The bicoherence theory of situational irony

Situational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and comm onplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scientists and other scholars. This paper present s the bicoherence theory of situational irony, based on the theory of conce ptual coherence (Kunda & Thagard, 1996; Thagard & Verbeurgt, 1998). On this theory, a situation counts as ironic when it is conceived as having a bico herent conceptual structure, adequate cognitive salience, and evokes an app ropriate configuration of emotions. The theory is applied to a corpus of 25 0 examples of situational ironies gathered automatically from electronic ne ws sources. A useful taxonomy of situational ironies is produced, new predi ctions and insights into situational irony are discussed, and extensions of the theory to other forms of irony are examined. (C) 2001 Cognitive Scienc e Society, Inc. All rights reserved.