Marta Dynel
University of Łódź
Negotiating irony in interaction
“Irony” tends to be used as an umbrella term for a number of distinct phenomena: Socratic irony, dramatic irony, irony of fate, situational irony, and – most importantly, from a linguistic perspective – a trope, also referred to as a (rhetorical/stylistic) figure (e.g. Haverkate 1990; Kreuz and Roberts 1993; Simpson 2011; Dynel 2014, 2018). This polysemy of meaning causes some confusion in academic conceptualisations, and the picture of what the rhetorical figure of irony involves gets even more complicated when the notion of sarcasm and emic (language users’) labels are considered (see e.g. Taylor 2016, Dynel 2017a). In technical terms, sarcasm and irony may be defined as different, but potentially co-occurring, notions (see Dynel 2018).
Overall, prototypically (but see verisimilar irony, e.g. Dynel 2017b), the figure of irony can be regarded as an overtly untruthful expression implicating negative evaluation (e.g. saying “What a beautiful day for a picnic!” when it is raining cats and dogs), which must be produced intentionally (see e.g. Dynel 2018). Whilst the proposal of “unintentional irony” (Gibbs and O’Brien 1991; Gibbs et al. 1995; Gibbs 2012; see also Muecke 1973) may be questioned on the grounds that it conflates the different understandings of irony (see Kapogianni 2016, Dynel 2018), it cannot be denied that the figure of irony is amenable to negotiation by participants in an interaction, both the speaker and the hearer(s). This is the problem this presentation will address.
In my talk, I will show that ironic meanings can be retroactively cancelled or imposed on preceding turns. Consequently, various communicative problems may arise: misunderstanding and miscommunication (of which the speakers may or may not become aware), and/or ambiguity between sarcasm and irony when the presence/absence of overt untruthfulness is not clear, with the ultimate communicative product not being certain to the participants themselves. The observations on the rather untypical but possible, and empirically verifiable, interactional workings of irony are illustrated with examples taken from the American series “House”.
References
Dynel, Marta. 2014. Isn’t it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony. HUMOR 27. 619–640.
Dynel, Marta. 2017a. The irony of irony: Irony based on truthfulness. Corpus Pragmatics 1. 3–36.
Dynel, Marta. 2017b. Academics vs. American scriptwriters vs. Academics: A battle over the etic and emic “sarcasm” and “irony” labels. Language & Communication 55: 69–87.
Dynel, Dynel. 2018. Irony, Deception and Humour: Seeking the truth about overt and covert untruthfulness. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Gibbs, Raymond, Jr. 2012. Are ironic acts deliberate? Journal of Pragmatics 44. 104–115.
Gibbs, Raymond, Jr. & Jennifer O’Brien. 1991. Psychological aspects of irony understanding. Journal of Pragmatics 16. 523–530.
Gibbs, Raymond, Jr., Jennifer O’Brien & Shelley Doolittle. 1995. Inferring meanings that are not intended: speakers’ intentions and irony comprehension. Discourse Processes 20. 187–203.
Haverkate, Henk. 1990. A speech act analysis of irony. Journal of Pragmatics 14. 77–109.
Kapogianni, Eleni. 2016b The ironist’s intentions: Communicative priority and manifestness. Pragmatics & Cognition 23(1). 150–173.
Kreuz, Roger J. & Richard Roberts. 1993. On satire and parody: The importance of being ironic. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8. 97–109.
Muecke, Douglas. 1973. The communication of verbal irony. Journal of Literary Semantics 2. 35–42.
Simpson, Paul. 2011. “That’s not ironic, that’s just stupid”: Towards an eclectic account of the discourse of irony. In M. Dynel (ed.), The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, 33–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Taylor, Charlotte. 2016. Mock Politeness in English and Italian. A Corpus-Assisted Metalanguage Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.