Irony: speaker’s intention and listener’s interpretation : Conversation analysis of American TV dramas

This paper observes some examples of verbal irony from American TV dramas, with special attention to the speaker’s intention and the listener’s interpretation. Various listener’s reactions will be shown. This paper also observes the cases where ironies are not detected by the addressees and shows that naivety, lack of knowledge, self-centeredness, and lack of empathy can be the reasons for failing to detect the ironies. Using English TV drama scenes including verbal irony is useful in English education, because it requires understanding of contextual information and human relations to understand verbal irony.