Phrasal irony: Its form, function and exploitation

This paper is an examination of the as yet little-studied phenomenon of phrasal irony, defined as the reversal of customary collocational patterns of use of certain lexical items. The first research question is how phrasal irony is structured. A second, very closely related question is how, why and where writers use it, and a third question is how it relates to other more familiar types of irony. During the course of these investigations it was observed that, occasionally, the ironic use of a particular phrase or phrase template is found to be repeated frequently and productively and can therefore be said to have become a recognised usage in its own right. However, it was also noted that by no means all reversal of normal collocational patterning is performed with an ironic intent, and so yet a further research question is 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. 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.