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Producing Figurative Expression: Theoretical, experimental and practical perspectives
Edited by John Barnden and Andrew Gargett
[Figurative Thought and Language 10] 2020
► pp. 175–210

How nice does it sound?

An argumentative approach to the affective aspects of irony production

| University of Cagliari
The chapter presents irony as a form of the reductio ad absurdum argument having a specific emotional charge, which cannot be found either in literal arguments or in other arguments containing figurative language. The claim of the chapter is that irony production depends on the ironist’s ability to convey the emotional charge together with the point she invites the addressee(s) to infer. An empirical study is presented aiming (1) to understand whether and when participants produce (non-sarcastic/sarcastic) ironic vs. literal arguments having a positive vs. negative emotional charge and (2) to check whether and when participants revise their own (non-sarcastic/sarcastic) ironic vs. literal arguments when they are at the addressee’s side, in both critical and praise irony conditions.
Keywords: irony, sarcasm, emotions, argumentation
Article outline
  • 1.Irony as an indirect argument
  • 2.The affective and evaluative aspects of irony
  • 3.Blurring the boundaries of irony’s affective aspects
  • 4.The empirical study
    • 4.1Specific background to the study
    • 4.2Hypotheses
    • 4.3Participants
    • 4.4Materials
    • 4.5Rating studies
    • 4.6Method
    • 4.7Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.10.07erv
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Ervas, Francesca & Zsuzsanna Schnell
2024. Irony Across Cultures: A Contrastive Analysis of Conceptualizations and Social Functions. In Studying Verbal Irony and Sarcasm, ► pp. 279 ff. DOI logo
Ervas, Francesca, Maria Grazia Rossi, Amitash Ojha & Bipin Indurkhya
2021. The Double Framing Effect of Emotive Metaphors in Argumentation. Frontiers in Psychology 12 DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor [Figurative Thought and Language, 13], DOI logo

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