Abstract My paper deals with responses to conversational irony in two different contexts. As an interaction analyst I am interested in how interlocutors co-construct the whole conversational sequence, in what they do with the ironic act in reacting to it. I combine data analytic methods from interaction al sociolinguistics with questions from cognition theory. I shall point out how the interaction analysis of different response types contributes to the development of irony theory. A look at two data sets (informal conversations among friends and pro- and con-TV-discussions) provides interesting differences in responses to irony in these contexts.
One important difference in responding appears to depend on whether the irony is framed and understood as critical or as friendly. From the format of the responses we can often access the processing of the ironic (though not always).
If there are responses to the literal meaning and to the, we can take this as evidence that principally both the implicated and the literal message is processed. We find five response types: Responses to the literal, to the implicated, mixed types, just laughter and ambiguous types which do not allow us to assign a meaning. The data further confirm that the different types of responses to irony create different activity types: Responses to the literal develop a humorous discourse type of joint teasing. These are highly frequent during the dinners among friends.
In the context of pro and con debates responses within the group differ in connection to the line of arguing. Responses to the are much more frequent here. They re contextualize the Page 2 serious debate. Very often, those who share the general opinion of the ironist, laugh – those who do not reject the implication of the ironic act. 1.
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Introduction This paper is contributing to a neglected area of irony research, the reception of irony in contexts of face-to-face interaction. I would like to show that the reception of irony in different conversational contexts can give us insights into the way irony is processed. I cast a critical glance at cognition-oriented irony research which works with data from lab settings. The greatest differences between lab situations and natural conversations are: (a) in the first type of situation the irony recipients are not affected by the ironic act and (b) have no opportunity to continue the interaction and thus to shape and co-construct it. I have reason to think that the way an addressee is affected by the ironic act influences her or his response. I discuss the ironic in two different contexts: in private conversations among good acquaintances and in pro and con television discussions.
I will show that in private conversations (where friendly irony is displayed) people react more to what is said in the ironic act, while in television discussions of controversial issues they react more to what is meant by the (critical) ironic act. Previous irony research underestimated the fact that people normally can react to both levels of meaning: to what is said and to what is implicated, and thereby shape the meaning of the ongoing conversational sequence. In particular, the double responses (to the dictum and the) which are also present in both data sets suggest as well that both levels of expression are received. This indicates that irony is a special case of communicating a cleft between the two levels of dictum and. This cleft has to do with an evaluation contrast. Let us first take a short glance at the long history of irony theory.
In Antiquity ironists were viewed, on the one hand, as deceivers, hypocrites and self-righteous pretenders and, on the other, also as sensitive, modest persons who employ understatement. In his Institution Oratorio, Quintilian classifies irony as a trope and figure of speech. 2 Page 3 Irony, however, is a type of allegory in which the opposite is expressed. The Romans call it ” illusion’ (mocking).
The Essay on Irony In Act Three
Richard III Irony, as defined by Perrines Literature, is a situation or a use of language involving some kind of incongruity or discrepancy (1709). Irony can be broken down to three types; verbal, dramatic, and situational. In Shakespeares Richard III, all types of irony are found throughout the play. Irony can be humorous, sarcastic, and sometimes quite complicated as it is used to convey a truth ...
One recognizes this either from the tone in which it is spoken or from the person affected or from the nature of the subject; for if something contradicts what is said, it is clear that the speech wishes to say something different. (VII, 6, 54, my translation) In irony, Quintilian maintains – building upon Cicero’s comments on irony – the speaker states the opposite of what he means and at the same time communicates that the stated message is not the one intended.
In the further history of the concept, the notion of ‘dissimulation’1 was emphasized more strongly (Lapp 1992: 22).
Lapp summarizes the ancient concept of irony as follows (1992: 24): 1. What is said is the opposite of what is meant. 2. One says something other than what one thinks. 3.
Criticism through false praise, praise through apparent criticism. 4. Every type of making fun and ridicule. Quintilian has emphasized points 1 and 3. Later debates focused on the motive for the ironic, the specific quality of the contrast expressed in irony, its and the question of the necessity of irony signals. Wein rich (1970) postulated the latter in ‘Linguistic der L”use’ (Linguistics of the lie).
In contrast to this, most researchers assume that indicators of a prosodic, mimetic, kinetic or purely contextual nature are usually the case. They emphasize, however, that there are no signals which point exclusively to irony, but rather there are distancing procedures which, among other things, can block a direct understanding of the message and suggest perceiving it as ironic or sarcastic (Haim an 1990).
I suggest treating these distancing procedures as contextualization cues in the sense of Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz (1976) and Gumperz (1982).
The question of motives is answered in quite different ways. Many linguists regard irony as an aggressive form of communication (see on this the overview by Lapp 1992).
Brown & Levinson (1987) and Barbe (1995) have maintained, to the contrary, that ironic critique is less face threatening than direct.
They thus view politeness as a reason for using irony. I regard as unfounded not only the general statement that irony 1 Simulation = simulate, say hypocritically, pretend; dissimulation = obvious pretending or pretending to be dumb in a way that the other will detect it on his own. 3 Page 4 is aggressive, but also the claim that it is always more polite than other speech activities. 2 Above all, these assertions do not clarify what is uniquely specific about irony. I would like to show that what is specific about irony is the communication of a cleft between what is said and what is meant as the primary message.
The Essay on Irony Of Macbeth Ironic Scene
IRONY IN MACBETH Shakespeare s play Macbeth portrays much irony. Such as the scene where Macbeth is made to believe that he is supposed to become king when really he is not. Another ironic scene is where Macbeth, on the outside gives the impression that he is trustworthy and loves Duncan, yet on the inside he longs for the death of Duncan. Also ironic is where Duncan is walking into Macbeth s ...
2. On what level do we find the irony-specific opposition? The view that in irony the said and the meant form an opposition is commonplace. But the question is on what level the opposition should be located: on that of semantics, of speech acts or of evaluation? Recently positions have been developed which conceptualize the relationship between the said and the meant as essentially one of the opposition between positive and negative evaluation (Elstermann 1991, Hartung 1998).
They emphasize that the specific opposition is located not simply on the level of the proposition or illocution, but rather on the level of evaluation. I have reason to agree with this view. Hartung’s (1998) concept of evaluation can be summarized as follows: 1.
An evaluation is a mental activity in which a person assigns an object a value on a continuous scale between the poles of positive and negative. The object can be any given entity: object, action, utterance, event, person, etc. 2. An evaluation is made from a perspective which takes specific attributes as relevant and assigns them a normative value. It is based on a comparison between the concrete object and a mental standard consisting of the relevant attributes, their normative value and their weighting. 3.
Between the individual components of object, evaluation aspect and standard there are conventional relationships which develop from the practical activities in which the object is integrated. Without this evaluation knowledge, neither joint activity nor communication would be possible. Evaluations can be communicated as a predicate or included in formulations (choice of words, prosody, mimicry, repetition formats, syntactical (in) completion, presupposition, etc. ).
Hartung concludes that ironic utterances are perceived as negative evaluations. This is supposedly directed against the person who is associated 2 See for that discussion my review of Barbe 1995 in Kotthoff 1997 and Kotthoff 1996 and 1998.
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4 Page 5 with the object of the evaluation (not necessarily the addressee).
I do not share the view that irony is always a form of negative evaluation. Instead, it is a form of communicating an evaluation cleft. Irony can quite well express positive evaluations by stating them negatively. Thus in my data of dinner conversations the following remark is laughingly made by a guest as a comment on a sumptuous menu: ‘Once again something simple out of a can.’ From the evaluation side this message is negative. Everyone laughs at it.
The hostess and cook replies: ‘I certainly do know how to open cans.’ The background knowledge to which the ironic remark alludes is that the hostess often invites people to ‘something simple.’ Normally, the dinner she then offers is quite complicated and extensive. She is known as a good cook. The accordingly consists of something like: ‘Once again such a wonderful meal that you announced much too modest.’ From the evaluation side this message is positive. She reacts to the level of wording, thereby continuing the sequence as ironic (displaying self-irony).
The of her ironic reply is something like: ‘I know a lot more than how to open a tin.’ Among good friends irony very often alludes to group knowledge, as is the case here. As Hartung (1998) also pointed out in his analysis of data from ironic sequences among friends, irony allows members to reaffirm the in-group, because both the ironist, his / her addressee and the public rely on shared knowledge about a joint interaction history. 2. 1. Irony as echo? One answer to the question of why people use irony is given by Sperber/Wilson (1981), who state that an additional comment is expressed in irony.
Stempel (1976) assumes that the ironic speaker draws the opposition potential of irony from his / her partner hypothesis. That is: if a mother says when her son comes home covered with dirt: ‘You are really a hero’s he is attributing to her son that he might find himself heroic, but she is of the opposite opinion. Many irony analysts presume a three-person interaction model (Stempel 1976, Groeben/Scheele 1984), drawing on the Freudian situation of telling a ‘dirty’ joke. Stempel writes that the first person (speaker) explicitly refers in an affirming manner to a second person (addressee), whom he in reality attacks through an implicit dement i of the affirmation and thereby exposes in front of a third person, another hearer. Researchers often speak of 5 Page 6 exposing and ridiculing the irony object (Stempel 1976).
The Essay on Irony In The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s Use of Irony in The Canterbury Tales In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer compiles a mixture of stories on a pilgrimage into a figurative depiction of the medieval society in which he lived. Chaucer’s stories have a punch and pizzazz, which, to an average reader, seem uncommon to the typical medieval writer, making his story more delightful. Certain things account for ...
However, irony does not necessarily ridicule the object.
Sperber/Wilson (1981), Sperber (1984) and Wilson/Sperber (1992) view irony as the prototype of speech which does not ‘use’ the literal meaning to transmit a message, but rather ‘mentions’ it (transmits it as ‘echo’) and simultaneously expresses a specific attitude toward it. In irony, which is thus regarded as a special case of non-introduced citation, a revaluation of the said is communicated. This seems reasonable at first glance. Wilson and Sperber’s limitation of irony to the case of citation should, however, not be accepted. And vice versa: not all forms of un introduced citation are ironic. In 1992 they expanded their concept of irony as ‘echo’ and ‘mention’s o much that it now applies to every attribution of a position to someone from which the speaker distances herself.
Now their concept comes very close to Stempel’s concept of irony (although they do not cite his work).
In 1981 they assumed that the ironic utterance ‘what a lovely party’, made at a very boring party, alluded to the formerly expressed expectation of a hearer, who had expected a ‘lovely party’, while the ironist shows that this expectation was not fulfilled at all. In 1992 the authors merely stipulate that the opinion that it is a ‘lovely party’ could be attributed to someone (whether present or not).
In Kotthoff (1998 a, b) I argue against conceptualizing irony as a prototypical case of mentioned speech (to be exact: of quasi-citation, that is of un introduced citation-like speech).
Double voicing through un-introduced quasi-citation and complex conversational to find out what was actually meant are not limited to irony, but rather also occur in many other forms of polyphonic communication (in the Bakhtinian sense), above all in conversational parody, which is so often a feature of reported speech (Kotthoff 1998 a, b).
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3 I discussed irony as just one case of ‘staged.’ For Sperber and Wilson it seems to be the only case or at least the prototypical one.
In interaction al sociolinguistics researchers show that we always contextualize our utterances in a specific way to guide conversational (Gumperz/Cook-Gumperz 1994, 1996).
It is not enough to just distinguish ‘bona fide’ and ‘non bona fide’ communication (Raskin 1985), one must go into the details 3 See G” 1999 and Copper-Kuhl en 1999 for the topic of double voicing in reported speech. 6 Page 7 of formatting talk in such a way that a specific understanding is managed. Contextualization research starts from the assumption that we always conversationally create the frames (or contexts) we act in. For humor research this approach has been used by Davies (1984 and in this volume), Nor rick (1993 and in this volume) and Kotthoff (1996, 1998 a, b).
2.
2. Do we only process what is meant in perceiving irony? Beside the question of what the irony-specific opposition consists in, it is also important to ask whether the meant, the said or both levels are processed. For Wilson and Sperber (1992: 75) only the level of the meant is central: ‘It is a variety of echoic interpretive use, in which the communicator dissociates herself from the opinion echoed with accompanying ridicule or scorn.’ ‘What a lovely party!’ echoes a specific or imagined meaning and simultaneously that this meaning is absurd. The message that such a meaning is absurd is proclaimed as the most relevant one. In contrast to this, Giora (1995), Giora/Kotthoff (1998), Kotthoff 1998, and Giora/Fein (1999 a, b) assume that irony does not erase what is said (the implicitly contrasted message), but rather it communicates the difference between the dictum and the as the most relevant information. I consider the special achievement of irony to be its ability to point to an evaluation contrast.
An attitude is attributed to the addressee or a third person from which the ironist wishes to contrastive ly distance him / herself . The evaluation cleft between the said and the meant is communicated as the most relevant message. 2. 3. Empirical irony research Irony has seldom been studied in interaction. The major share of the literature reviewed in Lapp (1992) and Hartung (1998) works with artificial examples and with isolated individual activities (often taken from literary texts).
Not even Barbe (1995) systematically takes responses to the ironic act into account. Empirical communication studies have been made by, inter alia, Engler (1980), Groeben/Scheele (1984), Groeben/See mann/Drink mann (1985), Groeben (1986), Rundquist (1990), Sch ” utter (1991), Barbe (1995) and Hartung (1998).
