Expats' Talk : Humour and Irony in an Expatriate's Travel Blog (original) (raw)

Travel blogs are becoming very common and so are the expatriates, who, after a holiday “under the Tuscan sun”, decide to move to Italy for good and live the “Italian Dream”. This paper summarizes the results of a case study which shows how humour and irony are commonly used in their online travel journals as preferred rhetorical strategies to carry out several social and rhetorical functions (Attardo 2000; 2001a, Yus 2003). The article is a case study and is divided into two main sections. First, I identify and discuss the linguistic means through which irony and humour are coded at different levels of the language system in a small corpus of blog entries. This aims at unveiling the indissoluble interaction of semantic and pragmatic processes at play in irony and humour, as is predicted by the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo 1994, 2001a) and by the Relevance-theoretic account of humorous phenomena (Giora 2003, Wilson and Sperber 1992). The final part of the article discusse...