L’ironie, la litote et l’hyperbole dans les chroniques humoristiques du journal Le Monde

Our goal is to analyse the role played by irony, litotes and hyperbole in humour. Our theoretical perspective is that of discurse analysis. We study the different forms of irony in journalistic texts as well as their relation with litotes. We also study the forms and functions of hyperbole, depending on whether it magnifies the positive or the negative. Furthermore, we propose to divide the figures of speech analysed in this paper into three broad categories of polyphonic play : parody, irony and caricature. We take our examples from a sample of newspaper columns published on the French newspaper le Monde between 2000 and 2003 and between 2006 and 2009.