Audiovisual Strategies in the Production of Ironic Speech

Verbal irony is a type of echoic allusion to an attributed utterance or thought (Sperber & Wilson, 1981) that the speaker contrasts with her/his own current thoughts (e.g., saying “You are so brilliant, man!” when he/she actually means “What a clumsy person!”). It has been shown that speakers use a variety of prosodic signals to communicate ironic intentions (see Bryant, 2011). So far, researchers investigating ironic speech have mainly focused on exploring verbal prosodic cues involved in the production and recognition of ironic utterances. These studies have clearly shown that speakers of different languages apply acoustic and prosodic modulations to their speech to facilitate the listener’s comprehension of irony. However, little is known about the potential role of visual features in the production and detection of irony. The main goal of this study is to explore the production of ironic speech from an audiovisual point of view and to analyze the discursive, prosodic, and gestural strategies used in the expression of Catalan ironic spontaneous speech. Our hypothesis is that the density and consistency of prosodic and gestural marks is especially important in the case of ironic speech, as these marks are especially helpful in highlighting the inappropriateness of the echoized representation by making clear the speaker’s dissociative attitude towards the content of the utterance, as the relevance-theoretic approach claims. In order to assess the contribution of discursive, prosodic, and gestural in the production of ironic statements in spontaneous speech, we designed a production task aimed at eliciting spontaneous verbal irony utterances. Thirty-three ironic utterances and the thirty-three utterances preceding them were extracted from the 11 conversations which lasted a total of 3 hours 26 minutes . As we expected, results have shown that (a) there is a higher density of auditory and visual marks in ironic utterances than in non-ironic, immediately preceding utterances and that (b) regardless of the semantic strategy chosen by the speakers, we find consistent auditory or visual marks in ironic utterances that help listeners during the ironic interpretation of the utterances.