Re: RT list: question on irony

Dear Francisco,

Just a handful of remarks inspired by the surreal examples:

I am not sure whether the three examples quoted are true instances of irony;
there are lots of ways of mocking or offending people, which obviously
involve a dissociative attitude, but are non-echoic (and non-ironical).
The context for processing the examples would have to be given more
precisely to decide whether any echo was present. I can imagine that the
answer to the question
A:"How did you sleep"
B "Hanging upside down from a log...."
may be given in a situation in which the question is inappropriate because A
knows that B did not sleep well. Then the absurd answer can be seen as a
way of communicating that the apparent politeness was misplaced. B echoes
the assumption "A believes that B slept well", or "A person asking another
person how they slept expects the answer that they slept well". It has to be
noted that the echoing expression itself does not resemble the echoed
assumption in linguistic form but its implicature "B didn't sleep well"
does.
If no such assumption is mutually manifest to A and B it is hard to see B's
response as ironical. Then it looks like quite a typical humour strategy
relying on intentional misinterpreting a question and answering it, as in
"Where did King John sign the Magna Carta ?"
"At the bottom of the page"
or
A husband finding his wife with a lover "What are you doing?!"
The wife to the lover: "Didn't I tell you he was stupid?"
I believe an exchange like this, i.e. "How did you sleep..." could be used
as a dialogue in a comedy without triggering an ironical interpretation.

Assuming that the interviewee's question ("You want me to introduce
myself?") is not spoken with self-confidence as part of a well-planned
rhetorical strategy ("You want me to introduce myself? - well, let me start
with my hobbies") but reveals nervousness, shyness, etc., it makes mutually
manifest the assumption that the interviewee is not prepared for the
interview, or not fit for the job. Then, again the interviewer's remark
about singing an aria has a strong implicature that the interviewee should
be prepared rather than surprised by a request to introduce oneself, which
echoes the assumption that the interviewee is not prepared. Again, it is
hard to see interviewer's remark as ironical if it the interviewee is well
prepared - then the remark sounds just like an attempt to show off in front
of fellow interviewers (if present).

As for the third example - it invites the implicature "Your doing well in
the exam is as likely as my being Queen of England", which echoes the
explicature of the
utterance ("I did great").
If the three examples have anything in common, then it seems to be the fact
the echo lies in one of strong implicatures of the absurd utterance, whereas
in non-surreal examples of irony it is in the explicature of the utterance,
as in "Lovely weather for a picnic". The assumption being echoed must be
mutually manifest in any case.

I haven't read Eleni's paper and the above are just intuitions.

All the best,

Agnieszka Piskorska

----- Original Message -----
From: "Francisco Yus" <francisco.yus@ua.es>
To: <relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk>
Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2012 1:23 PM
Subject: RT list: question on irony

> Dear all,
>
> I am currently writing a review of the book
>
> The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, edited by Marta Dynel.
> Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011
>
> One of the papers is "Irony via "surrealism"" by Eleni Kapogianni. She
> analyses
> "a particular strategy in which the speaker employs a strikingly
> unrealistic,
> unexpected, and inappropriate question or assertion in order to create the
> ironic effect" (p. 51), as in "Hanging upside down from a log on the
> ceiling
> just like a bat" as an answer to "How did you sleep?" (p. 56). Other
> examples
> include:
>
> Job interviewer: Introduce yourself please
> Candidate: You want me to introduce myself?
> Job interviewer: No, you should sing us an aria from "The Marriage of
> Figaro"
> (p. 57)
>
> John: Although I hadn't studied, I am sure I did great in the exam
> Mary: Sure you did! And I am the Queen of England (p. 57)
>
> As I was reading this chapter, I was wondering what account relevance
> theory
> would provide for this kind of ironic strategy. The issue of "the
> speaker's
> dissociative attitude" is clear. But what about the source of echo in
> these
> examples? The absourd quality of these remarks makes it difficult to trace
> an
> echo beyond, perhaps, the invalidation of commonsense encyclopedic
> information
> about the world we live in...
>
> Comments welcome, thanks!
>
> Best
>
> Francisco
>
Received on Sun Jan 8 17:34:21 2012