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16 - Irony, Exaggeration, and Hyperbole: No Embargo on the Cargo!

from Part V - Irony, Affect, and Related Figures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2023

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

Hyperbole is a trope with close relations to irony. People use hyperbole to overly exaggerate the reality of some situation, which implicitly communicates their attitudes toward that topic or event. Barnden specifically argues that hyperbole is another example of “irony-as-affect-expression” in which a hyperbolic statement, such as “Peter has millions of pets,” is not an exaggeration about the number of pets Peter owns, but exaggerates the discrepancy between what some person believes about Peter’s pets and the number of pets Peter really owns. In this manner, hyperbole increases the intensity of “the affect cargo” (e.g., the speaker’s affective purpose in saying “Peter has millions of pets”) beyond that of the cargo (e.g., the actual number of Peter’s pets), which could have been expressed by a nonexaggerating utterance (e.g., “Peter has many pets”). Barnden considers several types of “affect types in ironic cargo,” including contempt, bitterness, criticism, teasing, as well as annoyance, disappointment, regret, relief, and gladness. More generally, irony, including hyperbole, offers far more potential for expressing complex affective states than does nonirony.

Keywords

affect-cargodiscrepancyexpectation violationexaggerationhyperboleirony-as-affect expressionverbal irony
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought , pp. 272 - 309
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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