Altijd leuk, zo’n ironische constructie!

Some linguistic constructions can be considered default ironic construc­tions, as those combinations of words almost always trigger an ironic reading (Giora, Drucker & Fein 2014, Giora et al 2015). According to La Roi (2014), the Dutch altijd-X-construction can be considered such a default ironic construction. However, a corpus analysis reveals that most of the instances are not ironic. The assumption that the altijd-X-construction is ironic by default no longer holds. Nevertheless, the corpus analysis indeed shows that the combination of altijd with a positive evaluative word is significantly more interpreted as ironic than the usage of altijd or the positive evaluative words in isolation.