Article published in:
Relevance Theory: Recent developments, current challenges and future directions
Edited by Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 268] 2016
► pp. 147–171

Relevance theory and contextual sources-centred analysis of irony

Current research and compatibility

| University of Alicante
In this paper, several claims compatible with the relevance-theoretic view of irony comprehension are proposed, beyond the essential requirement of the identification of the speaker’s dissociative attitude and the location of a source of the echo. Firstly, a view of context accessibility in terms of “contextual sources” is described. Secondly, it will be argued that the variability of processing speed and mental effort involved in irony comprehension depend on the kind of activation of these sources during irony comprehension. Finally, a proposal of how ironical intention is spotted is provided, this time by applying a type of metarepresentation to the overall interpretive procedure for ironies: the one detecting inconsistencies in utterances and in the speaker’s intentions.
Keywords: contextual sources, epistemic vigilance, irony comprehension, metarepresentation, propositional attitude
Published online: 20 October 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.268.06yus
References

References

Bargh, John A., and Tanya L. Chartrand
1999 “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.” American Psychologist 54 (7): 462–479. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 “The Mind in the Middle: A Practical Guide to Priming and Automaticity Research.” In Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology, ed. by Harry T. Reis and Charles M. Judd, 253–285. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bargh, John A., Shelly Chaiken, Paula Raymond, and Charles Hymes
1996 “The Automatic Evaluation Effect: Unconditional Automatic Attitude Activation with a Pronunciation Task.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 32 (1): 104–128. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bryant, Gregory A.
2011 “Verbal Irony in the Wild.” Pragmatics & Cognition 19 (2): 291–309. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Burgers, Christian, Margot van Mulken, and Peter J. Schellens
2011 “Finding Irony: An Introduction of the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP).” Metaphor and Symbol 26 (3): 186–205. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Caucci, Gina M., and Roger J. Kreuz
2012 “Social and Paralinguistic Cues to Sarcasm.” Humor 25 (1): 1–22. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Curcó, Carmen
2000 “Irony: Negation, Echo and Metarepresentation.” Lingua 110 (4): 257–280. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eisterhold, Jodi, Salvatore Attardo, and Diana Boxer
2006 “Reactions to Irony in Discourse: Evidence for the Least Disruption Principle.” Journal of Pragmatics 38 (8): 1239–1256. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W.
[1986] 2007 “On the Psycholinguistics of Sarcasm.” In Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader, ed. by Raymond W. Gibbs and Herbert L. 
Colston, 173–200. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
2002 “A New Look at Literal Meaning in Understanding What Is Said and Implicated.” Journal of Pragmatics 34 (4): 457–486. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond W., and Herbert L. Colston
2001 “The Risks and Rewards of Ironic Communication.” In Say Not to Say: New Perspectives on Miscommunication, ed. by Luigi Anolli, Rita Ciceri, and Giusepe Riva, 188–198. Landslade: IOS Press.Google Scholar
Giora, Rachel
1998 “When is Relevance? On the Role of Salience in Utterance Interpretation.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 11: 85–94. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grice, Herbert P.
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Speech Acts (Syntax and Semantics 3), ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Jorgensen, Julia
1996 “The Functions of Sarcastic Irony in Speech.” Journal of Pragmatics 26 (5): 613–634. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kotthoff, Helga
2003 “Responding to Irony in Different Contexts: On Cognition in Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (9): 1387–1411. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kreuz, Roger J.
1996 “The Use of Verbal Irony: Cues and Constraints.” In Metaphor: Implications and Applications, ed. by Jeffery S. Mio and Albert N. Katz, 23–38. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mascaro, Olivier, and Dan Sperber
2009 “The Moral, Epistemic, and Mindreading Components of Children’s Vigilance towards Deception.” Cognition 112 (3): 367–380. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nuolijärvi, Pirkko, and Liisa Tiittula
2011 “Irony in Political Television Debates.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 572–587. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2012 “Epistemic Vigilance, Cautious Optimism and Sophisticated Understanding.” Research in Language 10 (4): 365–386. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Partington, Alan
2011 “Phrasal Irony: Its Form, Function and Exploitation.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (6): 1786–1800. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Peña, Jorge F.
2011 “Integrating the Influence of Perceiving and Operating Avatars under the Automaticity Model of Priming Effects.” Communication Theory 21 (2): 150–168. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pexman, Penny M., and Meghan T. Zvaigzne
2004 “Does Irony Go Better with Friends?” Metaphor and Symbol 19 (2): 143–163. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1981 “Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction.” In Radical Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 295–318. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
1995 Relevance. Communication and Cognition, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
1998 “Irony and Relevance: A reply to Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanashi.” In Relevance Theory. Applications and Implications, ed. by Robyn Carston, and Seiji Uchida, 283–293. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clement, Christophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, 
Gloria Origgi, and Deirdre Wilson
2010 “Epistemic Vigilance.” Mind & Language 25 (4): 359–393. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre
1999 “Metarepresentation in Linguistic Communication.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 127–162.Google Scholar
2006 “The Pragmatics of Verbal Irony: Echo or Pretence?” Lingua 116 (10): 1722–1743. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 “Irony and Metarepresentation.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 21: 183–226.Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber
1992 “On Verbal Irony.” Lingua 87 (1–2): 53–76. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 “Explaining Irony.” In Meaning and Relevance, 123–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Woodland, Jennifer, and Daniel Voyer
2011 “Context and Intonation in the Perception of Sarcasm.” Metaphor and Symbol 26 (3): 227–239. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yus, Francisco
1997 “La teoría de la relevancia y la estrategia humorística de la incongruencia-resolución.” Pragmalingüística 3–4: 497–508.Google Scholar
2000 “On Reaching the Intended Ironic Interpretation.” International Journal of Communication 10 (1–2): 27–78.Google Scholar
2003 “Humor and the Search for Relevance.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (9): 1295–1331. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2008 “A Relevance-theoretic Classification of Jokes.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4 (1): 131–157. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 “Saturación contextual en la comprensión de la ironía.” In Dime cómo ironizas y te diré quién eres: Una aproximación pragmática a la ironía, ed. by Leonor Ruiz Gurillo and Xosé Padilla García, 309–331. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2011 “A Pragmatic Analysis of Jokes.” Paper delivered at the Seminar Meaning in Interaction . Seville (Spain): University of Seville, May.
2012 “Strategies and Effects in Humorous Discourse. The Case of Jokes.” In Studies in Linguistics and Cognition, ed. by Bárbara Eizaga Rebollar, 270–296. Berlin: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2016 Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Ruiz-Moneva, Maria Angeles
2020.  In Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics [Figurative Thought and Language, 8], ► pp. 327 ff. Crossref logo
Ruiz-Moneva, María Angeles
2019. Ironie, umor și cultură în How to Be a Brit de George Mikes: perspective teoretice ale relevanței. Diacronia :10 Crossref logo
Ruiz-Moneva, María Angeles
2019. Irony, humour and culture in George Mikes’ How to Be a Brit: relevance-theoretical perspectives. Diacronia :10 Crossref logo
Ruiz-Moneva, María Ángeles
2018. Irony and Parody in a Spanish Translation of Fowles’ "The French Lieutenant’s Woman": A Relevance-Theoretical Approach. Complutense Journal of English Studies 26 ► pp. 121 ff. Crossref logo
Walczak, Agnieszka
2020.  In Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics [Figurative Thought and Language, 8], ► pp. 309 ff. Crossref logo
Yus, Francisco
2016. Propositional attitude, affective attitude and irony comprehension. Pragmatics & Cognition 23:1 ► pp. 92 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 october 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.