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Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language: In memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926-2015)
Edited by Paul Simpson
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 34] 2019
► pp. 171–192

Chapter 10
“Americans don’t do Irony”

Cross-cultural perspectives on the pragmatics of irony

| Liverpool University
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.
Keywords: ‘folk’ linguistics, humorous language, ironic situations, irony, non-ironic situations, quantification, situational irony
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology: “Six Little Stories in Need of a Response”
  • 3.Results and discussion
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.34.12sim
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