Chapter 10
“Americans don’t do Irony”
Cross-cultural perspectives on the pragmatics of irony
This chapter probes the common (and perhaps controversial)
perception of many in the UK and Ireland that people from North America
“don’t do” irony. Stimulated by the type of discussion found in Nash’s The Language of
Humour (1985), the author interrogates this folk
belief by developing a quantitative methodology to capture the ways in which
ironic situations are interpreted by people from diverse national
backgrounds. This methodology comprises an anonymous online experiment which
gathers reactions to six narrative scenarios from over 300 informants
world-wide. Each informant is required to provide a one-word response to
each scenario after which they may offer an optional, longer free-text
commentary on the same story. In the course of the chapter, the author
advances a theoretical model of situational irony, while the results
elicited from the survey shed some light on what people from different parts
of the world understand as an ironic situation.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methodology: “Six Little Stories in Need of a Response”
- 3.Results and discussion
- 4.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
References
-
Appendix
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