Stylistic and Contextual Effects in Irony Processing

Irony is perceived through a complex interaction between an utterance and its context and serves many social functions such as to be sarcastic and to be humorous. The purpose of this paper is to explore what role linguistic style and contextual information play in the recognition of irony (i.e., assessing the degree of irony) and in the appreciation of ironic functions (i.e., assessing the degree of sarcasm and humor). Two experiments demonstrated that the degree of irony and sarcasm was affected primarily by linguistic style (i.e., sentence type and politeness), while the degree of humor was affected by both linguistic style and contextual information (i.e., context negativity and ordinariness of negative situation). These results are almost consistent with the predictions by the implicit display theory, a cognitive theory of verbal irony. Discussion of the findings also suggests that the implicit display theory can account for an indirect effect of context on the degree of irony.