L´ironie dans le discours parlementaire portugais: degrés d´implicitation, indices linguistiques et stratégies discursives

The subject of this study is a semantic, pragmatic and discursive analysis of irony in Portuguese parliamentary debate. We study in particular the implicitation degrees of ironic criticism, the signals, the functions and the discursive strategies of irony. Our interdisciplinary theoretical approach covers the multiple forms that irony takes in our corpus, and includes operating concepts deriving from : the speech act theory (Austin 1962 and Searle 1969 and 1979) ; Grice´s conversational maxims (1975) ; the antiphrastic irony´s point of view (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1980) ; the linguistic theory of polyphony (Ducrot 1984) ; the verbal politeness theory (Brown & Levinson 1987 and Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005 and 2010) and studies on argumentation (Amossy 2000). The first part of this work focuses on the characteristics of the Portuguese parliamentary discourse and on the critical analysis of different studies on irony. In the second part, we study the different forms of irony in our corpus and identify the most common signals of irony. In the third part, we focus on the main discursive functions and strategies that underlie the use of irony in the discursive genre being analysed. This approach has allowed us to conceive irony as an axiological linguistic-discursive mechanism that aims to depreciate someone, while supporting argumentation and persuasion.