Verbal Irony as a Communicative Mode of Persuasion

Is Verbal Irony Special?

The way we speak can reveal much about what we intend to communicate, but the words we use often only indirectly relate to the meanings we wish to convey. Verbal irony is a commonly studied form of indirect speech in which a speaker produces an explicit evaluative utterance that implicates an unstated, opposing evaluation. Producing and understanding ironic language, as well as many other types...

Towards a Formal Semantics of Verbal Irony

This paper presents a formal semantics of verbal irony in assertions. In particular, it makes precise what is meant by the common intuition that an ironic utterance expresses the opposite of its literal meaning. We start by considering cases of verbal irony that are marked by a particular prosodic tune in English. We then demonstrate that an extant model for intonational meaning can be extended...

Asymmetries in the Use of Verbal Irony

Recognizing Verbal Irony in Spontaneous Speech

We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this in...

Implicit Display Theory of Verbal Irony: Towards A Computational Model of Irony

This paper proposes the implicit display theory of verbal irony that overcomes several difficulties of previous irony theories, and then describes a computational model of irony interpretation and generation based on the theory. The theory claims that irony implicitly communicates the fact that its utterance situation is surrounded by ironic environment which has three properties, but hearers c...