Is Verbal Irony Special?

Abstract

The way we speak can reveal much about what we intend to communicate, but the words we use often only indirectly relate to the meanings we wish to convey. Verbal irony is a commonly studied form of indirect speech in which a speaker produces an explicit evaluative utterance that implicates an unstated, opposing evaluation. Producing and understanding ironic language, as well as many other types of indirect speech, requires the ability to recognize mental states in others, sometimes described as a capacity for metarepresentation. This article aims to connect common elements between the major theoretical approaches to verbal irony to recent psycholinguistic, developmental, and neuropsychological research demonstrating the necessity for metarepresentation in the effective use of verbal irony in social interaction. Here I will argue that verbal irony is one emergent, strategic possibility given the interface between people's ability to infer mental states, and use language. Rather than think of ironic communication as a specialized cognitive ability, I will claim that it arises from the same set of abilities that underlie a wide range of inferential communicative behaviors.Language interaction involves a complex interplay of many cognitive abilities. Theorists across many disciplines struggle with questions of how to carve up these abilities, and whether they can be carved up in the first place (e.g., Christiansen and Chater 2008). Among the most difficult questions to address are those that involve how people recognize intentions in others' behavior, and how that is achieved through language in the context of many other sources of information. The way we speak can reveal much about what we intend to communicate, but the words we use are often quite different from the meanings we wish to convey. People often speak indirectly for a variety of strategic reasons, and these strategies rely intrinsically on social cognition. One well-researched example of this is the phenomenon of verbal irony -a type of indirect speech in which a speaker produces an explicit evaluative utterance that implicates an unstated, opposing evaluation. As described below, this trope has been traditionally defined in rather vague terms, but has generated a great deal of research as a phenomenon in need of special theoretical explanation. Here I will argue that verbal irony is one emergent, strategic possibility given the interface between people's ability to infer the mental states of others, and use language. Rather than think of ironic communication as a unique skill or specialized cognitive ability, I suggest that it arises from the same set of abilities that underlie a wide range of inferential communicative behaviors.The study of verbal irony production and comprehension has been a multidisciplinary effort lacking extensive interdisciplinary exchange. There have been various taxonomies and definitions of what constitutes irony, both verbal and situational -a struggling enterprise to say the least (Colston and Gibbs 2007). The traditional not...

An eye-tracking investigation of written sarcasm comprehension: The roles of familiarity and context.

“…Gibbs (2000) and Hancock (2004) both reported similar rates of ironic language use—about 8% of conversational turns include an ironic comment, be it between friends, or total strangers. However, psycholinguists have found it difficult to define these two forms of figurative language and conceptualise the mechanisms through which people manage to understand and make use of them in their everyday life (Bryant, 2012). …”

A fine-grained analysis of the acoustic cues involved in verbal irony recognition in French

“…*H%), which has been described in the French_ToBI annotation system as containing a specific pragmatic meaning related to disagreement and the expression of counterfactual statements, that is, utterances made when the speaker thinks that the listener holds a contrasting view [22]. The results of Experiment 2 showed that speakers judge as ironic those utterances containing all the prosodic cues that have been reported to be important in previous studies on verbal irony perception [e.g., 1,3,5,8,9,18]. Specifically, the study showed that French speakers are more able to detect irony when all the characteristic acoustic features (pitch range expansion, syllable lengthening, and marked intonation) are presented together.…”

“…For each of the 12 target sentences, we prepared 5 different versions by modifying the acoustic parameters of the last critical word (e.g., formidable in (2)). The five acoustic modifications were performed separately in accordance with the results of Experiment 1, as follows: (1) with no modification; (2) with pitch modification (expanding the range of the pitch accent by 1 semitone); (3) with duration modification (a 30% increase for each word); (4) with intonation pattern modification (from L*L% to H+!H* !H%); and (5) with all modifications (pitch, duration, and intonation pattern) (see Figure 1). As in Experiment 1, we incorporated two stories in which a negative context led to a banal non-ironic remark (i.e., decoys) and two other stories in which a positive context was followed by a positive remark (i.e., fillers) (see section 2.1.1).…”

“…Verbal irony is a form of non-literal language in which a speaker produces an utterance whose actual meaning is at variance with or even opposite to its literal verbal content [1,2]. For an ironic meaning to be understood, listeners have to detect the discrepancy between the speaker's words and his/her intentions [3,4].…”

“I Understand You, So I’ll Not Hurt You with My Irony”: Correlations Between Irony and Emotional Intelligence

“…Situational irony, also called the irony of fate, though it has a strong presence in popular culture and daily life, is less dependent on people. Verbal irony is the most important and most widespread category of irony, and also the most widely discussed in the literature (Bryant, 2012).…”