This contribution revisits the difference between irony and humor taking into account new approaches shedding light on the complicated relationship between irony and humor (Dynel 2013; Gibbs, Bryant & Colston 2014; Garmendia 2014; Kapogianni 2011; Piskorska 2014; Yus 2016). In previous research (Hirsch 2011a, 2011b), the differentiation between irony and humor was established based on a comparative model, which distinguished between cues for irony and cues for humor through pragmatic analysis of source texts and their translations.
In view of some of the new accounts (Dynel 2013; Kapogianni 2011; Piskorska 2014), the study purports to adapt the model, incorporating the concept of surrealistic irony and concluding that differences in the use of explicitation strategies in translation are still a decisive tool in setting the boundaries between irony and humor.
This paper focuses on a particular type of metaphorical irony in which both readings of a metaphor have to be processed in order to grasp the speaker’s intention. Two ways in which the text encourages retention of both readings of metaphorical expressions are discussed: (1) Metaphorical expressions that refer to two different referents, whose comparison by the author requires keeping both readings in mind; (2) Two kinds of contextual clues assigned to a single referent or topic.
The examples are amusingly sophisticated, but at the same time express a critical stance on controversial issues. The metaphorical irony enhances the critical, evaluative aspect of the text as it contributes to its entertaining effect.
This paper discusses readers’ comments on posts written by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his Facebook page in November 2017. It focuses on the use of ironic echoes (Sperber & Wilson 1981), including multi-stage ones, to either enhance or damage Netanyahu’s ethos as a successful leader.
It is argued that Netanyahu’s supporters use ironic echoes of his critics in order to enhance his ethos, whereas Netanyahu’s critics use ironic echoes of Netanyahu and his supporters in order to damage it. Moreover, It is argued that both the construction and de-construction of Netanyahu’s ethos are intertwined with the self-enhancement of the positive face (Brown & Levinson 1987) of commenters from one political camp, alongside the threat to the positive face of their rivals.
Indirectness in language can basically be understood in two different ways: on the one hand, there is the indirectness that is associated with the meaning (either literal or ‘indirect’) of the speaker’s words; on the other hand, we have the indirectness that is specific for the discourse, understood as the textual work of co-constructing meaning. The first kind of indirectness is a semantic-contextual one; the other kind (while also relying on the context for its interpretation) is a pragmatic one, as it involves the active collaboration of the interactants in language use. It is this latter understanding of indirectness, in particular as it concerns the ‘voices’ of the interactants and their access to the underlying ‘indirect’ meanings of the discourse that will be the subject of my contribution.
The goal of this contribution is to distinguish between the implied-author and other narrative voices in order to answer the question of how the implied-author conveys criticism. For this purpose, I introduce three pragmatic cues. I argue that these serve as a mechanism connecting text and context, allowing the implied-author to convey ironic/humoristic criticism. I found the combination of footing and narrative entities a useful methodology. I offer an analysis of Jerome K. Jerome’s novel Three Men in a Boat using these cues. This theoretical-methodological combination enabled me to distinguish between the speaker-meanings of the implied-author and the narrator in this novel; describe the three-way relations between the implied-author/implied-reader/narrator; and expose the implied-author’s critical stance towards its narrator.
The 2017 adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary into a graphic novel by Ari Folman and David Polonsky is addressed in this article as a case of indirect translation, a concept developed by Ernst-August Gutt on the basis of relevance theory. According to Gutt, indirect translation “interpretively resembles” the source text in respects that are relevant to a new target audience in a new context. Rather than applying this concept to interlingual translation, we use it to study an adaptation which involves a change of modalities – from the verbal to the multimodal. To find out how the adaptation retains the relevance of the original diary to a new generation of readers, familiar with new media and visual means of communication, we employ the Bakhtinian concepts of chronotope and polyphony. Through this case study we hope to demonstrate the usefulness of Gutt’s concept of “indirect translation” to the study of adaptations, to offer a link between the principle of relevance and Bakhtinian concepts, and to shed new light on the principle of relevance itself.
This chapter deals with the question: which strategies are used when formulating a request in a particular context – workplace – and with a specific means of communication (electronic mails). This research is based on a case study: the analysis of 60 emails sent over two days by three employees of a large French professional training company. Our research questions are: how are requests formulated in organizational context? What relationship can we observe between indirectness and effectiveness of email requests.
This contribution examines the use of directness and indirectness as utilized by the two candidates to the presidency of Argentina, in a debate broadcast on television before the 2015 elections. Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective, this study makes a qualitative and quantitive analysis of addressivity at the micro and meso levels of the interaction. An exploration of the form and function of the interactants’ contributions demonstrated that directness is the preferred choice when presentations and closing fragments are produced, while the questions and answers addressed by the candidates to each other reveal differences in the use of in/directness. These disparate strategies have a bearing on the interpersonal discourse relationship between the two politicians and the audience.
This chapter reports on an analysis of references to truth and compares their discursive value with references to fact and to reality as argumentative and rhetorical resources in the context of Prime Minister’s Questions. Truth is assigned a dual status in the analysis: it is a fundamental premise and can thus be assigned the status of a presupposition to which participants are committed. The research is based on 240 question-response sequences between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The analysis shows that references to truth are utilised by both participants with the Prime Minister referring more frequently to truth and fact, and the leader of the opposition referring more frequently to reality. References to truth insinuate its gradient conceptualisation with higher and lower degrees of truthfulness. The conversational implicature allows the speaker to act at face level in accordance with the rules of conduct of the speech event.
This chapter discusses a specific type of interactional ritual in ethno-political interviews, one that hinders their conciliatory potential. The ritual is performed by two types of participants: Jewish-Israeli interviewers demanding the condemnation of transgressions committed by others, and the respective response by Arab-Israeli political representatives in the role of interviewees. Negotiation over condemnations is examined, as this speech act is considered crucial to setting up models for civic behavior. The chapter demonstrates how interviewers’ efforts to exercise interactional and social power through pushing their interviewees to adopt a consensual stance are rejected by resorting to indirect answer designs. It concludes by discussing the extent to which “do you condemn” questions may be perceived as a legitimate professional journalistic practice.
This contribution revisits the difference between irony and humor taking into account new approaches shedding light on the complicated relationship between irony and humor (Dynel 2013; Gibbs, Bryant & Colston 2014; Garmendia 2014; Kapogianni 2011; Piskorska 2014; Yus 2016). In previous research (Hirsch 2011a, 2011b), the differentiation between irony and humor was established based on a comparative model, which distinguished between cues for irony and cues for humor through pragmatic analysis of source texts and their translations.
In view of some of the new accounts (Dynel 2013; Kapogianni 2011; Piskorska 2014), the study purports to adapt the model, incorporating the concept of surrealistic irony and concluding that differences in the use of explicitation strategies in translation are still a decisive tool in setting the boundaries between irony and humor.
This paper focuses on a particular type of metaphorical irony in which both readings of a metaphor have to be processed in order to grasp the speaker’s intention. Two ways in which the text encourages retention of both readings of metaphorical expressions are discussed: (1) Metaphorical expressions that refer to two different referents, whose comparison by the author requires keeping both readings in mind; (2) Two kinds of contextual clues assigned to a single referent or topic.
The examples are amusingly sophisticated, but at the same time express a critical stance on controversial issues. The metaphorical irony enhances the critical, evaluative aspect of the text as it contributes to its entertaining effect.
This paper discusses readers’ comments on posts written by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his Facebook page in November 2017. It focuses on the use of ironic echoes (Sperber & Wilson 1981), including multi-stage ones, to either enhance or damage Netanyahu’s ethos as a successful leader.
It is argued that Netanyahu’s supporters use ironic echoes of his critics in order to enhance his ethos, whereas Netanyahu’s critics use ironic echoes of Netanyahu and his supporters in order to damage it. Moreover, It is argued that both the construction and de-construction of Netanyahu’s ethos are intertwined with the self-enhancement of the positive face (Brown & Levinson 1987) of commenters from one political camp, alongside the threat to the positive face of their rivals.
Indirectness in language can basically be understood in two different ways: on the one hand, there is the indirectness that is associated with the meaning (either literal or ‘indirect’) of the speaker’s words; on the other hand, we have the indirectness that is specific for the discourse, understood as the textual work of co-constructing meaning. The first kind of indirectness is a semantic-contextual one; the other kind (while also relying on the context for its interpretation) is a pragmatic one, as it involves the active collaboration of the interactants in language use. It is this latter understanding of indirectness, in particular as it concerns the ‘voices’ of the interactants and their access to the underlying ‘indirect’ meanings of the discourse that will be the subject of my contribution.
The goal of this contribution is to distinguish between the implied-author and other narrative voices in order to answer the question of how the implied-author conveys criticism. For this purpose, I introduce three pragmatic cues. I argue that these serve as a mechanism connecting text and context, allowing the implied-author to convey ironic/humoristic criticism. I found the combination of footing and narrative entities a useful methodology. I offer an analysis of Jerome K. Jerome’s novel Three Men in a Boat using these cues. This theoretical-methodological combination enabled me to distinguish between the speaker-meanings of the implied-author and the narrator in this novel; describe the three-way relations between the implied-author/implied-reader/narrator; and expose the implied-author’s critical stance towards its narrator.
The 2017 adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary into a graphic novel by Ari Folman and David Polonsky is addressed in this article as a case of indirect translation, a concept developed by Ernst-August Gutt on the basis of relevance theory. According to Gutt, indirect translation “interpretively resembles” the source text in respects that are relevant to a new target audience in a new context. Rather than applying this concept to interlingual translation, we use it to study an adaptation which involves a change of modalities – from the verbal to the multimodal. To find out how the adaptation retains the relevance of the original diary to a new generation of readers, familiar with new media and visual means of communication, we employ the Bakhtinian concepts of chronotope and polyphony. Through this case study we hope to demonstrate the usefulness of Gutt’s concept of “indirect translation” to the study of adaptations, to offer a link between the principle of relevance and Bakhtinian concepts, and to shed new light on the principle of relevance itself.
This chapter deals with the question: which strategies are used when formulating a request in a particular context – workplace – and with a specific means of communication (electronic mails). This research is based on a case study: the analysis of 60 emails sent over two days by three employees of a large French professional training company. Our research questions are: how are requests formulated in organizational context? What relationship can we observe between indirectness and effectiveness of email requests.
This contribution examines the use of directness and indirectness as utilized by the two candidates to the presidency of Argentina, in a debate broadcast on television before the 2015 elections. Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective, this study makes a qualitative and quantitive analysis of addressivity at the micro and meso levels of the interaction. An exploration of the form and function of the interactants’ contributions demonstrated that directness is the preferred choice when presentations and closing fragments are produced, while the questions and answers addressed by the candidates to each other reveal differences in the use of in/directness. These disparate strategies have a bearing on the interpersonal discourse relationship between the two politicians and the audience.
This chapter reports on an analysis of references to truth and compares their discursive value with references to fact and to reality as argumentative and rhetorical resources in the context of Prime Minister’s Questions. Truth is assigned a dual status in the analysis: it is a fundamental premise and can thus be assigned the status of a presupposition to which participants are committed. The research is based on 240 question-response sequences between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The analysis shows that references to truth are utilised by both participants with the Prime Minister referring more frequently to truth and fact, and the leader of the opposition referring more frequently to reality. References to truth insinuate its gradient conceptualisation with higher and lower degrees of truthfulness. The conversational implicature allows the speaker to act at face level in accordance with the rules of conduct of the speech event.
This chapter discusses a specific type of interactional ritual in ethno-political interviews, one that hinders their conciliatory potential. The ritual is performed by two types of participants: Jewish-Israeli interviewers demanding the condemnation of transgressions committed by others, and the respective response by Arab-Israeli political representatives in the role of interviewees. Negotiation over condemnations is examined, as this speech act is considered crucial to setting up models for civic behavior. The chapter demonstrates how interviewers’ efforts to exercise interactional and social power through pushing their interviewees to adopt a consensual stance are rejected by resorting to indirect answer designs. It concludes by discussing the extent to which “do you condemn” questions may be perceived as a legitimate professional journalistic practice.