The functioning of clichés in ironic discourse

Abstract

The article analyzes one of the social functions of clichés in discourse – the expression of irony. It is generally believed that clichés do not convey new information and, consequently, worsen the quality of communication. However, the use of clichés to create irony is an example of the creative use of various “ready-made” patterns to express an implicit negative evaluation and mark social relationships between the speaker and the addressee. Etiquette phrases, rhetorical questions, proverbs and sayings, memes and idioms with initial positive evaluative meaning can be used to express irony. Being easily recognizable, from a cognitive point of view, clichés are one of the most convenient ways to create irony, since it guarantees recognition of the speaker’s intention by the addressee as irony emerges as a result of “sign substitution”, i.e. a positive evaluation is changed to a negative one. Irony is “read” by the addressee if the semantic coherence of the utterance is violated or the speaker’s fake-playful behavior is obvious. Provided that clichés are often used to implicitly express a critical attitude, they can become conventional ways of expressing irony in discourse, and in such a case the possibility of ironic use should be mentioned by dictionaries of discursive formulas, etiquette tools, etc.