Chapter published in:
Irony in Language Use and Communication
Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston
[Figurative Thought and Language 1] 2017
► pp. 237–254

Chapter 11
The standard experimental approach to the study of irony

Let us not be hasty in throwing out the baby with the bathwater

The traditional way in which irony has been studied in the laboratory takes a critical item, such as the sentence “You are a true friend” and embeds it in a verbal context that either supports a sincere reading or a counterfactual ironic one. One can question the ecological validity of this approach. In this chapter, three demonstrations are presented to show that by making slight changes to the traditional methodology one can provide insights into the discourse context in which irony is embedded, the pragmatic effects of the critical statements above that provided by the discourse context and, finally, a means of disentangling the multi-faced aspects of the ironic experience.
Keywords: quasi-experimental approaches, ecological validity, context generation technique, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), no-reply control group, process tree modeling
Article outline
  • Irony and the ecological discourse context in which it is found
  • Sarcastic irony usage: Compared to what?
  • Unpacking the effects of irony
  • Concluding statements
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.1.12kat
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