Sarcasm

We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants’ eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed longer reading times for ironic comments compared to a non-ironic baseline, suggesting that additional processing was required in ironic compared to non-ironic conditions. Reading times for subsequent pronominal reference indicated that for ironic materials, both the ironic and literal interpretations of the text were equally accessible during on-line language comprehension. This finding is most in line with predictions of the graded salience hypothesis, which, in conjunction with the retention hypothesis, states that readers represent both the literal and ironic interpretation of an ironic utterance.

To cite this article: Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak (2021): "Unicorn humour isn't very subtle." Graphic novels and comics as a potential didactic tool for teaching irony to children: the example of Dana Simpson's Phoebe and her unicorn, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics,

This paper explores the feasibility of incorporating sarcasm into teaching through a limited research into teacher‐perceptions. Firstly, by using the findings of research in neuroscience and language studies in relation to sarcasm, inferences are drawn to support the use of sarcasm‐based lessons. Consequently, utilising the quantitative opinion of 46 education practitioners of English Language out of 62 respondents who participated in an anonymous online survey, this paper arrives at the conclusion that there is indeed strong support and good potential for such an approach. This paper recommends
further research into this issue and advocates the use of sarcasm‐based lessons (an example of which is annexed) in teaching.

Дисертацію присвячено визначенню особливостей вербалізації комічного у текстах романів Л. Піранделло. Здійснено аналіз наукових робіт з історії естетичної, психологічної та філософської думки, мовознавчих студій, у яких розглянуто означену проблему. Зроблено критичний огляд міркувань письменника про комічне і виявлено, що висновки Л. Піранделло про гумор, висловлені у його теоретичній праці «L’umorismo», слід розглядати лише як проміжний етап творчої еволюції автора.
У дисертації систематизовано мовні засоби об’єктивації комічного у ранній великій прозі письменника (фонетичні, морфологічні, лексичні, синтаксичні та стилістичні), а також окреслено особливості їх застосування для вираження авторської іронії, сарказму, сатири та гумору.
Встановлено, що в концептосфері творів Л. Піранделло комічне виявляється у п’яти базових концептах: ТРАДИЦІЇ, РЕЛІГІЯ, БЮРОКРАТІЯ, МИСТЕЦТВО та НАУКА. Визначено їхню структуру та дихотомії, які покладено в основу реалізації комічної суперечності у межах кожного з них. Зафіксовано повторювані референти комічного у творах письменника.
Ключові слова: вербалізація, комічне, іронія, сарказм, сатира, гумор, концептосфера, концепт, семантичне поле, Піранделло, романи.

The thesis dwells upon specific features of verbal representation of the comical in L. Pirandello’s novels. It includes a multidisciplinary research on the aesthetic, psychological, philosophic, and linguistic approaches to the study of the comical. Furthermore, the thesis offers a critical view of the writer’s ideas on the comical and specifically on the humor theory presented in L. Pirandello’s essay «L’umorismo». The dissertation questions author’s thoughts and methods thus considering L. Pirandello’s critical oeuvre as a merely transitional stage in his creativity evolution.
The thesis also investigates the verbal means used to render author’s irony, sarcasm, satire, and humor and offers a systematization of the linguistic instruments (phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactical, and stylistic) used by the writer to actualize the comical in his early prose.
The concept-sphere of L. Pirandello’s writings has also been thoroughly studied, and five major concepts constructing the comic senses were therefore defined: TRADITIONS, RELIGION, BUREAUCRACY, ART, and SCIENCE. This research studies their structure and individuates their dichotomy-based comic disparity. The thesis proposes a fixed list of comic referents in author’s novels.
Keywords: verbalization, the comical, irony, sarcasm, satire, humor, concept-sphere, concept, semantic field, Pirandello, novels.

The focus of this research is politeness theory and politeness strategies, in particular the notion of sarcasm in communication and how it is used in American sitcoms. The research also relates to the notion of ‘face’ and how facework is managed in interaction. Such research in this field is important because of growing interests in linguistic politeness theory and conversational theories. The study also addresses the usage of sarcasm in current modern-day media, in particular television programs from the turn of the century in America. The approach used in this research involves using current politeness theories and applying it to extracts taken from modern-day media. The findings in the research suggest that American sitcoms present the viewers with characters who adopt sarcasm in conversation as a politeness strategy in facework management often producing a hidden meaning in their utterance. The main conclusions drawn from the research indicate that the hidden meanings in the messages, portrayed as sarcasm in conversation, have negative connotations but provide entertainment for the viewers of the sitcoms.

Starting from John Osborne’s negative reaction to theatre critics’ and journalists’ perception of "Look Back in Anger"’s idiosyncratic language as “angry”, as well as their perception of the protagonist Jimmy Porter as a representative of the Angry Young Man movement, this paper considers sarcasm as one of the key aggressive rhetorical devices used in the language of the play. Osborne thought that the specific, even revolutionary rhetoric of his play was in most cases misunderstood and wrongly conveyed in theatre adaptations as “angry”, which made the performance lose the edge that the language of the play had the potential for. "Look Back in Anger" provides an insight into the Porters’ lower-class mundane dailiness, charged with verbal aggression and intertextual allusiveness stemming from deeper political, historical and social issues of mid-twentieth-century Britain. This paper focuses on Jimmy Porter’s prevalent use of sarcasm as a weapon in his personal battle, by taking John Haiman’s "Talk Is Cheap: Sarcasm, Alienation, and the Evolution of Language", to illustrate how the language of "Look Back in Anger" coincides with Haiman’s conclusions on the theoretical and applied characteristics of sarcasm in contemporary society.

Keywords: theatre, verbal aggression, sarcasm, intertextuality.

The importance of the detection of aggressiveness in social media is due to real effects of violence provoked by negative behavior online. For this reason, hate speech online is a real problem in modern society and the necessity of control of user-generated contents has become one of the priorities for governments, social media platforms and Internet companies. Current methodologies are far from solving this problem. Indeed, several aggressive comments are also disguised as sarcastic. In this perspective, this research proposal wants to investigate the role played by creative linguistic devices, especially sarcasm, in hate speech in multilingual context.

This paper aims to cast light on the somewhat neglected area of mock politeness. The principle objectives are to describe the ways that mock politeness is talked about and performed. In order to investigate such usage, I analyse data from informal, naturally occurring conversations in a UK-based online forum. The paper introduces a range of metalinguistic expressions which are used to refer to mock polite behaviours in lay interactions and describes the different structures of mock polite behaviours. The analysis shows that both metalanguage and structure are more diverse than anticipated by previous research and, as a result, the paper argues against equating mock politeness with sarcasm and calls for further research into mock politeness as an important strategy of impoliteness.

The relationship between irony and sarcasm has been much discussed and yet there is still little agreement on how the two relate at a theoretical level, as Attardo (2000: 795) notes “there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are essentially the same thing […] or if they differ significantly”. The aim of this paper is to take a user-perspective and report on how participants in everyday conversations in the UK and Italy talk about irony and sarcasm and what kinds of authentic behaviors are described using these labels. These findings are discussed with reference to the academic concepts of irony and sarcasm to investigate how the lay and academic perspectives relate.

A significant part of everyday verbal communication consists of nonliteral language, including irony (Gibbs 2000). Efficient irony use can serve a wide range of pragmatic goals, while deficits in irony comprehension can have negative social consequences. Whereas a large body of psycholinguistic research has been produced on irony use and understanding by adults, little attention has been paid to the socio-cultural characteristics of this phenomenon so far. Some individual factors that have been identified as correlates of irony use include personality of the speaker, gender, age, or speaking a second language. In this article, we argue that it is necessary to bring the aspects of socio-cultural variables and individual characteristics together in the further study of irony across national cultures. To this end, we present a narrative review of theoretical and quantitative empirical literature from the field of psycholinguistics on both national cultural and individual/psychological factors impacting the use and understanding of verbal irony in communication. Based on the review, we suggest a theoretical model that could guide future quantitative studies on irony use such that both contextual factors (including national cultural dimensions) and individual differences between the speakers are clearly defined and related to one another in terms of their influence.

In public political discourse, figurative expressions used by one participant are often followed up and ‘countered’ by other participants through ironical allusions, comments and altered quotations aimed at denouncing the original version or deriving a new, contrarian conclusion from it. What is the relationship between metaphor and irony in such cases: are they independently processed and then added to each other in the overall interpretation or are they integrated into a ‘blended’, context-dependent implicature? Using data from a corpus documenting the long-running political debate in Britain about the nation’s place at the heart of Europe, this paper investigates the interplay of metaphor, irony and sarcasm in comprehension processes. It is argued that the latter two involve speaker-hearer-shared awareness of aspects of the ‘discourse history’ of the slogan, including a default version of the metaphor, which in the case of sarcasm, is recontextualised in a contrasting scenario (e.g. that of a dead, rotting, diseased heart) with the aim of insulting or disqualifying the echoed or pretended ‘preceding’ speaker.

According to Gibbs and Colston, one of the biggest challenges for irony research is the uncovering of the various ways in which irony is used in discourse. This article takes up a genre-based approach to deal with this research challenge. In a content analysis of ironic utterances from six written genres (commercial and noncommercial advertisements, columns, cartoons, letters to the editor, book and film reviews), ironic utterances are compared on the usage of irony factors and irony markers. Results indicate that every genre in the corpus differs from the general distribution for at least one irony factor and one category of irony markers. Taken together, the clustering of irony factors and markers in specific genres is a first step toward identifying the various ways in which verbal irony is used differently across various genres.

…nor is there anything wet or dry, but is in a clear record(Holy Quran, al-An'am, 59).
With any approach we look at the Qur'an, either in terms of scientific or literary and artistic, It shines special. Everybody who drinks of this resuscitative spring, his words will seem to be heavenly. In Persian literature, the poets or the writers whose works' themes are rooted in the teachings of Quran have special positions. Thanks to the Word of God in Holy Quran, Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muhammad Hafez stands on the peak of Persian sonnet. One of the rhetoric arrays of Quran from which Hafez benefits is sarcasm that has been analyzed in present essay. Sarcasm is a kind of Irony that appears sporadically in the divans of predecessor poets, however it cannot be considered as their stylistic feature because it doesn't have the necessary frequency and abundance.
This stylistic feature is observed in Divan of Hafez with high frequency such as: Dignified Zahid, Khwāja of Wisdom and etc

Zunächst wird der vieldiskutierte Satz "Sed bono vinci satius est quam malo more iniuriam vincere" (Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum 42,3) auf eine neue Weise erklärt: als Ausdruck aggressiver Ironie. Der zweite, längere Teil der Arbeit ist ein kritischer Forschungsüberblick. Er zeigt, auf welche Ungereimtheiten die bisherigen Deutungen führen und enthält viele Beobachtungen, die die sarkastische Deutung abstützen.

Sarcasm is commonly used in our everyday interactions. However, there is currently little research that has investigated the on-line cognitive processes underlying sarcasm comprehension. We report two eye-tracking experiments, which test the predictions of three pragmatics theories: the Standard Pragmatic Model (SPM; Grice, 1975), the Graded Salience Hypothesis (GSH; Giora, 1997), and the Implicit Display Theory (IDT; Utsumi, 2000). In both experiments, participants’ eye movements were recorded while they read texts that described an interaction between two characters. Factors which were manipulated in Experiment 1 were (1) whether the final comment was intended literally, or was an unfamiliar sarcastic comment, and (2) whether comments appeared in a context which contained an explicit expectation which was known to both the speaker and the recipient, or in which the expectation was implicit. Results showed that literal comments were read faster than sarcastic ones, regardless of whether an explicit expectation was present in the context, which supports the predictions of the SPM and GSH, but not the IDT. In Experiment 2, salience was included as an additional factor in the design, in order to further distinguish the predictions of the GSH and SPM. The results supported the GSH: in the early stages of processing, familiar sarcastic comments were read as quickly as literal comments, while unfamiliar sarcastic comments took longer to read. There was again no effect of expectation. Interestingly, the processing advantage for familiar sarcastic comments was not observed in the later stages of processing, when sarcastic comments were more difficult to process than literal ones irrespective of their saliency. These results potentially indicate that in the later stages of sarcasm comprehension, there may be an on-going conflict between the literal and ironic meanings of the comment. The GSH and the Indirect Negation View (Giora, 1995) best accommodate these results.

In this paper we will study the irony gathered in the parliamentary speeches in Spanish language. From this research object, and following the Theory of Argumentation, it is based on the hypothesis that irony in its negative valuation becomes sarcasm (which will come to be understood here as the variant of irony). We will also understand that irony, as a dialectical weapon, is the shield that allows the politician to consolidate his adversary role thanks to the maximum dependence of the sociocultural context. For all this, we will present discursive samples, on the one hand, to defend that this pragmatic resource is a mechanism of cohesion in the discursive process of the ideological argumentation of the politician; on the other hand, to try to categorize the linguistic mechanisms for their expression.

Although there is increasing evidence to suggest that language is grounded in perception and action, the relationship between language and emotion is less well understood. We investigate the grounding of language in emotion using a novel approach that examines the relationship between the comprehension of a written discourse and the performance of affect-related motor actions (hand movements towards and away from the body). Results indicate that positively and negatively valenced words presented in context influence motor responses (Experiment 1), whilst valenced words presented in isolation do not (Experiment 3). Furthermore, whether discourse context indicates that an utterance should be interpreted literally or ironically can influence motor responding, suggesting that the grounding of language in emo- tional states can be influenced by discourse-level factors (Experiment 2). In addition, the finding of affect-related motor responses to certain forms of ironic language, but not to non-ironic control sentences, suggests that phrasing a message ironically may influence the emotional response that is elicited.

This essay looks at two young English-speaking Iraqi bloggers whose internationally recognized writings describe the chaos in post-Saddam Iraq. It examines sarcasm as a mode of resistance as employed by Salam Pax, characterized by BBC Radio in 2003 as “the most famous diarist in the world,” and Riverbend, whose blog was published as a book and translated into several languages. By subjecting the colonial discourse to ridicule, they not only successfully convey the angst their people suffer, but also mock a stereotypical rhetoric that haunts the Western mentality regarding the Middle East. This essay negotiates their use of sarcasm as a means of non-violent resistance. It demonstrates how, for instance, they shift from the sarcastic to the absurd to unravel the banality of the colonial mind and the conceited position of its liberating enterprises. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to shed light on the emergence of a digitalized group of subalterns who write back to the center in the wake of the American intervention to topple the Baath regime in Iraq. Pax and Riverbend distinctively succeed in subverting the colonial and hegemonic gaze by unravelling the encroaching uncertainties of war through the deployment of sarcasm to signify resistance, and by transforming the coalition forces’ theatre of war into a theatre of the absurd.

Nizār Qabbāni,the contemporary Syrian Poet (1923-1998), is known as the poet of woman in the field of poetry and have been mostly criticised from this poin of view. A detailed scrutiny of her works clearly illustrates that she has sensitively and emotionally reacted to insufficiencies of the Arab society and the incompetence of the rulers.Political and social issues have certainly been among her concerns.Nizār Qobbāni used sarcasm to harshly and bitterly challenged the inadequate policy  and statesmanship of Arab puppet rulers and exhaustion of Arabic culture and peoples' narrow-mindedness.Sarcasm is one of the expressive techniques Nizār Qabbāni has used in portrating his mental concepts. This can be very vividly seen in her political famous work called “Hawâmish Ala Daftar al_Naksah”. This study attempts to, with a descriptive-analytical approach,explore the role of this techniques. The result is that the use of this technique has had a profound effect in the poet's prominent language and her audience to get the intended concepts. In addition the coincidence of poet's bitter language with Arab bitter defeat in 1967 war,has made a kind of harmony and coordination of content and vocabulary and poetic compositions,which has attracted specific audiences such as literary critics

This paper presents a supervised learning method for irony detection in Arabic tweets. A binary classifier uses four groups of features whose efficiency has been empirically proved in other languages such as French, English, Italian, Dutch and Japanese. Our first results are encouraging and show that state of the art features can be successfully applied to Arabic language with an accuracy of 72.76%.

Sarcasm is a peculiar form of sentiment expression, where the surface sentiment differs from the implied sentiment. The detection of sarcasm in social media platforms has been applied in the past mainly to textual utterances where lexical indicators (such as interjections and intensifiers), linguistic markers, and contextual information (such as user profiles, or past conversations) were used to detect the sarcastic tone. However, modern social media platforms allow to create multimodal messages where audiovisual content is integrated with the text, making the analysis of a mode in isolation partial. In our work, we first study the relationship between the textual and visual aspects in multimodal posts from three major social media platforms, i.e., Insta-gram, Tumblr and Twitter, and we run a crowdsourcing task to quantify the extent to which images are perceived as necessary by human annotators. Moreover, we propose two different computational frameworks to detect sarcasm that integrate the textual and visual modalities. The first approach exploits visual semantics trained on an external dataset, and concatenates the semantics features with state-of-the-art textual features. The second method adapts a visual neural network initialized with parameters trained on ImageNet to multimodal sarcastic posts. Results show the positive effect of combining modalities for the detection of sarcasm across platforms and methods.

This study aimed to investigate the emotional impact of sarcasm. Previous research in this area has mainly required participants to answer questions based on written materials, and results have been mixed. With the aim of instead examining the emotional impact of sarcasm when used in a more conversational setting, the current study utilized animated video clips as stimuli. In each clip, one individual answered general knowledge questions while the other provided feedback that could be delivered either literally or sarcastically, and either complimented or criticized the question answerer’s performance. Participants rated the feedback based on (a) the anticipated emotional impact on the recipient, (b) how the speaker intended the recipient to feel, and (c) whether the speaker intended to be humorous. Results overall supported the Tinge Hypothesis, showing that sarcastic criticism was rated as less negative than literal criticism, and sarcastic compliments (also termed “ironic praise”) were rated as less positive than literal compliments, when judged from both the perspective of the recipient and of the speaker. The speaker was also perceived to be intending to be more humorous when sarcastic feedback was given.

Verbal irony is a figure of speech that communicates the opposite of what is said, while sarcasm is a form of irony that is directed at a person, with the intent to criticise. The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with the aim of mapping the neural networks involved in the processing of sarcastic and non-sarcastic irony. Participants read short texts describing an interaction between two characters, which ended in either a literal, sarcastic, or non-sarcastic ironic comment. Results showed that the mentalising network (mPFC) and semantic network (IFG) were more activated for non-sarcastic irony than for literal controls. This would suggest that interpreting this kind of language involves understanding that the speaker does not mean what they literally say, as well as processes involved in conflict detection and resolution. Sarcastic irony recruited more of the semantic network, as well as areas associated with humour appreciation and subcortical structures, indicating that more complex neural mechanisms underlie the comprehension of sarcastic versus non-sarcastic irony.

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 tweet. Informed by linguistic theories, we propose for the first time a multi-layered annotation schema for irony and its application to a corpus of French, English and Italian tweets.We detail each layer, explore their interactions, and discuss our results according to a qualitative and quantitative perspective.

L'analyse automatique du langage figuratif est l'un des défis majeurs du traitement des langues. Contrairement au langage littéral, le langage figuratif détourne le sens propre pour lui conférer un sens dit figuré ou imagé, comme la métaphore, l'ironie, le sarcasme, la satire et l'humour. La détection de ces phénomènes requiert des outils plus complexes que ceux utilisés pour l'analyse d'opinion. Dans ce contexte, nous nous focalisons sur l'ironie et le sarcasme. Nous présentons un panorama des définitions et principaux travaux existants. Nous décrivons ensuite une première expérimentation qui vise à détecter l'ironie dans un corpus de tweets en français.