive/favourable/desirable etc., as
against negative/unfavourable/undesirable etc. – that an item normally helps to realise in the discourse (Louw, 1993;
Sinclair, 2003), and in this particular excerpt, Lodge is exploiting this unfavourable prosody to subvert the normally positive
evaluation associated with self-improvement.
It should thus be apparent why this kind of effect can be considered a form of irony as defined in the previous section. The
kind of bisociative clash or opposition or incongruency that speakers strive to create when they indulge in phrasal irony, as
can be seen from the example above, is an effect created by using an item in combination with an item of the opposite
evaluative polarity to that with which it normally co-occurs with, and therefore to that expected by the listener/reader.
Irony is, famously and as already mentioned, very generally used to criticise:

An irony is a nipping jeast [jest], or a speech that hath the honey of pleasantness in its mouth, and a sting of rebuke in its taile.
(E. Reyner 1656, cited in OED)

and the butts of David Lodge’s criticism are, of course, participants in academic conferences. A similar effect from literature is
Thackeray’s ‘‘Politics set in a short time after dessert’’ (from Vanity Fair, included as an example of set in in the OED). Sinclair
shows, again using evidence from the Cobuild corpus, that set in has a highly negative evaluative prosody, normally co-
occurring with items such as rot, ill-will, decadence, impoverishment, infection, prejudice (1987:155–156), and so on.
Thackeray’s comment casts dinner-table politics in a decidedly less than favourable light. P.G. Wodehouse too realised the
comic potential of this technique: ‘‘concealed my astonishment that anyone . . . could deliberately love this girl’’,4 where the
choice of deliberately, which the corpus evidence shows to be not only negative but often nefariously so,5 reverses the normal
positive associations of love and notifies us that the speaker is not himself enamoured of the young lady in question. One
presumes that the butts of the irony are both the girl and her admirer.
However, as Hunston (2007) underlines, speakers/writers do not always coselect evaluatively/attitudinally
‘‘incompatible’’ lexical items in order to perform irony; sometimes the effect sought is purely dramatic, on other occasions
there would seem to be very little unusual effect at all. In section 7 we will examine how the circumstances when phrasal
irony is at play might differ from those of simple counter-instances to the statistically normal collocational patterns of use.
Finally, Louw also argues that writers can diverge from normal, expected collocational usage by accident, in which case the
reader/listener may detect a difference between what the writer is apparently saying and what s/he really believes. These would
be cases of unconscious irony, unintended by the speaker but detectable by a listener, similar to dramatic irony in which the
audience evaluates a situation in a radically different way from one of the characters in the drama. He cites the example of a
speaker who is apparently praising the professional standards of the University of Zimbabwe as follows: ‘‘it is symptomatic of
the University of Zimbabwe which has such a high reputation that . . .’’ (1993:169). Corpus data shows that the semantic
prosody of symptomatic is heavily unfavourable, which suggests that the speaker may not subconsciously think quite so highly
of the University he is discussing. Hunston noted her own confused reaction to an acknowledgement in a student dissertation: ‘‘I
would like to thank my supervisor for his persistent help and advice’’ (2007:259). Was this (non-native) student misapplying
the generally negatively charged item persistent? Or was the student/writer being ironic about the quality of the supervisor’s
advice? The implications of collocational/evaluative reversal and mismatch for language learners are clear in the twin perils of
both failing to detect ironic intent in others or of creating confusion and misunderstanding with our own speech.
A final point. In examining the form of phrasal irony, that is, its internal structure consisting of the juxtaposition of
elements of opposing evaluative polarity, it was necessary, inescapable, that we simultaneously described its function, that of
the speaker/writer intending to defeat the listener’s/reader’s normal collocational expectations (for a variety of local effects,
generally including humour and criticism). All this would appear to be a very lucid illustration of how form and function in
language are two sides of the same coin.

3. Corpus and software

The principal corpus used in the present study is SiBol, a newspaper corpus (named after the Universities of Siena and
Bologna where it was compiled) composed of two roughly parallel subcorpora: SiBol 93, consisting of around 100 million
words of texts from the UK so-called quality newspapers – the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, The Times
and The Sunday Times – from the year 1993, and SiBol 05, approximately 155 million words from the same papers, plus the
addition of the Observer, from the year 2005; a combined corpus, then, of 255 million words of text. They both represent the
entire output of these papers for their respective years. The principal research programs employed were WordSmith Tools
(version 5), especially the Concordance tool. A concordancer is essentially a collector and collator of examples. It extracts

4
From The Code of the Woosters (1991:53).
5
The SiBol 05 corpus includes: deliberately infecting women with HIV/killing unarmed civilians/mislead people/scaremongering and many similarly negative
uses.
 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800 1789

instances of the searchword or expression under analysis and arranges them in a concordance, that is, a list of unconnected
lines of text that have been summoned by the concordance program from a computer corpus, with the searchword or search
expression located at the centre of each line. The rest of each line contains the immediate co-text to the left and right of the
search-item. It is possible to specify the number of characters of co-text from 80 to, realistically, around 600 on each side (a
narrower co-text is often more suitable for grammatical analyses, a wider one for analysis of features of discourse). Such a list
enables the analyst to look for eventual patterns in the surrounding co-text, which proffer clues to the use of the searchword.
It allows the observer to discover patterns of collocation, that is, how any particular word or expression co-occurs with other
words/expressions with particular frequency. These patterns are often not obvious to introspection by itself.

4. Evaluative oxymoron

One form of phrasal irony is that which we might term the evaluative oxymoron. Oxymorons (or oxymora) ‘‘are
traditionally defined as figures of speech that combine two seemingly contradictory elements’’ (Gibbs, 1993:268). Shen
(1987) talks of two types of oxymoron, direct and indirect. In the first, one element or ‘‘term’’ is a more or less direct antonym
of the other (bittersweet, living death), whilst in the second, one term is a hyponym of the other’s antonym (for example, ‘‘the
silence whistles’’, where whistle is a hyponym of noise, itself the antonym of silence). Most of Gibbs and Shen’s examples are
drawn from poetry (the first takes from Shakespeare, the latter from Hebrew verse, where he also finds that indirect
oxymoron is far more frequent in his material than direct and may well be generally perceived to be the more poetic form),
but Gibbs also notes how ‘‘oxymora are frequently found in everyday speech . . . ‘internal exile’, ‘loyal opposition’’’, which
‘‘suggests some underlying ability to conceive of ideas, objects, and events in oxymoronic terms’’ (Gibbs, 1993:269).
What is of interest here is a type of oxymoron where the two constituent elements are of opposing evaluative polarity.
Examples include bittersweet, sweet sorrow, tough love (the first being a direct, the second and third indirect oxymorons,
under Shen’s classification). In each case one of the elements would generally be seen (in context-free terms) as negative, the
other positive. The overall evaluation may often appear to be neither good nor bad but in between or a mixture of the two,
although in practice speakers may shift the balance, as in the corpus examples of bittersweet: rather more bittersweet than hey
nonny-no sweet (SiBol 05: Times),6 but it was bittersweet applause and Rusedski knew it (SiBol 05: Guardian), both of which are
clearly negative in evaluation.7 Instances of evaluative oxymoron from politics include (for clarity, the parts of examples in
focus are underlined): champagne socialism, the lessons of Chinese democracy (Daily Telegraph, 1993), [b]ut, one hundred years
later, the Negro [. . .] finds himself an exile in his own land (M. Luther King) and the wisest fool in Christendom, said of James I of
England (VI of Scotland).
Even the word itself – oxymoron – can be used to make an argument because of its potential to perform evaluation:

(4) Mr Adams confirmed in my presence as recently as last week that he did not, and would never, recognise British
justice, which he described as an oxymoron.
(Baroness Park of Monmouth, House of Lords debate, 2003)

British justice is described as an oxymoron and negatively evaluated because the primary source, Gerry Adams, president of
Sinn Fein, wishes to argue that the British judicial system is unfair.
Similarly, in:

(5) There may be people - there may even be people in this House - who are so cynical as to suggest that business
ethics is an oxymoron.
(Lord Borrie, House of Lords debate, 2003)

the speaker is suggesting that some people – cynics as he calls them – evaluate all business as unethical.
Even though evaluative oxymorons contain one favourable and one unfavourable element, the overall evaluation of such
constructs in political language tends to be highly unfavourable.8 The most straightforward of these is the last: the
description of James is a derisive comment on the difference between how he sees himself (wise: positive) and how others
(his enemies at least) see him (fool: negative). In the third, the ‘‘negro’’ (Dr. King’s own term) being in his own land, usually a
good thing, actually compounds the negative condition of being an exile, though, of course, the exile himself is not the object
of criticism here, but those who have consigned him to this piteous circumstance.
In the first two above, in contrast to a presumed positive evaluation of themselves by the two groups, the champagne
socialists and the Chinese regime, the overall evaluation is again scornful. The items champagne and Chinese are not, of
course, in themselves negative, but become so when presented in the company of socialism and democracy. They both of
course rely heavily on the audience sharing the same type of knowledge-of-the-world as the speaker. The former implies
hypocrisy, the latter, written not long after the Tienanmen incident, implies that it is no democracy at all.

6
Hey nonny no is the title of an anonymous 16thC carpe diem – let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die – drinking song.
7
Plausibly, if an entity or situation is described as less than entirely positive, listeners are psychologically and philosophically inclined to view this as
problematic.
8
See also Shen (1987) and Gibbs and Kearney (1994) on how oxymorons in poetry are perceived as more than the simple sum of their constituent parts.
1790 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800

5. Substitution by evaluative opposite in well-known phrases

Another form of phrasal irony, common in advertising and newspaper headlines, is devised when some part of a well-
known phrase is substituted by its evaluative opposite. Having come across, in a novel (Anthony Burgess: The End of the
World News):

(6) That night in Southern Australia brought its first snuffle of tidings of great horror.

which is a highly negative reworking of the evaluatively positive tidings of comfort and joy, from the well-known Christmas
carol God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, I prepared a concordance of tidings of in SiBol 05 and found9:

(7) I hate to have to bring tidings of discomfort and joylessness to the nation of shopkeepers I love.

whilst a web search found this marvellous ‘‘Halloween carol’’ to the same tune as its Christmas version:

(8) God rest ye merry spirits, let nothing you dismay.

Witches stirring bubbling cauldrons, smelling of decay.
To save you all from Satan’s Po’er before your hair turns gray.
Oh tidings of horror and fright,
Horror and fright!
Oh tidings of horror and fright.

Partington (1998) reports several other similar examples of this sort of evaluative substitution (part of a phenomenon he
terms unusuality)10 from newspaper headlines, including Catholic distaste (derived from the expression catholic taste –
meaning ‘‘wide-ranging’’ taste), which introduces a review of a Dario Fo play in which the author expresses his own
‘‘distaste’’ for the Church. Other examples cited include an all-American villain (rather than hero), referring to Colombus’s
unpopularity among some native-Americans, and Oxford quick to lose the initiative (rather than gain), which describes an
unimpressive performance on the part of the University cricket team. Martin discusses Christmas and New Year
tribulations (tribulations instead of celebrations, being frequently found in the expression trials and tribulations)
(1992:82). Very occasionally, and most germane to the current paper, the reworked phrase becomes a new use and can
even then develop into a well-worn canonical one. In SiBol 05 there are 34 occurrences of [snatch] defeat from the jaws of
victory compared to only 19 occurrences of the original version [snatch] victory from the jaws of defeat (Morley, personal
communication).
Such instances are somewhat different from those analysed in the previous sections. There is no inherent internal
incongruency as in sweet sorrow or bent on self-improvement. There is, however, an implicit opposition between the version
actually produced and that previously mentally acquired by the reader. As mentioned in section 1, there are two types of
irony, explicit irony as in example (1) where both the opposing elements are present in the text, and implicit irony, where the
opposition is between a dictum, that which is actually spoken (or written) and an implicatum, that which is unspoken but
implied, as in America’s allies – always there when they need you (Kaufer, 1981:501, discussed in Attardo, 2000:798), whose
ironic effect depends upon prior knowledge of the optimistic proverb friends, always there when you need them.
There are, then, parallel analogies between, firstly, the type of phrasal irony as illustrated by sweet sorrow or bent on self-
improvement and other forms of explicit irony in that both elements are present, and also, secondly, between the instances of
evaluation substitution as illustrated in this section and implicit irony, in that only one narrative is given, but its effect
depends upon another quite different one.
Is this form of evaluative substitution always performed with an ironic intent? Several of the examples here seem clearly
ironic, especially quick to lose the initiative and [snatch] defeat from the jaws of victory, which also have obvious butts of the
criticism. Christmas tribulations too is a humorously ironic and unflattering comment on the so-called festive season and an
all-American villain is also deliberately mocking (often a signal of ironic intent), whilst example (7) contains several other
markers of irony besides the substitution, especially the phrase the nation of shopkeepers. Tidings of great horror (example 6)
and Catholic distaste on the other hand are minimally ironic and the evaluative substitution is instead seeking an intensifying
effect through novelty and surprise. We will return to the topic of ironic versus intensified usage in sections 7.2 and 8.

6. The ‘popularisation’ of the ironic usage of a phrase

What is of further interest is that, in the corpus data here, certain phrases or phrase templates where ironic evaluative
clash is exploited appear several times, in several reworkings. In such cases, the ironic use of a template is employed
productively and has perhaps come to be recognised as a new version. In other words, writers adopt and reproduce the

9
A ‘‘nation of shopkeepers’’ refers to England; attributed to Napoleon.
10
Giora et al. (2004) analyse other examples of unusuality in their research into the psycholinguistic ‘‘optimal relevance hypothesis’’.
 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800 1791

formulation in its ironic sense and we can presume that writers (and possibly readers) have been primed to recognise this
usage thanks to previous encounters.11
These fall into two types:

1) reversals where an expected negative element of the template is replaced by something positive;
2) reversals where an expected positive element of the template is replaced by something negative.

6.1. Replacing an expected negative element of the template with something positive

One example of this kind of reversal-replacement is.

 An outbreak of NP, the outbreak of NP

The NP, that is, the noun phrase following an outbreak of very generally has a negative meaning or connotation. The ironic reversal-
replacement upsets the primed expectation of something unfavourable and provides an evaluatively positive NP in the relevant
position in the template instead.
There is no shortage of corpus evidence that the NP in the template is usually negative. SiBol 05 contained, inter alia,
hysteria (4 occurrences), despair (2), depression, exploding toads and a large number of diseases, including 27 occurrences of
avian/bird flu, the media health scare of the moment (in 2005). Although there was violence (9), fighting (2) and hostilities, I
was surprised to find only two instances of war, namely gang warfare and battery wars. However, if outbreak of is
concordanced when preceded not by an but by the, as many as 336 occurrences were returned, mainly referring to historical
events such as the outbreak of the Second World War.
Something which has broken out is generally something violent or virulent and is no longer under our control. The
opposition ‘‘under one’s control’’ – ‘‘not under one’s control’’ is a very major psychological theme or preoccupation which lies
beneath the surface of many lexical and grammatical phenomena (for instance the modal systems of volition – doing things
because one wishes to – and necessity – being under a constraint to do things; Duguid: personal communication). In
evaluative terms, the first of the binary oppositions ‘‘under one’s control’’ is, of course, with few exceptions, far preferable to
the latter, which explains at least in part the general negative prosody of an outbreak of.
In several cases where the following NP is not in itself necessarily bad, for instance, BBC politics or memoirs, it is difficult
not to sense a mocking disapproval on the part of the writer, and the wider context often confirms this, an outbreak of BBC
politics worthy of ‘‘Yes Minister’’ (a fictional satire on political hypocrisy and infighting broadcast by the BBC itself). But in
several examples the NP is overtly a good thing. There are so many in fact that the clash between the expected unfavourable
prosody of the phrase and its reversal in positive seems to have become normalised, an alternative standard meaning.
Examples from SiBol 93 and SiBol 05 include:

an outbreak of: candour, clear-sightedness, civility, commonsense (4 occurrences), democracy, divine intervention, love
between Blair and Brown, nutricious nosh, faith (seen as a good thing by the writer),12 peace (5), politeness, Anglo-French
solidarity

There can also be various local meanings to the irony. One of these is the suspicion that whatever has broken out may not be
sincere:

(9) Those suspicious of the recent outbreak of love between Blair and Brown. (SiBol 05: Guardian, letter)

Or that it might be short-lived:

(10) Not for the first time there has been an outbreak of candour at the Home Office shortly after an election.
(SiBol 05: Times letter)

Or that it was long overdue:

(11) Brussels prefers to keep reality away from the EU project, but this week there was an outbreak of sanity.
(SiBol 05: Times)

All five references to an outbreak of peace were to a hypothetical peace, not yet existing and perhaps difficult to achieve, for
instance:

(12) Senior American officials have been playing down the hope that the vote will lead to an outbreak of peace.
(SiBol 05: Sunday Times)

11
I am using primed in the sense described in Hoey (2005).
12
‘‘Outbreak of faith: Wherever disaster has struck this year, compassion has quickly followed’’ SiBol 05: Guardian, headline).
1792 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800

(13) Despite indications to the contrary, an outbreak of peace between EuroTunnel and Transmanche Link appears
as far away as ever. (SiBol 93: Times)

In fact this unreal or hypothetical use of an outbreak of, when ironic, is the dominant one. Of the ten occurrences in SiBol 93,
seven were unreal, for instance:

(14) So, what hope is there for an outbreak of honesty among Italian journalists? (SiBol 93: Guardian)

(15) What we need now is an outbreak of realism among European governments. (SiBol 93: Times)

(16) [. . .] made possible not so much by an outbreak of good taste as by [. . .] (SiBol 93: Telegraph)

There are a number of other non-straightforward occurrences of an outbreak of which are comic though not dependent on
bad-good reversal, in other words, where the NP is neutral rather than good:
an outbreak of Scottishness, sudoku, artiness, Egyptomania, Alhambresque architecture

The effect here is achieved by attaching the expression an outbreak of, usually associated with matters of importance and
gravity, to mundane or more trivial pursuits; it is in fact a form of bathos. Partington (2007) mentions understatement or
litotes irony, that is, a sub-type of irony which depends on large/small or important/unimportant reversal (see also the chapter
on irony in Gibbs, 1994).

 in a fit of

Somewhat similar to an outbreak of is the expression in a fit of, which also suggests a process, especially an emotional one, which
has passed out of someone’s control, accompanied by a strong implication of temporariness. It normally co-occurs with the
semantic set of negative emotions and in SiBol 05 we find pique (26 occurrences), rage (12), jealousy/jealous rage (6) and despair (3);
in lexical grammar terminology, we would say it displays a semantic preference (Sinclair, 2004:33–34; Partington, 2004) for items
expressing negative emotion. However we also find it followed by enthusiasm (2), benevolence and self-improvement among
others, where the negativity is clearly reversed. The rhetorical intention is generally to, firstly, imply that the worthy behaviour is
uncharacteristic and also often to poke mild sarcasm, sometimes self-deprecating and rueful, at whoever suffers the fit:

(17) In a fit of enthusiasm, I upgraded my iBook [. . .] without checking if my DSL modem would work with it.
It doesn’t. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(18) [..] in a fit of conscience, redistributing her fee [. . .] (SiBol 05: Sunday Times)

However, just occasionally, the tone is approving:

(19) But this time, in a fit of democracy which could usefully be copied by those companies looking for new
directors, there is a proper election. (SiBol 93: Guardian)

 an/the onslaught of

Bednarek (2008:127) notes the potential for ironic reversal of the template an/the onslaught of (from Monica Ali, Brick Lane):

‘‘Can’t stay’’, she said, ‘‘Can’t stay’’, ready to fend off any onslaught of hospitality.

The OED defines onslaught as ‘‘a vigorous or destructive attack or assault’’ and the earliest quotations are almost all military.
There are, however, very few instances in the SiBol corpora of the co-occurrence of this particular template with the semantic
set of ‘‘war/killing’’ – eight out of 159 in SiBol 05, including four references to suicide bombing.
The vast majority of uses are metaphorical and semi-metaphorical, an/the onslaught of tourists/the world’s media/the
midday sun/age, and the like, including the following where metaphor is married to bathroom bathos:

(20) [. . .] a wooden seat perched above a wheelie bin filled with sawdust, but was convinced that it would
withstand the onslaught of up to 10,000 bottoms over the next seven days.

 Brush(es) with NP:

The final template to be analysed here may appear to be slightly different from those discussed so far in that the negative
evaluative prosody of brush(es) with is much less apparent to the naked eye than that of onslaught or outbreak. However, it
becomes clear when, thanks to the concordancer, a statistical analysis is possible of a large number of its uses in context.
This template can clearly have a literal (‘‘clean brushes with alcohol’’) or a non-literal metaphorical form; in both the
SiBol newspaper corpora, however, all instances (129) were of the second type. It demonstrates a very strong semantic
preference for items relating to the law: the law (14 occurrences) authority/ies (9), the police (2), lawlessness, the bankruptcy
 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800 1793

laws; to dangerous things: danger (2), bombs, extremism, aggression and to death or illness: death (8), insanity (2), ill-health,
cancer.
By and large then the phrase has an unfavourable evaluative prosody, in general whatever follows brushes with is
something the ‘‘brusher’’ would prefer to avoid and so, once again, the underlying sense of ‘‘not in control’’, ‘‘not under
volition’’ is in play. Moreover, when the following NP is not in itself necessarily a bad thing, the reader is primed to look for
some disapproval in the situation, and so:

(21) Blair’s son Euan and his brushes with alcohol [. . .] (SiBol 05: Sunday Times)

is unlikely to be approving. Other elements in the cotext frequently support the undesirability (from the protagonist’s point
of view) of the ‘‘brushes’’:

(22) Smith’s previous brushes with Marcello Lippi [. . .] left him ‘‘battered’’. (SiBol 05: Sunday Times)

However we do come across a particular case where the NP is, apparently at least, something good or pleasant or desirable
and therefore we are in the presence of evaluation reversal. In particular brushes with has a semantic preference for fame
(fame, celebrity, glory, Hollywood) though this is also balanced by notoriety (2 occurrences):

(23) Everton did have a couple of brushes with glory. (SiBol 05: Observer)

However, the effect is often quite complex and even brushes with celebrity is not necessarily a portrayal of something good

(24) Jeunet has ambivalent memories of his brushes with Hollywood. (SiBol 05: Times)

(25) In time-honoured showbiz tradition, however, the brushes with fame led to discord, arguments and the
inevitable breakup of the band. (SiBol 93: Times)

Thus instances like brushes with fame etc. are available for ironic exploitation. As an aside, brushes with lends itself to the
metaphorical-to-concrete pun, in which a phrase whose salient interpretation is metaphorical is reinterpreted, usually
comically, as concrete, as physical. Partington (1998) notes Brushes with fiction, the headline to a piece about a spate of
fictional biographies of famous artists, where the brushes become actual paintbrushes, whilst SiBol provides, similarly:
brushes with Surrealism and brushes with Gauguin.
The mechanism at work in the cases considered in this section (an outbreak of, in a fit of, an onslaught of, brushes with) is as
follows (where NP = the following noun phrase):

1. in the majority of cases the NP is something bad;

2. when the NP is something neutral, the ‘‘badness’’ priming of an outbreak of, brushes with, and so on, can rub off,
3. when the NP is something good and desirable, the effect can be ironic, comic, dramatic or can create ambivalence
(especially in the case of an outbreak of). There is a range of individual local effects, for example, that the goodness of the NP
is actually being brought into question, that the sincerity of someone is in doubt, and so on.

6.2. Replacing an expected positive element of the template with something negative

In this section we will examine a number of templates where the irony depends on the opposite reversal-replacement to
those seen above, namely of a positive with a negative element.

 [much/a lot/a great deal] to be said for NP

The phrase template [much/a lot/a great deal] to be said for usually precedes an entity or situation that would be considered
pleasant or beneficial or which the writer is presenting as such. SiBol 05 has, among others, a stay in a villa, cutting taxes,
controllable gas-fired barbecuing, whilst SiBol 93 has academic honours, a healthy scepticism and being more adventurous.
However, in SiBol 05, we also come across the following ironic uses in which what is presented as being a good thing
would normally be seen as very bad:

(26) Beckett thinks there is a great deal to be said for death. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(27) [. . .] there is much to be said for envy if it prompts a sculptor to start chewing his whiskers over the genius
of his predecessor Michelangelo, and then to attempt to outdo the master. (SiBol 05: Telegraph)

(28) Yet, as Max Beerbohm observed. ‘‘There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success’’.
(SiBol 05: Times)
1794 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800

Again, there is play with evaluation reversal to produce irony. The two corpora also supplied the following endings to the
template:

. . . to be said for acrimony/envy/extreme weather/litter/laddish behaviour

As can be seen from the examples, this reworked template is a way of introducing a classic hyperbolic style conceit (an
‘‘Oscar Wilde-ism’’); an outrageously contrarian statement is produced that requires an ingenious explanation, which the
writer proceeds to supply or which has already been given in the preceding text.

 MAKE (occasionally DO) a good job of NP

The NP here is of a particular kind. It is generally a nominalised verb phrase governed by the preposition of and consisting of a
gerund and noun phrase.
This template contains the clearest lexical signal possible – good – that something positive, something desirable,
something deserving approval is to be expected. However the corpus provides several examples of negative-for-positive
reversal-replacement, as in the following (my italics):

(29) It may seem a waste of good ink to take apart Robin Cook’s arguments when he has made such a good job
of discrediting himself. (Times, 8 April 2003)13

(30) The Zimbabwean government spends millions of pounds promoting tourism while the national parks staff
seems to be making a good job of destroying it. (SiBol 05: Telegraph)

There is often a further twist to the ironic use of a good job of. Consider:

(31) [. . .] the British government actively discouraged attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler on the ground that he
was making such a good job of losing the war. (SiBol 05: Times)

(32) Paul Bremer, for example, the leader of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority, emerges as a far darker force
than Muqtada al Sadr, the Shia rabble-rouser whose militias did such a good job of slaughtering Iraqi
policemen in Najaf last summer. Why? Because he’s a free-marketeer and there can be no greater crime than
that. (SiBol 05: Telegraph)

Although there is a clear evaluative clash between good job and losing the war/slaughtering Iraqi policemen, there is
nevertheless an entity in the co-text for which the action/event in question is projected as a good thing, the British
government and the al Sadr militias respectively. Note too how, in example (32), the italicised phrase is part of a network of
irony which also includes the phrases darker force and there can be no greater crime, examples of comic hyperbole. There is
also a butt to the irony. This example is an extract from a book review, and the irony is at the expense of the leftist author
Naomi Klein, not a natural favourite of the conservative Telegraph.
The most commonly ironic form of this phrase template is one that includes such, for example made such a good job of.
SiBol 05 has 10 occurrences of this phraseology, of which six are ironic in intent, whilst SiBol 93 contains three, of which only
one is ironic. This is – admittedly very limited – evidence that, either the ironic use of this particular phrase became more
popular over time or, alternatively, that the newspapers represented in the two corpora adopted more ironic styles over the
period. We glimpse here, incidentally, how changes in rhetorical practices over time can be studied by using corpora of
similar texts from different time periods, a discipline known as modern-diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analysis (or
MD-CADS; Partington Ed., 2010).

 (enough to/the kind of) NP1 that/which GIVE NP2 a bad name

The last set of ironic reversals considered here is one that exploits the phrase template: NP that/which GIVE NP a bad name,
where the first NP is projected as something bad and the second NP is normally – logically – projected as something either
neutral or good, but which is being tainted by its association with the first NP, for instance:

(33) [. . .] an example of the relativism that gives sociology a bad name. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(34) [. . .] the remote, po-faced manner that has sometimes given contemporary dance a bad name.
(SiBol 05: Times)

(35) This is precisely the kind of middle class hand-wringing which gives the Guardian a bad name.
(SiBol 05: Guardian)

13
From the CorDis corpus, compiled to examine how the conflict in Iraq was reported (Morley and Bayley, 2009).
 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800 1795

The expression is quite common – SiBol 05 contains around 80 examples – and presumably derives originally from the
proverb give a dog a bad name and hang him, an origin perhaps echoed in the following:

(36) The Kennel Club is keen to promote responsible dog ownership because unruly canines give all dogs a bad
name. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

Writers in an ironic mood, however, can reverse the evaluative polarity of this second NP turning it, that is, into something
that would normally be seen as already bad in itself, another example of positive to negative reversal-replacement. Here are
some examples from the corpora:

(37) They are the kind of things that gives philistinism a bad name. (SiBol 93: Telegraph)

(38) [Mr Monbiot] gives pomposity a bad name. (SiBol 05: Sunday Telegraph)

(39) The man gives turf warfare a bad name. (SiBol 05: Times)

(40) [. . .] gives ambulance-chasers a bad name. (SiBol 05: Times)

and from the Web:

(41) National Post gives stupidity a bad name (headline)

(42) It’s Enough to Give Evildoers a Bad Name (headline)

(43) The kind of behaviour that gives hysteria a bad name.

Clearly philistinism, pomposity, evildoers, hysteria, and so on, being negative in themselves, have no need to be given
a bad name.
This phrase template is, as can be seen, a format used by writers/speakers to be critical of – or to belittle or poke fun at –
the entity or person in question. Given its ingenuity, it constitutes an unmistakable case of writers reproducing a rhetorical
format they previously encountered and enjoyed.
The mechanism at work in the cases considered in this section differs slightly from that of the previous section (apart
from the obvious inversion of the reversal of evaluative polarity). The expectation that the entity to be indicated by the NP
will be something positive is stronger given the presence in the template of some explicit positive lexical element, for
example, good job and give a bad name (implying it once had a good name). The defeating of the expectation is therefore also
all the more dramatic. The mechanism might be summarised:

1. in the majority of cases of the template the NP is something good;

2. when the NP is something bad and undesirable, the effect is dramatically ironic and often comic. As with other reversals
there can be a range of individual local effects, and considerations of point of view – that is, good or bad for whom – can
render these effects quite subtle.

6.3. How such ironic uses become popular

The process of popularisation of the ironic use of a phrase might plausibly have the following psychological mechanism:

1. someone coins a phrase whose effect relies on semantic/evaluative prosody clash

2. other speakers/writers like it so much it gets repeated
3. the semantic/evaluative prosody clash eventually becomes one normal usage of the phrase.

Alternatively, the ironic use may not have a single author but certain phrases may lend themselves to ironic use to ‘‘ironically-
minded’’ speakers/writers, independently of each other. Irony in fact is highly prized in the UK quality press, from which the
corpora employed here derive. Nevertheless, it is still reasonable to suppose that there would be a phase (2) in which the ironic
use is broadcast, adopted by other writers and speakers and becomes more widely popular.

7. A final twist: when is evaluative reversal ironic clash and when simply a counter-instance?

However, by no means every occurrence of collocational evaluation reversal in the phrase betrays an ironic intent. Very
often the effect is simple emphasis or dramatic stress. But, on other occasions, despite the unusuality in statistical terms of
the reversal, there is no special effect being sought at all. The reversal is simply a counter-instance to a general trend. We can
perhaps begin to investigate the difference in the conditions under which special rhetorical effects and simple counter-
instances occur by looking at one particular template.
1796 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800

7.1. The case of border* on NP (occasionally Adjective)14

Schmitt and Carter make the following observation on the expression bordering on (my italics):

Of the 100 instances of bordering on in the [British National Corpus], 27 do refer to a physical location, but by far the most
frequent usage (57 instances) carries the meaning of ‘‘approaching an undesirable state (of mind)’’. This majority usage
entails a negative evaluation of the situation which is key to the meaning sense it imparts.
(Schmitt and Carter, 2004:6)

By ‘‘refer to a physical location’’ they mean instances such as ‘‘Friuli, bordering on Slovenia and Croatia’’. They hold that the far
more frequent figurative usage tends to express negative evaluation; these are some of the concordance examples they list:

managers with an abandon bordering on carelessness

demonstrated an intransigence bordering on arrogance
been consumed, struck me as bordering on the ill-mannered
class were treated with distrust bordering on disdain
sat in a state of sullenness bordering on rage or had conspicuously moved
fundamentally disturbed, and bordering on the deeply neurotic or worse

They go on to say, however, that:

Bordering on is also used to express positive evaluation, as in the ‘‘hotel’’ example, in a minority of cases (9 instances out of
the 100).
(Schmitt and Carter, 2004:6)
the ‘‘hotel’’ example being:

Choose a good hotel, even bordering on the luxurious if you can.

According to the SiBol concordances, other forms of border* on, such as border on, borders on and bordered on are also primed to
occur as part of a negatively evaluated situation. In a concordance of the first hundred occurrences of these three forms, only
three referred to real physical locations, for example, ‘‘. . . bordering on Tibet’’, though we do also find ‘‘metaphorically physical’’
locations in ‘‘This is O’Driscoll land. It is a place that at first sight appears to be bordering on Larkin country’’ (SiBol 05; Guardian,
both named persons being poets). Of the remaining, 69 were unequivocally negative, such as ‘‘bordering on the dysfunctional’’,
‘‘. . . on xenophobic’’, ‘‘on malign parody’’, whilst six were purely descriptive or technical uses, for example, ‘‘at times [his music]
bordered on swing’’ (all from SiBol 05). The difference between a technical and an evaluative use is illustrated by the following
occurrences:

(44) [. . .] its ability to combine tough, uncompromising themes with comedy that borders on farce.
(SiBol 05: Guardian)

(45) At times the [trial] proceedings bordered on farce. (SiBol 05: Times)

whilst the ‘‘temperature is low, bordering on chilly’’ might at first appear potentially merely descriptive until we learn that
the wider context is that it is the emotional temperature which is bordering on the chilly, therefore the statement is highly
negatively evaluative. Many of the remaining occurrences are too ambiguous, at least on first appearance, to assign to one
evaluative camp or the other, for instance, ‘‘a voice [. . .] he used with great specificity, bordering on deliberation’’, ‘‘a look of
panic bordering on mirth’’.
What interests us here, however, is the expression border* on when used in apparently positive environments, of which
there were six in this preliminary concordance. Since the typical prosody is negative, does this negativity carry over to the
positive uses, as in the cases we saw in section 6.1 above? In other words, are we likely to find it employed in phrasal irony?
In light of the above I decided to analyse the full concordance of border* on in SiBol 05, where we find occurrences such as:

(46) [. . .] whose instinctive talent for the work bordered on genius. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(47) ‘‘Conviction’’ is gripping, bordering on brilliant. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(48) [. . .] made a recovery bordering on a ‘‘medical miracle’’. (SiBol 05: Times)

(49) [. . .] the Bulls performance last night at times bordered on perfection. (SiBol 05: Times)

14
The asterisk is the symbol generally recognised in corpus linguistics for ‘wildcard’ i.e. any combination of letters, so that border* indicates also borders
bordered, bordering, and so on.
 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800 1797

There is no sense of irony in these instances, in other words, the genius, brilliance and the miracle are not being ironically
undermined by an association with border* on; the overall positive evaluation endures. Yet, we come across one or two cases
where the approval, the positive evaluation, appears not to be entirely straightforward or genuine:

(50) That matters little to the City who greeted the results with an enthusiasm bordering on rapture.
(SiBol 05: Guardian)

(51) Talking with an adulation bordering on reverence, relatives try to depict the President-elect
[Mr Ahmadinajad] as a man of sharp humour. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

It will be recalled that the research question raised at the beginning of this section was under what circumstances is a
statistically unusual combination, a reversal of the usual evaluation, meant to convey an ironical attitude and when is it
simply an innocuous counter-instance? We can now begin to examine this issue specifically.
The most typical use of all forms of border* on is to talk of an NP1 bordering on or which borders on an NP2 and most
frequently the NP2 term is an implied pejoration of NP1. A simple case would be:

(52) monetary incompetence that now borders on sabotage. (SiBol 05: Times)

where NP1 is monetary incompetence and NP2 is sabotage. There is also the very occasional amelioration:

(53) [. . .] with a calm confidence that borders on serenity. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

What is particularly striking, however, is that the linking expression border on is itself a signal to the reader/listener on how
to view the relationship between the two terms. It is a means of overtly redirecting the reader’s evaluation, instructing them
to re-read NP1 as (almost) the equivalent of NP2. For instance, in (52) the reader is instructed to view the monetary
incompetence in the case in hand as almost equivalent to sabotage. Without this instruction it would by no means clear that
incompetence and sabotage have any natural similarities. In (53), instead, we are instructed to view serenity as better than
calm confidence, something which, again, might otherwise not be immediately obvious.
Returning to pejoration, by far the most frequent function, it is very often the case that the NP1 term is not self-evidently
inherently negative, for instance, polite interest, smoothness, uninhibited, freedom. But border* on followed by a genuinely
negative NP2 notifies us to read the situation with disapproval:

(54) showed a polite interest which bordered on boredom. (SiBol 05: Observer)

(55) [. . .] with a smoothness that borders on bland. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(56) [. . .] is so uninhibited that it borders on porn. (SiBol 05: Telegraph)

(57) allowed to behave with a freedom that borders on impunity. (SiBol 05: Telegraph)

Given the reversal of evaluation between NP1 to NP2 at play in such cases, a hint of critical ironic intent is perceptible. On several
occasions, border* on, is used by the writer to forge links between NP1 and NP2 in order to make a particular argument:

(58) the ‘‘traditional family’’ rhetoric [of some Conservative politicians] bordered on homophobia. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(59) the conservatism of British doctors borders on Luddism. (SiBol 05: Times)

In both cases a criticism is clearly being made of the arguments or stance of the group in question. As in these cases, the
judgemental function of border* on is best seen in cases where there is a shift of point of view from NP1 to NP2, in other
words, when the evaluator of NP1 is different from that of NP2. The evaluation of NP1 in such occasions is often projected on
some actor, some protagonist in the narrative, whilst the evaluator of NP2 is the observer (the writer). In two more instances:

(60) [UEFA] made a statement that bordered on a harangue. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

(61) Sharapova, whose will to win borders on frightening [. . .] (SiBol 05: Guardian)

one doubts whether UEFA considered its own statement a harangue, or that Ms Sharapova is frightened by her own will to
win. We again sense traces of irony. The positive (self-)evaluation of conservative politicians’ family values rhetoric (58),
UEFA’s ‘‘statement’’ (60), Ms Sharapova’s sporting determination (61) are undermined in each case by the addition of what
they border* on.
There are however instances where the ironic intent is much more marked, in particular, those instances where the dictum is
positive in evaluation but where an underlying implicatum is more negative and critical. These can be of different sorts:

(62) To allow Vaughan three lives bordered on the sort of charity that warrants tax benefits.
1798 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800

depends upon our rereading the charity of the dictum, that is the ‘‘generosity’’ of allowing an opposing (cricket) player extra
‘‘lives’’, as ‘‘incompetence’’ in the implicatum. The touch of hyperbole, allied to a fantasy script or narrative (‘‘that warrants
tax benefits’’: see Partington, 2006:69–73 on fantasy narratives in humour) is common to irony and can also be seen in (my
emphasis):

(63) As leaps of faith go, the International Cricket Association’s decision [. . .] bordered on the biblical.
(SiBol05: Guardian)

The irony in the following:

(64) Mystifyingly opaque though the Archbishop’s utterances may be (and he does have a gift bordering on genius
for calling a spade a uni-handled, longitudinal horticultural instrument) [. . .] (SiBol05: Times)

depends instead on a parody of mystifyingly pretentious language style whose mastery is termed genius in the dictum, but
the implicatum is rather less flattering.

7.2. Ratio, inherent hyperbole, critical intent

We can now perhaps attempt to answer the question raised in the previous section of why, when the normal critical
function of the expression border* on is reversed and it is employed to express positive evaluations, it is sometimes obviously
intended as ironic, as in examples (62) to (64), but by no means always so, as was seen in examples (46) to (49). This
distinguishes it from the expressions discussed in section 6, where the evaluation reversal was very generally indicative of
phrasal irony.
More than one factor is involved in the explanation. The first is how weighted our expectations are. Both the present
research and that conducted by Schmitt and Carter found ratios of unfavourable to neutral-or-favourable uses of border* on
of roughly 7: 3. It is likely that such a ratio is simply not sufficiently weighted to one side to set up expectations firm enough
to be reliably exploited for irony (without some of the cotextual help seen in examples 62 to 64). The ratio beyond which it is
not normally possible to go against the evaluative-prosodic grain of an expression without creating an ironic effect is an issue
which has received little rigorous study.
Another factor is that, as we saw in example (45), border* on can be used with a purely descriptive/technical function, which
was very rare in the use of the items in section 6.1. This means that, if there is no contextual help in how to read the author’s
intentions, statistically unusual favourable instances can be interpreted as semi-descriptive, or at least as non-judgemental and
non-ironic, although there can be a degree of tension and uncertainty as to their ironic value, as in examples (52) and (53).
A third factor is that the inherent non-hyperbolic sense, that is, the hedging function of border* on – if something borders
on love or genius, it still is not quite love or genius – frequently militates against its use as irony. Phrasal irony is most probably
expressed more easily with the aid of more dramatic expressions such as bent on, in a fit of or the onslaught of which lend
themselves more readily to an evaluative contrast with something in their vicinity (Kreuz and Roberts, 1995 and Colston and
Keller, 1998, among others, note the link between irony and hyperbole).
Finally the context and cotext play a vital part in priming the reader/listener for ironic intent. There may be hyperbolic or
other comic stylistic elements in the cotext hinting that the evaluation being expressed is not straightforwardly or
unambiguously positive, as we saw in examples (62) to (64).

8. Looking for other examples to further the research

Further research needs to be conducted to discover which kinds of words and expressions are used by speakers/writers to
exploit collocational effects for irony. Given their natural evaluatively hyperbolic function, intensifiers are a promising area;
we have already encountered ‘‘could deliberately love’’ and other instances are not difficult to find:

(65) Tom Watson . . . is the latest card to join the deck of excruciatingly loyal Blairites. (SiBol 05: Guardian)

But against these we must set instances such as utterly content, as in ‘‘utterly content in each other’s company’’ (Cobuild
corpus, Partington, 2004). The item utterly very generally premodifies negative items, whereas here it is found with the
obviously positive item content, and yet there appears to be no ironic, no critical sense to undermine the positiveness of
content (see also Bednarek, 2008:128–129 on totally). Even the very same item we found in example (65) – excruciatingly –
can intensify a positive adjective but without the resulting combination seeming to be meant ironically or critically:

(66) Christie’s pitches in first with a potential £10 million 40-car line-up headed by an excruciatingly beautiful
1937 Talbot-Lago T150 C SS teardrop coupe. (SiBol 05: Telegraph)

In one set of instances we find an ironic, comic subversive effect of the combination, in the second the effect is simply
dramatic, extra intensification is intended by using a novel intensifying combination (Bolinger, 1972:18–19). Finally, and
crucially, in the cases of utterly content, excruciatingly beautiful, as well as bordering on the luxurious and bordering on a medical
 A. Partington / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 1786–1800 1799

miracle, we can discern no hint of negative critical intent which, as we saw in section 1, is usually the driving force of irony,
the very reason why it is employed at all.

9. Conclusion

A good number of research questions have been addressed in this paper. We have examined, firstly, how phrasal irony is
structured, namely, by the combination of elements within the phrase of opposing evaluative polarity (one good and one
bad). This examination simultaneously addressed the question of why it is used: to upset readers/listeners’ normal
expectations that the evaluation of a particular entity will be straightforward and consistent at any particular point in a text.
Form and function were thus seen to be simply two perspectives on the same issue.
We also briefly indicated how phrasal irony relates to other forms of irony, in particular in that they are all driven by the
mechanism of abrupt reversal of evaluation, either explicitly (the reversal being signalled in the text) or implicitly (the
instruction to reverse the apparent evaluation being implied). Additionally, in common with other forms, phrasal irony is
conventionally used to express criticism and censure in an indirect fashion.
We then conducted a detailed analysis of different ways in which writers perform phrasal irony, and why they do so. We
first looked at how, in many instances of oxymoron, the particular effect being sought involved the forced juxtaposition of
two elements of opposing evaluative polarity. We then discussed various examples of the phenomenon of evaluation
reversal in texts, both from the expected good to actual bad and vice versa, and in particular we looked in detail at certain
templates which are used repeatedly and productively so that the new ironic use of the phrase seems to have become an
accepted, recognised version.
Finally, it was stressed that not all evaluation reversal is performed for ironic effect, sometimes it appears to be simply a
statistically unusual event, with no particular effect sought or achieved. A number of interlocking explanations were
proposed to illucidate the circumstances when collocational irony is intended and instead when simple collocational
counter-instance occurs. The issue is highly complex and could well explain in part on why language learners so often find
irony so difficult to detect and to master (as we perhaps saw at the end of section 1, and as I well know to my cost as a learner
of Italian). Just like the whole phenomenon of phrasal irony, this question has received precious little attention in either
linguistics or irony studies but further research, perhaps exploiting techniques from corpus-assisted discourse studies (or
CADS),15 which examine authentic (in the sense of real-life, non-invented) uses in context, may help shed more light on the
issue.

References

Attardo, Salvatore, 2000. Irony as relevant inappropriateness. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 793–826.
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Alan Partington is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bologna, Italy. His current research interests range from corpus linguistics proper (the
study of lexical grammar using corpus techniques) to Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (the use of corpora to study features of interactive discourse). He is the
author of Patterns and Meanings: Using corpora for English language research and teaching (John Benjamins), The Linguistics of Political Argument: The Spin-doctor and
the Wolf-pack at the White House (Routledge), The Linguistics of Laughter: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Laughter-talk (Routledge) and is co-editor of Corpora and
Discourse (Peter Lang).