This chapter examines the complicated relationship between irony and humor, primarily from the perspective of neo-Gricean pragmatics (e.g., an ironic utterance flouts/overtly violates the maxim of Quality). Not all irony is humorous, of course, in part because of the highly polysemous nature of irony. In this light, it is important to distinguish irony that is humorous from irony that is related to sarcasm, teasing, parody, and even playfulness. Dynel offers a formal test by which one may determine what forms of humor may be specifically viewed as “irony.” She also describes some of the reasons why irony sometimes expresses humor, focusing on the importance of contrast and incongruity in judgments of ironic humor, but extending this emphasis to include surprise, absurdity, and creativity as key facets of humorous irony. Even blindness to irony can elicit humorous responses in some interpersonal situations. Dynel’s chapter also considers some of the intricacies in the ways speakers use humorous irony to position themselves in various interactions with others.

This chapter discusses generalized conversational implicatures, especially quantitative or scalar implicatures, clausal implicatures and informative implicatures. First, the notion of quantitative scale is introduced as well as its relation to the logical square and its role in the computation of scalar implicatures. Then the reduction of Grice’s nine maxims to two general principles, as proposed by neo-Gricean models of pragmatics, is illustrated and critically discussed. Finally, the chapter presents an alternative to the neo-Gricean approach to scalar implicatures, involving a covert exhaustification operator (only) that operates at the syntax-semantics interface.

This chapter focuses on the notion of particularized conversation implicatures. It starts by illustrating these implicatures with the case of metaphors, and shows the different ways in which Grice and relevance theory accounted for them. It goes on to argue that neither framework is equipped to explain why speakers use implicatures to communicate. The chapter presents a possible explanation for the existence of implicatures in terms of plausible deniability. Finally, the chapter introduces the notion of epistemic vigilance, a mechanism that hearers develop to avoid being deceived or manipulated.