Acknowledgements Foreword 1 Introduction 1.1 Ironic utterance as a topic of discourse Understanding 1.2 Types of irony 1.3 Historical review of irony 1.4 Irony and some related figures of speech 1.5 Significance of studying ironic utterances 1.6 Methodology and corpus 1.7 Organizationa of the book 2 Interpretation of ironic utterances 2.1 Semantic study of irony 2.2 Pramatic study of irony 2.3 The necessity of cognitive study on irony 3 Cognition and ironic utterances 3.1 Relevance theory and discourse understanding 3.2 Relevance theory:the basis of cognitive pragmatics 3.3 Understanding ironic utterances within the framework 3.4 Summary 4 Echoic irony:system and function 5 Contextual cues and constraints in the use of ironic utterances 6 Conclusions Bibliography