Margot Van Mulken | Radboud University Nijmegen (original) (raw)
Papers by Margot Van Mulken
Language intensity has been investigated within several disciplines, such as linguistics, stylist... more Language intensity has been investigated within several disciplines, such as
linguistics, stylistics and social psychology, and from several approaches. As a
result, a wide range of intensifying elements and effects have been identified.
In this chapter, we demonstrate on the basis of a qualitative corpus-analytical
study that two dimensions play a decisive role in the discrimination of intensified
language: contextuality and semantic richness. Contextuality reflects the
degree to which the intensifying meaning of an element depends on its context.
Semantic richness describes the amount of meaningful information that an
intensifying element contains on top of its intensification function. This chapter
is a starting point for further research concerning the characteristics of language
intensity. Our insights contribute to established approaches in corpus-analytical
and stylistic research.
Verbal irony, or sarcasm, presents a significant technical and conceptual challenge when it comes... more Verbal irony, or sarcasm, presents a significant technical and conceptual
challenge when it comes to automatic detection. Moreover, it can be a
disruptive factor in sentiment analysis and opinion mining, because it
changes the polarity of a message implicitly. Extant methods for automatic
detection are mostly based on overt clues to ironic intent such
as hashtags, also known as irony markers. In this paper, we investigate
whether people who know each other make use of irony markers less
often than people who do not know each other. We trained a machinelearning
classifier to detect sarcasm in Twitter messages (tweets) that
were addressed to specific users, and in tweets that were not addressed
to a particular user. Human coders analyzed the top-1000 features
found to be most discriminative into ten categories of irony markers.
The classifier was also tested within and across the two categories. We
find that tweets with a user mention contain fewer irony markers than
tweets not addressed to a particular user. Classification experiments
confirm that the irony in the two types of tweets is signaled differently.
The within-category performance of the classifier is about 91% for both
categories, while cross-category experiments yield substantially lower
generalization performance scores of 75% and 71%. We conclude that
irony markers are used more often when there is less mutual knowledge
between sender and receiver. Senders addressing other Twitter
users less often use irony markers, relying on mutual knowledge which
should lead the receiver to infer ironic intent from more implicit clues.
With regard to automatic detection, we conclude that our classifier is
able to detect ironic tweets addressed at another user as reliably as
tweets that are not addressed at at a particular person.
How does a receiver know that humor is intended? The communicator may say so explicitly ("Wanna h... more How does a receiver know that humor is intended? The communicator may say so explicitly ("Wanna hear a joke?", "Listen, this is funny"), but she may also signal humor in less overt ways. Not much research exists that investigates signals of humorous devices (but see Attardo et al. 2011; Hay 2001; Adams 2012). Irony, however, is one of the best-researched types of humor [see ch. 18: Irony and sarcasm], and therefore the study of irony markers is more advanced and may also help to detect cases of humor. Although irony and humor are related to a certain degree (in that some irony is funny, and some humor is ironic), care should be taken to not equate the two. This contribution focuses on irony and sarcasm markers.
Cognitive Foundations of Language Structure and Use, 2012
Information Processing & Management, 2014
To avoid a sarcastic message being understood in its unintended literal meaning, in microtexts su... more To avoid a sarcastic message being understood in its unintended literal meaning, in microtexts such as messages on Twitter.com sarcasm is often explicitly marked with a hashtag such as '#sarcasm'. We collected a training corpus of about 406 thousand Dutch tweets with hashtag synonyms denoting sarcasm. Assuming that the human labeling is correct (annotation of a sample indicates that about 90% of these tweets are indeed sarcastic), we train a machine learning classifier on the harvested examples, and apply it to a sample of a day's stream of 2.25 million Dutch tweets. Of the 353 explicitly marked tweets on this day, we detect 309 (87%) with the hashtag removed. We annotate the top of the ranked list of tweets most likely to be sarcastic that do not have the explicit hashtag. 35% of the top-250 ranked tweets are indeed sarcastic. Analysis indicates that the use of hashtags reduces the further use of linguistic markers for signalling sarcasm, such as exclamations and intensifiers. We hypothesize that explicit markers such as hashtags are the digital extralinguistic equivalent of non-verbal expressions that people employ in live interaction when conveying sarcasm. Checking the consistency of our finding in a language from another language family, we observe that in French the hashtag '#sarcasme' has a similar polarity switching function, be it to a lesser extent.
Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing
Verschillende disciplines, waaronder de taalkunde, taalbeheersing, communicatiewetenschap en soci... more Verschillende disciplines, waaronder de taalkunde, taalbeheersing, communicatiewetenschap en sociale psychologie, buigen zich met regelmaat over het verschijnsel ironie. Vanwege de multidisciplinariteit van het onderwerp, lijken er verschillende ‘ironietradities’ te ontstaan in de respectievelijke domeinen, zonder dat er sprake is van kruisbestuiving. In deze bijdrage bespreken we kort de stand van zaken in het bestaande onderzoek naar het begrip en de retorische effecten van ironie, waarbij we de nadruk leggen op de taalbeheersingsaspecten van ironie. Aan de hand van determinanten gerelateerd aan (1) de formulering van ironie, (2) de co-tekst van ironie en de (3) context van ironie formuleren we ons model van het “ironisch spectrum”. Dit nieuwe model integreert taalkundige, communicatiewetenschappelijke, sociaalpsychologische en taalbeheersingevidentie over het begrip en de effectiviteit van ironie.
Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschappen, 2006
Information Design Journal, 2005
Some advertisements attract our attention because we do not immediately see what they are about. ... more Some advertisements attract our attention because we do not immediately see what they are about. They incite us to reflect upon the delivered message. Several studies have shown that this kind of implicit messages can have a considerable impact on readers/viewers: ...
This book came about as the growing community of practitioners and academics were progressing the... more This book came about as the growing community of practitioners and academics were progressing the area of services to new levels of understanding. Servitization was first introduced as the trend in which corporations offer fuller market packages or bundles of customer-focused combinations of goods, services, support, self-service and knowledge. As production becomes increasingly commoditised in the eyes of the end user, companies have pursued value downstream through greater customer involvement and interaction. This change in business focus, and indeed strategy, has presented new challenges and opportunities to all involved with it.
Information Design Journal, 2008
A rhetorical figure (for instance the antithesis in Come in and find out in a Dutch perfume ad)... more A rhetorical figure (for instance the antithesis in Come in and find out in a Dutch perfume ad) communicates an advertising message in an artfully divergent way. Two types of rhetorical figures are frequently distinguished, namely schemes (superficial decorations such as ...
Discourse Processes
Comprehension is an important factor in the functioning of irony. Readers who are unaware of the ... more Comprehension is an important factor in the functioning of irony. Readers who are unaware of the irony in an utterance are “sheep,” whereas readers who understand the irony are “wolves” (Gibbs & Izett, 2005). Factors that may impact on the attitude toward irony not only include comprehension, but agreement (agreeing with the position taken in the utterance or not) and group membership (belonging to the target of the irony or not) as well. In an experiment, participants were asked to evaluate either ironic prejudices against women or ironic prejudices against men. The attitude toward the utterance and text is more positive when participants recognize the ironic intention, agree with the statement, and are not the members of the targeted group. These results imply that studies into the pragmatic effects of verbal irony should consider these 3 factors.
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
Authors of written texts may mark the use of verbal irony in a variety of ways. One possibility f... more Authors of written texts may mark the use of verbal irony in a variety of ways. One possibility for doing so is the use of so-called co-textual markers of irony (i.e., support strategies that open up a non-serious frame). This study aims to classify and categorize these co-textual irony markers. A content analysis of 2,042 co-textual utterances of irony across four text genres(advertisements, newspaper columns, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor) shows that three categories of support strategies could be identified: other ironic utterances, tropes and mood markers. The use of irony support strategies was positively related to the genre of newspaper columns: columns used more ironic utterances and tropes as irony support strategies than the other genres in the corpus.
The effect of visual metaphor in advertising is claimed to follow a curvilinear pattern: visual m... more The effect of visual metaphor in advertising is claimed to
follow a curvilinear pattern: visual metaphors that constitute a moderate challenge are said to have a bigger impact on
appreciation than simpler or more complex metaphors. Until
now, empirical evidence has been scarce. This study verifies
whether the tipping point can indeed be identified. In an
experiment, 485 participants judged 16 different metaphors (in advertisements for 16 different product categories) varying in conceptual complexity. Mediation analyses showed that metaphors of moderate complexity, although comprehended less well than simpler metaphors, are appreciated more than simpler and more complex metaphors.
For multinational corporations, the need for efficiency and control has motivated the choice for ... more For multinational corporations, the need for efficiency and control has motivated the choice for a corporate language. However, increasing internationalisation has forced corporations to rethink their language policies to cater to the changing demands of the multicultural and multilingual workplace. This paper explores two related issues. First,
it addresses the influence of mode of communication (English as a Lingua Franca [ELF] vs. L1–L2 interactions) on task efficiency. Second, it investigates the use of communication strategies in the different types of interactions (ELF vs. L1–L2). In a within-subject experimental design, the present study explores the effectiveness of language use in dyadic, computer-mediated communication between non-native speakers of English (ELF) and native and non-native speakers of German and Dutch (L1–L2). In three consecutive chat sessions, 60 participants performed a problemsolving task in English, German or Dutch. Findings indicate that in L1–L2 interactions, the participants were more effective in realising communicative goals than in ELF interactions, and that participants made use of different communication strategies in L1–L2 interactions than in ELF interactions. Consequently, international organisations which implement a corporate language may benefit from condoning
multilingual practices on the work floor.
This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifyi... more This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifying irony in natural discourse. The first section discusses previous operationalizations of irony and demonstrates that these are not explicit about which criteria were used to separate irony from non-irony. The second section argues why irony can be defined as an "utterance with a literal eval-
The alternative typologies of visual metaphors proposed by and show some striking similarities wi... more The alternative typologies of visual metaphors proposed by and show some striking similarities with regard to disposition of the visual elements, that is, the source and target domains. The first part of this chapter summarizes the results of two experiments that tested the validity of these classifications with Spanish, French, and Dutch participants and proposes an overall image of the appreciation of the three visual metaphor types. The second part focuses on the interpretations of the metaphors by the Spanish, French, and Dutch participants in the second experiment, to verify whether culture influences the interpretation of the common ground in visual metaphor. We detected subtle cultural differences in focus and interpretive diversity.
Language intensity has been investigated within several disciplines, such as linguistics, stylist... more Language intensity has been investigated within several disciplines, such as
linguistics, stylistics and social psychology, and from several approaches. As a
result, a wide range of intensifying elements and effects have been identified.
In this chapter, we demonstrate on the basis of a qualitative corpus-analytical
study that two dimensions play a decisive role in the discrimination of intensified
language: contextuality and semantic richness. Contextuality reflects the
degree to which the intensifying meaning of an element depends on its context.
Semantic richness describes the amount of meaningful information that an
intensifying element contains on top of its intensification function. This chapter
is a starting point for further research concerning the characteristics of language
intensity. Our insights contribute to established approaches in corpus-analytical
and stylistic research.
Verbal irony, or sarcasm, presents a significant technical and conceptual challenge when it comes... more Verbal irony, or sarcasm, presents a significant technical and conceptual
challenge when it comes to automatic detection. Moreover, it can be a
disruptive factor in sentiment analysis and opinion mining, because it
changes the polarity of a message implicitly. Extant methods for automatic
detection are mostly based on overt clues to ironic intent such
as hashtags, also known as irony markers. In this paper, we investigate
whether people who know each other make use of irony markers less
often than people who do not know each other. We trained a machinelearning
classifier to detect sarcasm in Twitter messages (tweets) that
were addressed to specific users, and in tweets that were not addressed
to a particular user. Human coders analyzed the top-1000 features
found to be most discriminative into ten categories of irony markers.
The classifier was also tested within and across the two categories. We
find that tweets with a user mention contain fewer irony markers than
tweets not addressed to a particular user. Classification experiments
confirm that the irony in the two types of tweets is signaled differently.
The within-category performance of the classifier is about 91% for both
categories, while cross-category experiments yield substantially lower
generalization performance scores of 75% and 71%. We conclude that
irony markers are used more often when there is less mutual knowledge
between sender and receiver. Senders addressing other Twitter
users less often use irony markers, relying on mutual knowledge which
should lead the receiver to infer ironic intent from more implicit clues.
With regard to automatic detection, we conclude that our classifier is
able to detect ironic tweets addressed at another user as reliably as
tweets that are not addressed at at a particular person.
How does a receiver know that humor is intended? The communicator may say so explicitly ("Wanna h... more How does a receiver know that humor is intended? The communicator may say so explicitly ("Wanna hear a joke?", "Listen, this is funny"), but she may also signal humor in less overt ways. Not much research exists that investigates signals of humorous devices (but see Attardo et al. 2011; Hay 2001; Adams 2012). Irony, however, is one of the best-researched types of humor [see ch. 18: Irony and sarcasm], and therefore the study of irony markers is more advanced and may also help to detect cases of humor. Although irony and humor are related to a certain degree (in that some irony is funny, and some humor is ironic), care should be taken to not equate the two. This contribution focuses on irony and sarcasm markers.
Cognitive Foundations of Language Structure and Use, 2012
Information Processing & Management, 2014
To avoid a sarcastic message being understood in its unintended literal meaning, in microtexts su... more To avoid a sarcastic message being understood in its unintended literal meaning, in microtexts such as messages on Twitter.com sarcasm is often explicitly marked with a hashtag such as '#sarcasm'. We collected a training corpus of about 406 thousand Dutch tweets with hashtag synonyms denoting sarcasm. Assuming that the human labeling is correct (annotation of a sample indicates that about 90% of these tweets are indeed sarcastic), we train a machine learning classifier on the harvested examples, and apply it to a sample of a day's stream of 2.25 million Dutch tweets. Of the 353 explicitly marked tweets on this day, we detect 309 (87%) with the hashtag removed. We annotate the top of the ranked list of tweets most likely to be sarcastic that do not have the explicit hashtag. 35% of the top-250 ranked tweets are indeed sarcastic. Analysis indicates that the use of hashtags reduces the further use of linguistic markers for signalling sarcasm, such as exclamations and intensifiers. We hypothesize that explicit markers such as hashtags are the digital extralinguistic equivalent of non-verbal expressions that people employ in live interaction when conveying sarcasm. Checking the consistency of our finding in a language from another language family, we observe that in French the hashtag '#sarcasme' has a similar polarity switching function, be it to a lesser extent.
Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing
Verschillende disciplines, waaronder de taalkunde, taalbeheersing, communicatiewetenschap en soci... more Verschillende disciplines, waaronder de taalkunde, taalbeheersing, communicatiewetenschap en sociale psychologie, buigen zich met regelmaat over het verschijnsel ironie. Vanwege de multidisciplinariteit van het onderwerp, lijken er verschillende ‘ironietradities’ te ontstaan in de respectievelijke domeinen, zonder dat er sprake is van kruisbestuiving. In deze bijdrage bespreken we kort de stand van zaken in het bestaande onderzoek naar het begrip en de retorische effecten van ironie, waarbij we de nadruk leggen op de taalbeheersingsaspecten van ironie. Aan de hand van determinanten gerelateerd aan (1) de formulering van ironie, (2) de co-tekst van ironie en de (3) context van ironie formuleren we ons model van het “ironisch spectrum”. Dit nieuwe model integreert taalkundige, communicatiewetenschappelijke, sociaalpsychologische en taalbeheersingevidentie over het begrip en de effectiviteit van ironie.
Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschappen, 2006
Information Design Journal, 2005
Some advertisements attract our attention because we do not immediately see what they are about. ... more Some advertisements attract our attention because we do not immediately see what they are about. They incite us to reflect upon the delivered message. Several studies have shown that this kind of implicit messages can have a considerable impact on readers/viewers: ...
This book came about as the growing community of practitioners and academics were progressing the... more This book came about as the growing community of practitioners and academics were progressing the area of services to new levels of understanding. Servitization was first introduced as the trend in which corporations offer fuller market packages or bundles of customer-focused combinations of goods, services, support, self-service and knowledge. As production becomes increasingly commoditised in the eyes of the end user, companies have pursued value downstream through greater customer involvement and interaction. This change in business focus, and indeed strategy, has presented new challenges and opportunities to all involved with it.
Information Design Journal, 2008
A rhetorical figure (for instance the antithesis in Come in and find out in a Dutch perfume ad)... more A rhetorical figure (for instance the antithesis in Come in and find out in a Dutch perfume ad) communicates an advertising message in an artfully divergent way. Two types of rhetorical figures are frequently distinguished, namely schemes (superficial decorations such as ...
Discourse Processes
Comprehension is an important factor in the functioning of irony. Readers who are unaware of the ... more Comprehension is an important factor in the functioning of irony. Readers who are unaware of the irony in an utterance are “sheep,” whereas readers who understand the irony are “wolves” (Gibbs & Izett, 2005). Factors that may impact on the attitude toward irony not only include comprehension, but agreement (agreeing with the position taken in the utterance or not) and group membership (belonging to the target of the irony or not) as well. In an experiment, participants were asked to evaluate either ironic prejudices against women or ironic prejudices against men. The attitude toward the utterance and text is more positive when participants recognize the ironic intention, agree with the statement, and are not the members of the targeted group. These results imply that studies into the pragmatic effects of verbal irony should consider these 3 factors.
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
Authors of written texts may mark the use of verbal irony in a variety of ways. One possibility f... more Authors of written texts may mark the use of verbal irony in a variety of ways. One possibility for doing so is the use of so-called co-textual markers of irony (i.e., support strategies that open up a non-serious frame). This study aims to classify and categorize these co-textual irony markers. A content analysis of 2,042 co-textual utterances of irony across four text genres(advertisements, newspaper columns, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor) shows that three categories of support strategies could be identified: other ironic utterances, tropes and mood markers. The use of irony support strategies was positively related to the genre of newspaper columns: columns used more ironic utterances and tropes as irony support strategies than the other genres in the corpus.
The effect of visual metaphor in advertising is claimed to follow a curvilinear pattern: visual m... more The effect of visual metaphor in advertising is claimed to
follow a curvilinear pattern: visual metaphors that constitute a moderate challenge are said to have a bigger impact on
appreciation than simpler or more complex metaphors. Until
now, empirical evidence has been scarce. This study verifies
whether the tipping point can indeed be identified. In an
experiment, 485 participants judged 16 different metaphors (in advertisements for 16 different product categories) varying in conceptual complexity. Mediation analyses showed that metaphors of moderate complexity, although comprehended less well than simpler metaphors, are appreciated more than simpler and more complex metaphors.
For multinational corporations, the need for efficiency and control has motivated the choice for ... more For multinational corporations, the need for efficiency and control has motivated the choice for a corporate language. However, increasing internationalisation has forced corporations to rethink their language policies to cater to the changing demands of the multicultural and multilingual workplace. This paper explores two related issues. First,
it addresses the influence of mode of communication (English as a Lingua Franca [ELF] vs. L1–L2 interactions) on task efficiency. Second, it investigates the use of communication strategies in the different types of interactions (ELF vs. L1–L2). In a within-subject experimental design, the present study explores the effectiveness of language use in dyadic, computer-mediated communication between non-native speakers of English (ELF) and native and non-native speakers of German and Dutch (L1–L2). In three consecutive chat sessions, 60 participants performed a problemsolving task in English, German or Dutch. Findings indicate that in L1–L2 interactions, the participants were more effective in realising communicative goals than in ELF interactions, and that participants made use of different communication strategies in L1–L2 interactions than in ELF interactions. Consequently, international organisations which implement a corporate language may benefit from condoning
multilingual practices on the work floor.
This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifyi... more This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifying irony in natural discourse. The first section discusses previous operationalizations of irony and demonstrates that these are not explicit about which criteria were used to separate irony from non-irony. The second section argues why irony can be defined as an "utterance with a literal eval-
The alternative typologies of visual metaphors proposed by and show some striking similarities wi... more The alternative typologies of visual metaphors proposed by and show some striking similarities with regard to disposition of the visual elements, that is, the source and target domains. The first part of this chapter summarizes the results of two experiments that tested the validity of these classifications with Spanish, French, and Dutch participants and proposes an overall image of the appreciation of the three visual metaphor types. The second part focuses on the interpretations of the metaphors by the Spanish, French, and Dutch participants in the second experiment, to verify whether culture influences the interpretation of the common ground in visual metaphor. We detected subtle cultural differences in focus and interpretive diversity.
English serves as a lingua franca in situations with varying degrees of formality. How formality ... more English serves as a lingua franca in situations with varying degrees of formality. How formality affects non-native speech has rarely been studied. We investigated register variation by Spanish users of English by comparing formal and informal speech from the Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English that we created. This corpus comprises speech from 34 Spanish speakers of English in interaction with Dutch confederates in two speech situations. Formality affected the amount of laughter and overlapping speech and the number of Spanish words. Moreover, formal speech had a more informational character than informal speech. We discuss how our findings relate to register variation in Spanish.