The Diversity of Irony

Angeliki Athanasiadou, Herbert L. Colston, Angeliki Athanasiadou, Herbert L. Colston

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110648669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Although the figure of irony has enjoyed extensive attention through important contributions to the diverse literatures addressing figurative thought and language, it still remains relatively in the background compared to other figures such as metaphor and metonymy. The present volume, together with a 2017 collection by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston, aims to the further exploration of verbal and situational irony, its gestural accompaniments, its comprehension and interpretation, its constructional diversity and its cooperation with other figures such as metaphor and hyperbole.

The present volume is a highly interesting collection of chapters dealing with both theoretical investigations and descriptive applications of a central figure pervading human thought and language. Its aim is to draw more attention to irony's diversity and its concomitant connections to other aspects of figurativeness.

Part I: Diversity across figures

Uniting irony, hyperbole and metaphor in an affect-centred, pretence-based framework

Barnden John

School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

Abstract

This article makes steps towards a detailed cognitive processing model of irony, hyperbole and metaphor. The intent is not just to deal with irony, hyperbole and metaphor in a consistent way, but also to deal with intimate combinations of these types of figurative language. The model is being developed by uniting some existing models: the author’s own ATT-Meta model of metaphor, his separate, recently developing model of irony, and the hyperbole model of Peña & Ruiz de Mendoza. The irony and metaphor models are overtly of the “pretence” based style that various authors have followed. The hyperbole model can also be regarded as being in this style. The melding of the models proceeds largely by extending, into the models of hyperbole and irony, a certain major provision in the metaphor model. This is a provision for the transformation and exportation of aspects of pretended scenarios into the actual situations being addressed by the speaker. Another salient feature of the overall model is its strong affect-­centredness. The model does not only pay much attention to the affective (i.e., evaluative or emotional) connotations of hyperbole, irony and metaphor. It goes yet further by often giving affect the driving role in deriving a contrasting value in irony (e.g., the degree of badness of the weather conveyed by an ironic “Sure, great weather!”) or a scaled-down value in hyperbole (the actual rough weight of the suitcase in a hyperbolic “This suitcase weighs a ton!”). This approach was partly inspired by Peña & Ruiz de Mendoza’s work, and opposes the traditional assumption that the central issue in irony and hyperbole is the derivation of such contrasting and scaled-down values that are not dependent on the details of the affective connotations.

Keywords: Irony, hyperbole, metaphor, pretence, cognitive processing, affective processing,

Acknowledgments

The research in this article was initially supported in part by Research Project Grant F/00 094/BE from the Leverhulme Trust in the UK. I am grateful to editors and reviewers for comments that have led to important improvements to the article.

1 Introduction

This article works towards a combined cognitive processing model of irony, hyperbole and metaphor within a pretence framework. According to such a framework, the speaker is non-deceptively pretending something. For instance, with an ironic “Sure, such great weather” she is pretending to be someone who believes that the weather is great; with a hyperbolic “This suitcase weighs a ton” she is pretending the suitcase weighs a ton and that’s why it’s frustratingly difficult to lift; with a metaphoric “John’s exam marking overflowed into the weekend” she is pretending among other things that the marking is a liquid (or something else that can physically flow, such as loose powder). Various authors (see below) have proposed pretence approaches for irony and metaphor, over many years now, and recently there has been a pretence proposal for hyperbole as well. However, pretence been applied to the three types of figuration largely separately, and not using detailed mechanisms that are consistent across all three. My aim is instead to cope with all three completely consistently, and furthermore to handle combinations of them (hyperbole-with-metaphor, hyperbole-with-irony, metaphor-with-irony, or all three together). Combinations have been much discussed at a high theoretical level and addressed to an extent in psychological and corpus-based work, but the detailed processing involved has only been addressed sketchily.

As for further, related types of figurative language such as understatement and oxymoron, I consign them to further development of the approach here. On the other hand, the remaining main type of figurative language in current research – namely metonymy – would not appear to benefit strongly from a pretence framework (though see Fauconnier 2009 on handling metonymy in “blending” theory, noting that that theory’s blend spaces can be seen as pretended scenarios in the sense of this article). Nevertheless, it will be important in the future to add a treatment of metonymy that somehow fits smoothly with this article’s approach.

Hyperbole is often present in irony and metaphor (Athanasiadou 2017, Brdar-Szabó & Brdar 2010, Burgers, Konijn & Stein 2016, Carston & Wearing 2015, Claridge 2011, Colston & Keller 1998, Dynel 2016, Kreuz & Roberts 1995, McCarthy & Carter 2004, Musolff 2017, Norrick 2004, Peña & Ruiz de Mendoza 2017, Popa-Wyatt [this volume], Sperber & Wilson 1995). Indeed, irony tends to be exemplified in research papers by ironic sentences that have hyperbolic qualities. For example, as a reaction to a claim that someone is “clever,” ironic responses such as hyperbolic “Yeah, he’s a genius” are likely to be considered rather than non-hyperbolic counterparts like “Yeah, he’s a clever person.” The word “genius” ridicules not what was actually claimed but an exaggeration of it. By this means it heightens the ridicule, in a way to be explicated below. In saying metaphorically that someone is an “angel” the speaker is likely not to be attributing a degree of goodness, protectiveness, helpfulness, etc. as high as a traditional angel’s, so the statement is a hyperbolic metaphor, not just a metaphor.

The combination of irony with metaphor or simile (Camp 2006, Dynel 2016, Grice 1989, Katz & Lee 1993, Popa 2009, Popa-Wyatt 2017, Musolff 2017, Ritchie 2006, Stern 2000, Veale 2012) is illustrated by “Yeah, he’s just a sloth” used to praise an energetic person, using a stereotype of sloths as being non-energetic.

My strategy is to meld three previously separate accounts, one each for metaphor, irony and hyperbole. These are: an existing pretence-based account of metaphor understanding that I have developed (and called ATT-Meta: Barnden 2001, 2006a,b, 2015a, 2016, Barnden & Lee 2002; with “ATT” deriving from “attitudes”); an account of ironic pretence that I have also been developing but much more recently (Barnden 2017; to be called ATT-Iro here); and a recent account of hyperbole by others (Peña & Ruiz de Mendoza 2017; see also Ruiz de Mendoza 2014, 2017). This last account can be described as pretence-based with respect to the light notion of “pretence” used in this article.

The three models all involve correspondences (mappings) between aspects of a pretence and aspects of the actual situation the speaker is talking about. In all three models, such correspondences support the ability to export (or transfer) some aspects of the pretended scenario to apply, though in possibly changed forms, to the real situation. The melding of the three models is mainly a straightforward matter of extending certain export provisions of ATT-Meta (the metaphor model) to hyperbolic pretence and ironic pretence. The only significant change needed is to introduce a comprehensive sort of potential attenuation of the degrees to which circumstances apply in the pretence – such as the suitcase-lifter’s degree of frustration in the pretence – when they are exported to become degrees of holding of corresponding circumstances in reality – such as the lifter’s real degree of frustration. I argue that this attenuation not only serves hyperbole well but also works for irony and metaphor across the board.

Our reaching towards a consistent, combined model parallels the aim of Peña and Ruiz de Mendoza (2017), who take steps towards consistently bringing together the processing of various forms of figurative language, including irony, hyperbole and metaphor. Indeed, there are specific similarities in the efforts; for instance, the export provision in our approach is paralleled in their work by an Extended Invariance Hypothesis originally proposed largely for metaphor, and they suggest extending this to hyperbole and irony. However, there are major differences, including our more detailed and constrained approach to mappings and our addition of a focus on how degrees (see above) are managed.

A major, long-standing concern in research on irony, hyperbole and metaphor has been the affective connotations that these phenomena have. An ironic “Sure, great weather” in response to someone, Alan, who thinks the weather is good, may come with considerable criticism, mockery, ridicule, etc. of Alan, although there are other, milder possibilities. (For a variety of work on attitudes in irony, see Colston 1997, Colst...