Cover not available
Part of
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

ORCID logo | 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
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.268.06yus
References (40)
References
Bargh, John A., and Tanya L. Chartrand. 1999. “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.” American Psychologist 54 (7): 462–479. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bryant, Gregory A. 2011. “Verbal Irony in the Wild.” Pragmatics & Cognition 19 (2): 291–309. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Caucci, Gina M., and Roger J. Kreuz. 2012. “Social and Paralinguistic Cues to Sarcasm.” Humor 25 (1): 1–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Curcó, Carmen. 2000. “Irony: Negation, Echo and Metarepresentation.” Lingua 110 (4): 257–280. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kotthoff, Helga. 2003. “Responding to Irony in Different Contexts: On Cognition in Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (9): 1387–1411. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nuolijärvi, Pirkko, and Liisa Tiittula. 2011. “Irony in Political Television Debates.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 572–587. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2012. “Epistemic Vigilance, Cautious Optimism and Sophisticated Understanding.” Research in Language 10 (4): 365–386. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Partington, Alan. 2011. “Phrasal Irony: Its Form, Function and Exploitation.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (6): 1786–1800. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pexman, Penny M., and Meghan T. Zvaigzne. 2004. “Does Irony Go Better with Friends?” Metaphor and Symbol 19 (2): 143–163. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012. “Explaining Irony.” In Meaning and Relevance, 123–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woodland, Jennifer, and Daniel Voyer. 2011. “Context and Intonation in the Perception of Sarcasm.” Metaphor and Symbol 26 (3): 227–239. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. “A Relevance-theoretic Classification of Jokes.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4 (1): 131–157. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (9)

Cited by nine other publications

Ruiz-Moneva, Maria Angeles
2020. Chapter 12. Humour and irony in George Mikes’ How to be a Brit. In Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics [Figurative Thought and Language, 8], ► pp. 327 ff. DOI 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 DOI logo
Ruiz-Moneva, María Angeles
2019. Irony, humour and culture in George Mikes’ How to Be a Brit: relevance-theoretical perspectives. Diacronia :10 DOI 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. DOI logo
Walczak, Agnieszka
2020. Chapter 11. Echoic irony in Philip Larkin’s poetry and its preservation in Polish translations. In Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics [Figurative Thought and Language, 8], ► pp. 309 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2016. Propositional attitude, affective attitude and irony comprehension. Pragmatics & Cognition 23:1 ► pp. 92 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2023. Inferring Irony Online. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 160 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Modeling Irony [Figurative Thought and Language, 12], DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. Irony in Linguistic Communication. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 129 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 october 2024. 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.