A Language Game Upon a Language Game: Irony at the Intersection of Semantic Indeterminacy and Metalinguisticity

The paper aims to illustrate how irony, in contrast to the traditional conception, can be considered a mechanism that conforms to the properties of language. Particularly it relies on semantic indeterminacy and presents a metapragmatic component. Within a Wittgensteinian framework, irony can thus be understood as a ‘language game within a language game’. Despite the widespread opinion that it represents an anomaly of the linguistic system, irony aligns seamlessly with it and constitutes the extreme outcome of semantic vagueness, which is the primary condition that allows language to adapt to all the communicative needs of speakers (De Mauro, 1982). In this sense, some scholars (Mizzau, 1984) emphasise how irony is a resource predisposed by the linguistic system itself, aiming to counteract the inevitable language wear and revitalize its capacity for signification. In the ironic mechanism, an utterance is uprooted from its usual context of use to be rendered «anti-performative with an epipragmatic intent» (Russo Cardona, 2017), so that the recipient's attention shifts from the utterance content to the background assumptions being questioned. Thus, the utterance is reinserted into a new interpretative frame, initiating a self-reflexive process that focuses not so much on what is being said, but on the type of language game itself being played out. From this perspective, in Wittgensteinian terms irony can be considered a kind of language game that implicitly thematises the mechanisms of another language game. The principle of irony lies in the complete ritualization of an utterance now so conventional as to be emptied of meaning—a total wearing down aimed at repositioning it in a revitalizing context. Irony, by exasperating the automatism of expressions and implicit assumptions, awakens our perception blunted by habit.