Litotes – an ironic or polyphonic figure of speech?

According to classical rhetorical traditions, litotes is a rhetorical figure of speech used as a negative statement in order to emphasise the speaker’s positive point of view. In this contribution in honour of Sten Vikner, I discuss the function and the semantic features of negative litotes, i.e. a positive statement expressed by negating its opposite. Although some scholars claim that negative litotes does not possess any kind of polyphony, i.e. the idea that an utterance or a text communicates different points of view, I will argue that negative litotes communicates different points of view when used by a speaker for ironic purposes, especially because the presence of a polemic negation in combination with irony can be interpreted in terms of linguistic polyphony.