1. Irony in Context: Developmentally and Theoretically For more than twenty years researchers have been trying to determine when children begin to understand irony. But we still don't have a clear answer. While some argue that irony comprehension emerges in early adolescence, Some of this confusion appears to be attributable to differences in the materials and procedures used (Creusere, 1999). ...

Studies focusing on the comprehension of figurative language among schizophrenia patients (SZ) reveal their difficulties comprehending such language and their tendency to interpret it literally. The present study investigated hemispheric processing and comprehension of irony in 16 SZ patients and 18 typically developing (TD) adults. Two experimental tasks were used: an online divided visual fie...

Although frequent in our everyday conversations, irony is a complex pragmatic phenomenon involving specific linguistic, communicative and cognitive abilities in order to be fully understood. In this study we examined the pragmatic comprehension of ironical and non ironical language by analysing event-related potentials (ERPs) of irony decoding process. We asked 12 subjects to listen to 240 sent...

background: many types of single-use blades are manufactured with different designs and materials. there have been several reports of difficulties in obtaining a view of the glottis with single-use laryngoscopes. the purpose of this prospective study was to compare the quickness and the success rate of endotracheal intubations with two different laryngoscope blades: disposable laryngoscope blad...

This paper provides a linguistic and pragmatic analysis of the phenomenon of irony in order to represent how Twitter’s users exploit irony devices within their communication strategies for generating textual contents. We aim to measure the impact of a wide-range of pragmatic phenomena in the interpretation of irony, and to investigate how these phenomena interact with contexts local to the twee...

The traditional theory of irony, which assumes that an ironist uses a figurative meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the utterance, is shown to be inadequate; an alternative theory is presented, which assumes that the ironist mentions the literal meaning of the utterance and expresses an attitude toward it. Although the implications for understanding irony are difficult to test, the two ...

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...

The paper defines the notions of laughter, humour, ridicule and irony in terms of a cognitive model of communication and social action, and analyses some uses of irony and ridiculisation in an Italian trial of high political import, that has been seen as a “degradation ritual” of a whole political class. In ridiculisation, one remarks some lack of power of the other, that contrasts with some pr...

Verbal irony plays an important role in how we communicate and express opinions about the world. While there exist many theories and empirical findings about how people use and understand verbal irony, there is to our knowledge no formal model of how people incorporate shared background knowledge and linguistic information to communicate ironically. Here we argue that a computational approach p...