2.2.2　Irony and Sincerity Principle

A significant issue，highlighted by R.Brown，is that irony is not restricted to assertions and that other speech acts can be ironical as well.Brown enumerates some examples of congratulations，thanking，requesting and apologizing as evidence.He first defines irony as the performance of a speech act in lack of the required sincerity conditions（Brown，1980，p.114）.Haverkate adheres to the theory that“irony is the intentional expression of insincerity”（Haverkate，1990，p.104）.Gluckskerg introduces the concept of“pragmatic insincerity”by which he means that“the speaker has violated at least one of the felicity conditions of wellformed speech acts，usually the sincerity condition”（Gluckskerg，1995，p.52）.Both Austin and Searle have given their felicity conditions respectively.As a special kind of indirect speech act，irony also boasts its own felicity conditions.Sincerity forms a necessary condition in committing any speech act.Sincerity condition plays an important role because sincerity of the speaker presupposes that the utterance should reflect loyally what speaker means.However，it is the insincerity that works in ironic speech acts，because the proposition conveys something that is against the real intention of speaker.A successful irony depends mainly on the condition of insincerity.By performing one speech act，the speaker often means the opposite.Performative verbs can be inserted in the indirect performatives，but it is not the case in ironic speech acts.That is，no performative verbs appear in ironic speech acts.“Verbal irony is incompatible with metareferential expressions，which may be empirically inferred from the fact that there does not exist a performative verb‘ironize’”.（Dijk，1976，p.97）