Abstract
Discourse irony has recently served as a useful tool for studying the socio-cognitive and socio-communicative underpinnings of communication. Yet, the abundance of its usage across cultures makes the study of its occurrence in everyday discourse a worthwhile undertaking in its own right.
The present study examines how Czech speakers (N=54) perceive irony in its different forms and identifies some linguistic characteristics of its usage in Czech. The findings point to important parallels between the usage of irony in Czech and Anglo-American discourse.
However,the study also identifies important cultural specifics in the forms of irony gathered from our group of respondents. Respondents tended to mark linguistic categories carrying the core meaning as those likely stressed by an ironist.
Consultations with two Czech language corpora failed to confirm that the meaning of irony rests on the emphasis placed on linguistic modifiers. Our findings lead to culture- and context-relevant conclusions about the overt reflective aspects of irony identified by Czech speakers.