Book contents
5 - Attitude Expression in Irony
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2018
Summary
When being ironic the speaker always expresses a certain attitude –that is something unanimously accepted among the pragmatic theories analyzing ironic communication. It was Grice who first signaled the importance of attitude expression in irony. Furthermore, it seems that he intended to claim that this attitude is always of a negative sort. However, most pragmatic accounts are not ready to accept this extreme: they accept that you can be ironic and express a positive attitude. Positive ironies do exist, they claim, even in they are scarcer than classical negative ironies. This imbalance between negative and positive ironies is called the asymmetry issue of irony. The challenge for the theories is to explain why this asymmetry exists: why we are usually negative when being ironic. In this chapter, I analyze how different theories explain this issue. I also explain why there are still some authors who claim that we always express negative attitudes in irony –that is, that there exist no real positive ironies. Finally, I introduce an account that might help us approach the issue from a different perspective: Dews and Winner’s Tinge Hypothesis, according to which the attitude attached to the literal meaning tinges the hearer’s interpretation of the ironic meaning.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Irony , pp. 88 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018
References
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1981. Irony and the use-mention distinction. In Radical Pragmatics, ed. Cole, P., 295–318. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 1992. On verbal irony. Lingua 87: 53–76.10.1016/0024-3841(92)90025-ECrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alba-Juez, L. & Attardo, S. 2014. The evaluative palette of verbal irony. In Evaluation in Context, ed. Thompson, G. & Alba-Juez, L., 93–115. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kumon-Nakamura, S., Glucksberg, S. & Brown, M 1995. How about another piece of pie: the allusional pretense theory of discourse irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124(1): 3–21.10.1037/0096-3445.124.1.3CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Partington, A. 2007. Irony and reversal of evaluation. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1547–69.10.1016/j.pragma.2007.04.009CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dynel, M. 2013a. Irony from a neo-Gricean perspective: on untruthfulness and evaluative implicature. Intercultural Pragmatics 10(3): 403–31.10.1515/ip-2013-0018CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garmendia, J. 2010. Irony is critical. Pragmatics and Cognition 18(2): 397–421.10.1075/pc.18.2.07garCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garmendia, J. 2015. A (neo-)Gricean account of irony: an answer to relevance theory. International Review of Pragmatics 7: 40–79.10.1163/18773109-00701003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dews, S. & Winner, E. 1995. Muting the meaning: a social function of irony. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10: 3–19.10.1207/s15327868ms1001_2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dews, S. & Winner, E. 1999. Obligatory processing of literal and nonliteral meanings in verbal irony. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 1579–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dews, S., Kaplan, J. & Winner, E. 1995. Why not say it directly? The social functions of irony. Discourse Processes 19: 347–67.10.1080/01638539509544922CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the HTML of this chapter is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.