Towards a Formal Semantics of Verbal Irony
نویسنده
چکیده
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 to capture ironic prosody. Afterwards, we discuss how to expand this semantics to cases of irony that are not marked by prosody.
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