Languages & Linguistics
Situational Irony
Situational irony occurs when there is a discrepancy between what is expected to happen and what actually happens in a situation. It is a literary device used to create a humorous or dramatic effect in a story or play. Situational irony can be found in all forms of literature and is often used to highlight the absurdity of human behavior.
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7 Key excerpts on "Situational Irony"
- Piotr Stalmaszczyk(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
At the intersection of philosophy of language and linguistics, the disci- pline of pragmatics is primarily, if not exclusively, concerned with verbal irony. That is because verbal irony is a mode of language use 3 which, crucially, is determined by the speakers’ communicative intentions. Attempts at unified accounts of the irony family have been made within the field (Currie, 2006; Simpson, 2011; Willison, 2017), but these always entail the risk of conflating phenomena that are essentially non- comparable. For instance, in his discussion of “unintended irony,” Gibbs (2012) employs an example of Situational Irony (or dramatic irony, if we take the example to be literary fiction) that happens to involve a verbal act: a speaker who has unknowingly been involved in cheating utters, “I would never be involved in any cheating” (Gibbs, 2012: 107; reproduced from Gibbs, O’Brien, and Doolittle, 1995). Using this example to draw the gen- eralization that any irony, including verbal irony, can be unintentional is of course problematic, since it contradicts the most basic and common- place conceptualization of verbal irony, which requires an ironist, i.e. an agent who conveys a message via the ironic trope. Similarly, in a model that is geared toward verbal irony, Partington’s (2007) examples of “expli- cit irony” (a term originally proposed by Barbe, 1995) predominantly con- sist in speakers descriptively pointing out the presence of Situational Irony (isn’t it ironic that . . .) without actually using verbal irony. In terms of methodology, it is therefore important to point out that Situational Irony can only be considered as a feature of the context, and it should not be confused with the deliberate verbal act of being ironic.
- Sabina Tabacaru(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Averbeck and Hample (2008, p. 397) suggest a more complete definition of irony that includes this perspective: “Verbal irony is a message that is intention-ally and transparently inconsistent with attitudes or beliefs held between two or more people”. For instance, consider a scenario where it is raining and a speaker exclaims “What a fine day!” This constitutes irony because of the obvious incon-gruity between the speaker’s words and the actual event (on the common view that rainy weather does not constitute fine weather). The speaker’s words would thus be intentionally inconsistent with the actual context. Drawing from this, Attardo (2000) presents the relevant inappropriateness hypothesis in a pragmatic framework. The Cooperative Principle is violated in a Basic assumptions bar.two 119 certain context, resulting in the rejection of the literal interpretation of an utter-ance in favor of an ironic meaning (see also Brône 2012 for an overview). Moreover, as already illustrated in Chapter 2 above, humor, and, more spe-cifically, irony has been discussed in terms of the graded salience hypothesis. In understanding, salient meanings have priority. Salience is different from literal meanings since they depend on a number of factors, such as conventionality, fa-miliarity, and frequency. Irony is seen as involving two meanings, a literal one and an implicit ironic meaning. Irony depends on non-explicit negation: [I]rony is a form of negation that does not use an explicit negation marker. Often an affirm-ative ( What a lovely day for a picnic said on a stormy day) rather than a negative ( What a lousy day for a picnic said on a sunny day) expression is used to implicate that a specific state of affairs is different or far from the state of affairs that is taken for granted, expected or more desirable and that is made explicit by the expression. Such a view assumes that irony comprehension involves activating the salient, often literal meaning automatically.
eBook - ePubIrony, Deception and Humour
Seeking the Truth about Overt and Covert Untruthfulness
- Marta Dynel(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The hallmark of all irony can be thought of as a mismatch between the basic (typically, but not always, literal) meaning of an utterance and the implicated intended meaning. However, this common denominator does not suffice as the primary definitional component of irony (Bredin 1997; but see Garmendia 2014) for it fails to distinguish irony from other means of communicating implicated meanings. This is why the notion of meaning opposition is endorsed here. What follows naturally from the above description is that irony must be intentionally produced, which most academics take for granted. However, Gibbs et al. (1995) introduce the concept of “unintentional irony” (see also Muecke 1973; Gibbs and O’Brien 1991), which arises when the speaker does not mean his/her utterance to be ironic but it is perceived as being such by the hearer. Similarly, arguing that irony may not be intentional, Gibbs (2012) discusses cases which can actually be grouped into three categories: Situational Irony and dramatic irony (neither of which is a stylistic figure and thus neither is relevant here), as well as cases where the hearer reads irony into an utterance which was not meant as ironic. 63 Such a situation seems to be more of a misunderstanding, a mirror reflection of which is the hearer’s failure to perceive the ironic nature of an intentionally ironic utterance. On the other hand, the case of “I would never be involved in any cheating” said by someone who has unknowingly been involved in cheating (Gibbs 2012: 107) constitutes an example not of “unintentional irony” but of Situational Irony of whose presence the speaker is oblivious. This is compatible with Muecke’s (1973: 35) distinction between “the intentionally ironical” and “the unintentionally ironic”, the latter of which concerns the situation or event and the victim’s unawareness of it
eBook - PDFHumorous Texts
A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis
- Salvatore Attardo(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Since we saw that irony is a completely pragmatic phenomenon, with no se-mantic correlates, it follows that it is entirely dependent on context, including but not limited to, the speaker's intentions and goals. The ironical meaning needs to be inferred, it is never said (in Grice's sense), i.e., found in the text itself. The fact that irony does not necessarily implicate the opposite or the converse of the literal meaning is important. Schaff er (1982: 15) sums up the situation brilliantly: 5 A review of the literature on irony can be found in Attardo (2000). A treatment of the reasons for being ironical can be found in Attardo (ZOOOc) 6 I keep the pragmatic terminology, of speaker and hearer, with the memento that no speech-centrism need to be read in the terminological choice: speaker stands for writer, signer, etc. 112 CHAPTER 6. DIFFUSE DISJUNCTION Recognition of irony rarely comes from the words themselves [...], but rather from cues in the conversational context or nonverbal communi-cation of the speaker. The ironic implicatures resulting from such cues merely point to the possibility that the speaker's meaning may be other than that of the literal content of the utterance; other conversational im-plicatures and semantic considerations can then supply an alternative interpretation, [my emphasis, SA] This point is quite important and bears restating: there are two distinct phenom-ena at work: 1) the determination that a (part of) a text is ironical (the recognition of irony), 7 and 2) the determination of the intended meaning of the irony (the interpre-tation of the value of the irony). We turn first to the determination of the value of the irony and will return to the recognition of irony in a subsequent section (6.2.2). 6.2.1 Principle of least disruption Let us assume that the hearer has recognized an inappropriate utterance.
eBook - PDF- 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.
- 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.
eBook - PDFCorpus Linguistics
Readings in a Widening Discipline
- Geoffrey Sampson, Diana McCarthy(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
20 IRONY IN THE TEXT OR INSINCERITY IN THE WRITER? THE DIAGNOSTIC POTENTIAL OF SEMANTIC PROSODIES WILLIAM Louw 1993 Large corpora reveal regular patterns of collocation between words that could not be predicted on the basis of their 'dictionary meanings'. According to Bill Louw, these patterns can be crucial to the success of literary writing. Telling verbal effects in poetry or fiction may often depend on properties of our vocabulary which we unconsciously know, yet do not know we know. Happy (trying to quiet Willy): Hey, Pop, come on now . . . Willy (continuing over Happy's line): They laugh at me, heh? Go to Filene's, go to the Hub, go to Slattery's, Boston. Call out the name Willy Loman and see what happens! Big shot! (Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Act I) 0 Introduction As irony is to form the subject of this paper, one can perhaps be forgiven for allowing certain agreeable ironies in the history of stylistics to contextualize this study. In 1970, Donald C. Freeman edited a collection of articles under the general title Linguistics and Literary Style. In his brief introduction, Freeman (1970: 6) alludes to Bernard Bloch's definition of style and criticizes it: Another difficulty in the work of the 'style as deviation' school of linguistic stylistics is its definition of the norm from which an author's style is supposed to differ in certain ways. For example, Bernard Bloch defines style as 'the message carried by the frequency distri-butions and transitional probabilities of [a discourse's] linguistic features, especially as they differ from those of the same features in the language as a whole.' This definition is a chimera.
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