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10 - Inferring Irony Online

from Part IV - Irony in Linguistic Communication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2023

By
Francisco Yus
Edited by
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr  and
Herbert L. Colston
Herbert L. Colston
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Summary

The versatility of irony is evident in the variety of ways and places in which it is used. This chapter considers some of the complexities of ironic language on the internet (e.g., social media, messaging apps). Yus views irony as being associated with making a reference to some state of affairs that can be criticized or mocked, and which communicates a speaker’s attitudes toward that situation, including others who adopt a similar point of view. He embraces a “relevance theory” perspective to emphasize the prominence of echoic mention as a key source of pragmatic information when determining an ironic speaker’s dissociative attitude. Yus details the range of contextual information that enables successful irony use, even in situations where individuals do not share the same immediate physical space. This information includes widely held encyclopedic background knowledge, speaker-specific encyclopedic knowledge, previous utterances, particular linguistic cues, and information from the current physical setting. These different sources of contextual information are combined in specific ways to enable ironic meaning interpretation when people are not physical co-present (e.g., when posting messages or writing email on the internet).

Keywords

contextual informationdissociative attitudeechoic mentioninternetmessaging appsonline irony userelevance theorysocial media
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought , pp. 160 - 180
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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