Irony English Language

12 Key excerpts on "Irony English Language"

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  Irony

  • Joana Garmendia(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Irony as Opposition Verbal irony has classically been conceived of as the act of saying something and meaning the opposite. That, along with certain other features traditionally associated with irony (such as humour or the expression of an attitude), composes the pre-theoretical conception of irony we typically share: The expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect. 1 The use of words that are the opposite of what you mean, as a way of being funny. 2 The use of words that mean the opposite of what you really think especially in order to be funny. 3 The idea of opposition has also tinged the rhetorical conception of irony: Irony’s general characteristic is to make something understood by expressing its opposite. (Encyclopedia of Rhetoric 404) While the goal of meaning what one actually believes is repeated in every entry, the definitions are unclear regarding how the speaker achieves this. We are told that the speaker uses language that signifies the opposite, uses words that are (or mean) the opposite or expresses the opposite of what she intends to mean. The attempt to avoid the term included in the classical idea of irony – that the speaker says the opposite of what she means – is blatant at this point. Here we can discern the first challenge set by irony: how can it be possible that we mean the opposite of what we say? 1 Oxford Dictionary of English, ‘irony’, first entry, available at https://en.oxforddiction aries.com/definition/irony (accessed April 2017). 2 Cambridge Dictionary, ‘irony’, second entry, available at http://dictionary .cambridge.org/dictionary/english/irony (accessed April 2017). 3 Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ‘irony’, second entry, available at www.merriam -webster.com/dictionary/irony (accessed April 2017). 17

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  The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language

  • Piotr Stalmaszczyk(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  17 Notably a distinction that cannot apply to irony, since irony always serves at least one additional purpose associated with the conveyed evaluation. Types and Definitions of Irony 637 • Irony can be used to achieve a number of different social-interactional goals such as sarcasm, banter, and amusement. The phenomenon of (verbal) irony is a vast research topic, and this chapter has attempted to present an overview of the state of the art when it comes to theoretical models while opening routes for further debates regarding its evaluative nature and the ways in which it operates across different layers of communication. 638 E L E N I K A P O G I A N N I 35 Philosophy of Language and Metaphor Esther Romero and Belén Soria 35.1 Introduction To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors is to belittle him – like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting. Addiction to metaphor is held to be illicit, on the principle that whereof one can speak only metaphorically, thereof one ought not to speak at all. Yet the nature of the offence is unclear. (Black, 1954–1955: 273) These are the words with which the philosopher Max Black starts his seminal article “Metaphor.” With it, he points out that, traditionally, the study of the metaphorical use of language has been neglected by philoso- phers because they think that metaphor is incompatible with serious thought. In contrast, he attempts to clarify the notion of metaphor and to argue for its cognitive value. Black’s defense of the cognitive value of metaphor depends on his explanation of how to produce some metapho- rical senses (or meanings) related to the metaphorical uses of a word or words in some metaphorical sentences. According to Black, in the metaphorical sentence (1), (1) Man is a wolf. wolf is the metaphorically used part of the sentence that, taken literally, shows a contrast with the remaining words by which it is accompanied. This word is the focus of the metaphor while the remaining words are its frame.

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  Irony's Edge

  The Theory and Politics of Irony

  • Linda Hutcheon(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  And it happens in discourse, in usage, in the dynamic space of the interaction of text, context, and interpreter (and, sometimes, though not always, intending ironist). As a response to the extensive literature—in many different fields, from linguistics to psychology, from rhetoric to literary criticism—that sees irony as a straightforward semantic inversion (antiphrasis—or saying one thing and meaning its opposite) and thus as a static rhetorical tool to be used, this chapter expands on the suggestion made earlier in this book that irony is, instead, a communicative process. It is in this framework, then, that I would argue that ironic meaning possesses three major semantic characteristics: it is relational, inclusive and differential. Irony is a relational strategy in the sense that it operates not only between meanings (said, unsaid) but between people (ironists, interpreters, targets). Ironic meaning comes into being as the consequence of a relationship, a dynamic, performative bringing together of different meaning-makers, but also of different meanings, first, in order to create something new and, then, as Chapter 2 explored, to endow it with the critical edge of judgment. As noted, that Greek eiron, from whom irony got its name, was a dissembler, a pretender, and that notion of pretense figures frequently in “performative” theories of irony (Koestler 1964: 73–4; and especially Clark and Gerrig 1984: 121), humor (Douglas 1975), and figurative language, in general. In fact, it seems that children have to learn about pretense in order to understand irony (Winner 1988). The social dimension of this relational aspect of irony is the subject of the next chapter on discursive communities and their role in the enabling and comprehending of irony

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  Linguistics in the Netherlands 1985

  • Hans Bennis, Frits Beukema(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In many respects they also apply to lies or euphemistic expressions. It is evident, however, that the rhetorical traditions do not pretend to explain what irony really is. To condemn them on methodological grounds is, therefore, too severe a sentence. 1.2. Speech Act Theory The problem of irony has been addressed in what is customarily designated as the Speech Act framework. In a couple of papers by John Searle (1979a, 1979b) and Alice Davison (1975), an impilicit rule of interpretation is assumed to underlie the computation of irony. This rule is believed to compel the hearer of an iron-ical utterance to reinterpret it in terms of the opposite of its literal mean-ing. Searle introduces the notions of 'sentence meaning' and 'utterance mean-ing', in order to account for the contrast between underlying and superficial interpretations or readings. In the case of irony, the speaker is assumed to ar-rive at utterance meaning by going through sentence meaning and then doubling back to the opposite of sentence meaning (Searle 1979a: 115). It is unclear, however, how the nature of this opposite, or the implied contradictory proposi-tion. is to be comprehended, and by what means the doubling back is carried out. The idea that ironic language involves negation appears to be endowed with a pe-culiar survival capacity. Working with a semantic-feature analysis, Amante(1975: 29ff), whose dissertation is founded on the priciples of traditional Speech Act Theory, seeks to elucidate the case in which a man (+ HUMAN, + MALE, + ADULT) is ironically referred to as a boy (- ADULT, ceteris paribus). Surely, one of the differences between man and boy centers around the valency of the marker ADULT. Amante claims the ironic tenor in such an utterance to inhere in the 'misinter-pretation' of that semantic component.

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  Perspectives of Irony on Medieval French Literature

  • Vladimir R. Rossman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  TOWARD A DEFINITION OF IRONY 13 of each variety, even though the three concepts are closely related. The Greeks associated irony with Socrates. Latin antiquity understood irony as either Socratic or rhetorical, or both, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries added to this already complex notion the term irony of fate. Dictionaries of rhetoric attempt a deeper analysis, using the tech-nical vocabulary of the specialist, but sometimes confusing the issues for lack of precise definitions. 2 They too stress the three connotations listed in less specialized dictionaries. Recent treatises elaborate these concepts and often comment on semantic problems. An excellent study on the subject is that by C. G. Sedgewick, Dramatic Irony: Studies in Its History, Its Definition and Its Use Especially in Shakespere and Sopho-cles. 3 Professor Sedgewick illustrates with various texts the different meanings of irony and points to their common ground. Although he sees several varieties of irony, he occasionally underlines the three main groups, as labeled in the preceding pages. The generally accepted tripartite definition of irony proves to be inade-quate when applied to the analysis of literary texts, since it depends on non-verifiable criteria such as the author's intention, the nature of the audience (sympathetic, intelligent), and value judgments (good, bad, funny). 4 Inevitably the interpretation of any text is subject to the limita-çaise du commencement jusqu'à nos jours (Paris: Delagrave, 1964), II, 1335; Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford Univ. Press at Clarendon Press, 1933), V, 484; William Little, H. W. Fowler, J. Coulson, ed., The Oxford Universal Dictionary on His-torical Principles, revised and ed. C. T. Onions, 3rd edition (London: Oxford Univ. Press at Clarendon Press, 1964), 1045; Noah Webster, Webster's New Twentieth-Century Dictionary of the English Language, revised by Jean L.

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  Irony

  • Claire Colebrook(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Before going on to look at the complexities of literary irony in the following chapters, we can consider the ways in which we use the concept of irony in everyday and non-literary contexts. There are two broad uses in everyday parlance. The first relates to cosmic irony and has little to do with the play of language or figural speech. A Wimbledon commentator may say, ‘Ironically, it was the year that he was given a wild-card entry, and not as a seeded player, that the Croatian won the title.’ The irony here refers, like linguistic irony, to a doubleness of sense or meaning. It is as though there is the course of human events and intentions, involving our awarding of rankings and expectations, that exists alongside another order of fate beyond our predictions. This is an irony of situation, or an irony of existence; it is as though human life and its understanding of the world is undercut by some other meaning or design beyond our powers. It is this form of irony that covers everything from statements such as, ‘Ironically, Australians are spending more than ever on weight-loss formulas while becoming increasingly obese’, to observations like, ‘The film ends ironically, with the music of the young and hopeful cellist played as we see her crippled and wasted body.’ In such cases, the word irony refers to the limits of human meaning; we do not see the effects of what we do, the outcomes of our actions, or the forces that exceed our choices. Such irony is cosmic irony, or the irony of fate.

  Related to cosmic irony, or the way the word ‘irony’ covers twists of fate in everyday life, is the more literary concept of dramatic or tragic irony. This is most intense when the audience knows what will happen, so that a character can be viewed from an almost God-like position where we see her at the mercy of the plot or destiny (Sedgwick 1935). If irony is taken in its broadest sense as a doubleness of meaning, where what is said is limited or undercut by what is implied, then we can start to include ironies that are not rhetorical, that have little to do with speech or language. Such ironies were not labelled as ironies until the nineteenth century (Thirlwall 1833, 490), but it is frequently argued that even ancient texts display this mode of irony. Tragic irony is exemplified in ancient drama and is intensified by the fact that most of the plots were mythic. The audience watched a drama unfold, already knowing its destined outcome. There was already a sense of irony or mourning in the predetermined plot, as though the drama could only unfold an already given destiny, as though the time when human action could be open and determining was already lost. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King

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  Corpus Linguistics

  Readings in a Widening Discipline

  • Geoffrey Sampson, Diana McCarthy(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  In common with so many areas of language study for which Sinclair's work has revolution-ary implications, the theoretical debate on irony has sought to content itself with the study of made-up examples and with made-up contexts. Grice (1978: 124-5) names everything from pragmatics to tone of voice in search of the perceived irony involved in He's a fine friend. He assumes far too readily that the expression, as a repeatable event, has no anchor in the conventions of the language apart from tone of voice: Even if, however, there is no specifically ironic tone, it still might be suggested that a contemptuous or amused tone, when conjoined with a remark which is blatantly false, conventionally indicates that the remark is to be taken in reverse. But the suggestion does not seem to me to have much plausibility . . . (i) To be ironical is, among other things, to pretend (as the etymology suggests), and while one wants the pretense to be recognized as such, to announce it as a pretense would spoil the effect, (ii) What is possibly more important, it might well be essential to an element's having conventional significance that it could have been the case that some quite different element should have fulfilled the same semantic purpose; that if a contemptuous tone does in fact conventionally signify in context that a remark is to be taken in reverse then it might have been the case that, e.g. a querulous tone should have been used (instead) for the same purpose. But the connection of irony with the expression of feeling seems to preclude this; if speaking ironically has to be, or at least appear to be, the expression of a certain sort of feeling or attitude, then a tone suitable to such a feeling or attitude seems to be mandatory, at any rate for the least sophisticated examples. Less sophisticated examples than Grice provides would be difficult to find. It is worth making two observations about his position in the light of semantic prosodies.

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  The Diversity of Irony

  • Angeliki Athanasiadou, Herbert L. Colston, Angeliki Athanasiadou, Herbert L. Colston(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  j

  Wichiarajote, Weerayut. 1973. The Theory of Affiliative Society. Bangkok: College of Education, Prasanmitr. a , b

  Wilson, Deirdre. 2017. Irony, hyperbole, jokes and banter. In Formal Models in the Study of Language (pp. 201–219). Springer: Cham. →

  Wilson, Deirdre, & Sperber, Dan. 2012. Explaining irony. In Dirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber (Eds.) Meaning and Relevance (pp. 123–145). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. →

  Yao, Jun, Song, Jie, & Singh, Michael. 2013. The ironical Chinese bei-construction and its accessibility to English speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, 55, 195–209. →

  Yu, Ning. 2001. What does our face mean to us? Pragmatics and Cognition, 9, 1–36. →

  Yu, Ning. 2008. Metaphor from body and culture. The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 247–261. →

  Yu, Ning. 2008b. The Chinese heart as the central faculty of cognition. Culture, body, and language: Conceptualizations of internal body organs across cultures and languages, 7, 131. →

  Yus, Francisco. 2016. Propositional attitude, affective attitude and irony comprehension. Pragmatics & Cognition, 23(1), 92–116. a , b , c

  England is an appendix; Corrupt officials are like hairs on a nation’s arm: Sarcasm, irony and self-irony in figurative political discourse

  Andreas Musolff

  University of East Anglia

  Sing Tsun Derek Wong

  University of Oxford

  Abstract

  In political discourse, metaphor production/use can serve to achieve irony and sarcasm, e.g. ridiculing (Brexit: the kind of divorce that involves the police), (apparent) self-effacement (I am the toenail of the body politic), or devastating critique (the heart of Europe is rotten). Can such sarcastic or ironical effects also be observed in responses to metaphor interpretation tasks? This paper looks at comprehension responses for the metaphor nation-as-body that include critical, ironical or sarcastic comments on the perceived ‘health’ or ‘character traits’ of the nation in question (e.g. England is a body with feet designed for queuing; My nation have [sic] a mad mind

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  Salience and Defaults in Utterance Processing

  • Kasia M. Jaszczolt, Keith Allan(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2007 Expecting irony: Context versus salience-based effects. Metaphor and Symbol 22(2), 119–146. Grice, H. Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In Syntax and semantics 3: Speech Acts, P. Cole and J.L. Morgan, (eds.), 41–58. New York: Academic Press 1978 Further notes on logic and conversation. In Syntax and semantics, Vol.9: Pragmatics, P. Cole (ed.), 113–127. New York: Academic Press. Hancock, Jeffrey T. 2004 Verbal Irony Use in Face-To-Face and Computer-Mediated Conver- sations, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23 (4): 447-463. Herring, Susan 2003 Computer-mediated discourse. In The handbook of discourse analy- sis, Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), 612 - 634. Oxford: Blackwell. Jaszczolt, Katarzyna 2005 Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010 Default Semantics. In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds), 193-221. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kapogianni, Eleni Fc. Irony via “surrealism”: the humorous side of irony. In LAFAL: Linguistic Approaches to Funniness, Amusement and Laughter, Marta Dynel (ed.). Eleni Kapogianni 79 Kecskes, Istvan 2000 A cognitive-pragmatic approach to situation-bound utterances. Jour- nal of Pragmatics 32 (6), 605–625. 2001 The ‘‘graded salience hypothesis’’ in second language acquisition. In Applied Cognitive Linguistics, S. Niemeier and Puetz, M. (eds.), 249– 271. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2008 Dueling contexts: A dynamic model of meaning. Journal of Pragmat- ics 40: 385-406. Leech, Geoffrey 1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London-New York: Longman Nerlich, Brigitte and David D. Clarke 2001 Ambiguities we live by; towards a pragmatics of polysemy. Journal of Pragmatics 33:1-20 Padilla García, Xose A. 2009 Marcas acustico-melodicas: el tono ironico. In Dime Como Ironizas y te diré quien eres, L.R. Gurillo and X.A. Padilla Garcia (eds.),135- 166. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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  The Linguistics of Laughter

  A Corpus-Assisted Study of Laughter-Talk

  • Alan Partington(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Moreover, irony is often used with a moral or moralistic purpose — to pass judgement on someone or something — and thus the reversal is from proper to improper (to point out the wrongfulness of the latter: consider Barbe's Fireman Alan example, or the betrayal script of many ironies, see Appendix 3), a mechanism we saw was also the basis of a vast array of joke types (although whether jokes also have a moral purpose is a monumental moot point). We have also noted how much of modern linguistic thinking considers the evaluation function to be extremely pervasive and central to language use, to which we might add, to all human cognition.

  Moreover, it is this shared dependence on the sudden reversal ploy which explains why irony and humour have in common the element of surprise. In espousing evaluation reversal plus hyperbole as the main ingredients of irony we begin to comprehend why it is so popular. It enables speakers/writers to be — or to project themselves as — interesting and dramatic by springing a surprise upon the hearer/reader. Irony allows one to be both suspenseful and sententious. It says: Someone (you — me — a third party — the world) evaluated things in such a way. Let me tell you this: they were really in quite a different way altogether.

  6.2.10 ‘Implicit’ irony

  Explicit irony seems rarely to be linked to laughter-talk. However, we can now turn our attention to implicit irony, that is, irony which is not signalled by explicit lexical irony markers of the type we have been studying, and this kind of irony frequently is. We have already seen how often the word collocates with items from the semantic sets of laughter, wit and humour. Moreover, Kotthoff demonstrates how often ironic comments are followed by laughter in both conversation and more structured television debates. This kind of irony —the kind normally intended when talking of verbal irony — is also implicit in that only one of the narratives is present in the text (the dictum), whilst the other (the implication) remains unspoken and has to be reconstructed by the audience.

  As we have already noted, in almost all studies of implicit irony, episodes are taken for granted as being ironic for no other reason than that the author feels them to be so. Here we have already defined irony, through examination of the use of the term in authentic discourse, as involving evaluation reversal, and it is therefore contended that candidate sites of implicit irony can be identified with some degree of objectivity in interactive discourse by localizing laughter episodes where speakers employ some form of reversal. These episodes, as we saw in section 6.2.5, might well be accompanied and signalled by some kind of lexical or grammatical intensifier, some of which can be sought using the concordancer (for instance, -ly intensifying adverbs such as really or -est

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  Postirony

  The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers

  • Lukas Hoffmann(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  The reader should always have this general definition in mind. Furthermore, by exploring and analyzing particular texts, I will point out idiosyn-cratic excesses of postmodern irony. Linda Hutcheon – whom I will discuss in some length later in this chapter – makes the important claim that [u]nlike metaphor or allegory, which demand similar supplementing of mean-ing, irony has an evaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional responses in those who ‘get’ it and those who don’t, as well as in its targets and in what some people call its ‘victims.’ (1995: 2) The ones “who get it,” or “don’t get it” are important for any thought concerned with irony. An ironic utterance is twofold, it can be meant ironic and not under-stood as such, but it can also be not meant ironic and nevertheless understood as ironic. This ambiguity is one of the concerns of postironic literature. The whole idea behind postirony relies on the premise that the reader has a similar under-standing of irony (and a similar understanding whether an actual utterance is meant ironic or sincere). Raymond Gibbs supposes that “[…] irony is understood as a secondary meaning after the primary semantic meaning has been analyzed and rejected in the present context.” (2007: ix) These technical aspects of irony are particularly important for my reading of postironic texts; later I make assumptions about different audiences, the ideal audience for a postironic text needs to enter and accept the “present context” of the postironic narrative in order to understand it as postironic. Readers who are not familiar with this “context,” cannot possibly understand the postironic endeavor. But before postirony’s idiosyncracies are further considered, irony in general needs clarification. Many different critics have discussed irony’s role in contem-porary society.

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  Automatic Detection of Irony

  Opinion Mining in Microblogs and Social Media

  • Jihen Karoui, Farah Benamara, Veronique Moriceau(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-ISTE

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 , for other languages in the same family as French: English and Italian. An annotation campaign is carried out using our scheme, designed to analyze pragmatic phenomena relating to irony in French tweets. The aim of this first experiment is not only to test the performance of the annotation scheme on other Indo-European languages that are culturally similar to French, but also to measure the impact of a set of pragmatic phenomena on the interpretation of irony. Additionally, we shall consider the way in which these phenomena interact with the local context of a tweet in languages belonging to the same family.

  The second experiment consists of testing the performance of the feature-based automatic irony detection system (using the SurfSystem and PragSystem models – see Chapter 4 ) on tweets written in Arabic. For the purposes of this experiment, we constructed the first corpus of ironic and non-ironic tweets in Arabic, studying the performance of features and assessing the algorithms used to classify tweets as ironic/non-ironic.

  In what follows, we shall describe our two experiments and the obtained results. Section 5.2 is devoted to the first experiment and includes a description of the corpora used for English and Italian, along with the quantitative results for each level of the annotation scheme in each language. Section 5.3 provides a description of the second experiment, with an overview of the specificities of Arabic and a presentation of the tweet corpus used in this context. We shall then provide the quantitative results obtained through our experiment, comparing them with the results obtained for French as presented in Chapter 4 .

  5.2. Irony in Indo-European languages

  “In linguistics, the Indo-European languages (formerly known as Indo-Germanic or Scythian languages) form a family of closely related languages with shared roots in what is commonly referred to as proto-Indo-European. They possess strong lexical, morphological and syntactic similarities; it is thus supposed that each group of comparable elements evolved from the same original form, now extinct. There are around one thousand languages in this family, currently spoken by approximately three billion people”.1

  From this definition, we see that linguists have noted considerable morphological and syntactic similarities between most Indo-European languages. This is encouraging for the purposes of our research, considering the irony phenomenon in different languages within this family. Within this framework, we shall focus on English and Italian.

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