Irony is a very complex linguistic phenomenon both cognitively and psychologically. Recent years has seen a mushroom growth
of distinctly angled theorizations in this orientation, which nevertheless exhibit strong
complementarity. This article first examines what irony is from an interactive perspective, proposing it as a sort of miscommunication, which is viewed somewhat positively as a chance-rendering
communication by Anolli. It then puts forth four conditions for the production of verbal irony (CPI), drawing upon the complementarity of irony theorizings. The article also presents a formal account for the language realization of irony (LRI) on the basis of its propositional content feature. As for the perception of irony, the article holds that it must be the converging outcome of the relevant LRI and CPIs information retrieved on the part of the addressee, roughly following the abductive reasoning procedure of (LRI+CPI4)+(CPI1+CPI3)≈CPI2, and that the internal cognitive mechanism for irony perception can be better illustrated via mental space theory.