Verbal Irony

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...

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...

Asymmetries in the Use of Verbal Irony

Where is the humor in verbal irony?

Irony is often related to humor, both in spoken and written language. One possibility is that humor arises once people reconcile the incongruity between what speakers say and imply when using irony. Humor automatically emerges in these cases given the release of tension following a momentary sense of disparity. Our claim is that this proposal does not capture many of the dynamic complexities in...

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...