Lecture: "Well, that didn't go as planned": The use of irony and sarcasm in conversations

The interest in irony was already present in ancient Greece, even though the modern research on the use of irony and how it is defined has mainly started since Grice’s ideas on the Maxims of Conversation (1975). Even though researchers have tried to define what makes irony and similar communicative categories such as sarcasm, humor, banter, and how to define and differentiate between them, many different approaches and definitions of each category exist. Therefore, the research of irony today is also strongly connected to research on humor (Brock 2008:543). Irony therefore is closely related to other communications forms using humor, such as jokes, sarcasm or black humor. Besides that, an evaluation of the use of irony, sarcasm, humor, and others, is common in society (Brock 2008:541). Therefore, when researching irony, one has to keep an eye out for the definitions and concepts that are used defining the other phenomena.

Several elements are usually part of irony, namely intonation, pauses, and an opposition of what is said to what is meant (Sperber&Wilson 1981; González-Fuerte et al. 2015). Int his talk, some of the definitions will be explored and an outline of the involved elements in irony will be discussed on examples of irony used in popular TV shows.

Brock, Alexander. 2008. Humor, jokes, and irony versus mocking, gossip, and black humor. In: Antos, Gerd and Eija Ventola (eds). Handbook of Interpersonal Communication. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 541-565.

González-Fuerte, Santiago; Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Pilar Prieto. 2015. “Gestural codas pave the way to the understanding of verbal irony.” Journal of Pragmatics 90, 26-47.

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, Peter and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.). Syntax and Semantics 3. Speech Acts. New York: Academics Press, 41-58.

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deidre. 1981. Irony and the use – mention distinction. In: Cole, Peter (ed.): Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academics Press, 295-318.

Info

Day: 2020-05-23
Start time: 14:50
Duration: 00:30
Room: Herring
Track: Applied Linguistics
Language: en

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