This article compares the sentence-initial constructions it is ironic that in English with the Persian bāmaze ast ke [lit. with.taste is that] to argue that such framing clauses seem to be ‘epistemic phrases’ expressing event knowledge of speakers, being utilised in the form of extraposed initial constructions for focus-marking. They are discourse markers that are intended to frame perception of event incongruity and are submitted as a matter of intersubjective deliberation in the form of sentence-initial phrases in the sense that they mark the speaker’s orientation towards what they (are about to) say— presenting speakers’ epistemic knowledge of events and the conceptual (in)coherence of the world.