How salient are sarcastic questions (original) (raw)
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Lexical influences on the perception of sarcasm
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Figurative Language - FigLanguages '07, 2007
Speakers and listeners make use of a variety of pragmatic factors to produce and identify sarcastic statements. It is also possible that lexical factors play a role, although this possibility has not been investigated previously. College students were asked to read excerpts from published works that originally contained the phrase said sarcastically, although the word sarcastically was deleted. The participants rated the characters' statements in these excerpts as more likely to be sarcastic than those from similar excerpts that did not originally contain the word sarcastically. The use of interjections, such as gee or gosh, predicted a significant amount of the variance in the participants' ratings of sarcastic intent. This outcome suggests that sarcastic statements may be more formulaic than previously realized. It also suggests that computer software could be written to recognize such lexical factors, greatly increasing the likelihood that nonliteral intent could be correctly interpreted by such programs, even if they are unable to identify the pragmatic components of nonliteral language.
The case of default sarcastic interpretations
2018
What are the constraints rendering stimuli, such as Alert he is not; He is not the most organized person around; Hospitality is not his best attribute; Do you really believe you are sophisticated? sarcastic by default? Recent findings (Filik, Howman, Ralph-Nearman, & Giora, in press; Giora et al., 2005, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, in progress a) suggest that strongly attenuating a highly positive concept, e.g., alert, sophisticated, most organized, best attribute (associated here with hospitality), induces sarcastic interpretations by default. To be interpreted sarcastically by default, items should be construable as such in the absence of factors inviting sarcasm. 1 They should, thus, be (i) novel, noncoded in the mental lexicon, (ii) potentially ambiguous between literal and nonliteral interpretations, so that a preference is allowed, and (iii) free of specific and biasing contextual information. Online and offline studies, collecting self-paced reading times, eye-tracking data during reading, sarcasm rating, and pleasure ratings, alongside corpus-based studies, further support this view. 2
Default Sarcastic Interpretations: On the Priority of Nonsalient Interpretations
Discourse Processes, 2014
Findings from five experiments support the view that negation generates sarcastic utterance-interpretations by default. 1 When presented in isolation, novel negative constructions ("Punctuality is not his forte," "Thoroughness is not her most distinctive feature"), free of semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, were interpreted sarcastically and rated as sarcastic compared to their novel affirmative counterparts (Experiments 1 and 3). In strongly supportive contexts, they were processed faster when biased toward their noncoded (nonsalient) sarcastic interpretation than toward their noncoded but (salience-based) literal interpretation (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiment 5 reduces the possibility that it is structural markedness rather than negation that prompts nonliteralness. Such findings, attesting to the priority of sarcastic interpretations, are unaccountable by any contemporary processing model, including the Graded Salience Hypothesis.
The functions of sarcastic irony in speech
Journal of Pragmatics, 1996
Brown and theory of politeness, while partly supported by empirical studies, may not accommodate a number of relevant social and psychological variables. Accordingly, suggests investigating the 'forms and meanings of politeness' in a variety of discourse and social contexts. Since Brown and Levinson contend that irony may be used for face-saving, and Sperber and Wilson (1981) explain why irony is especially suitable for remarking on the failure of an expectation, the face-saving function of sarcastic irony in American discourse is the focus of this paper.
On the uses of sarcastic irony
Journal of Pragmatics, 2000
The studies reported here contrasted the effects of making a criticism directly with that of making it indirectly (via sarcasm). These effects were examined either when the focus was on the person who uttered the criticism (Study 1) or when the focus was on the person to whom the barb is directed (Study 2). Moreover, we studied the beliefs associated with sarcastic uses from four different points-of-view: from that of the speaker, from that of the target of the criticism, from that of an incidental overhearer and from a control no-perspective orientation. The main task involved reading a set of passages in which one of the characters criticized another either directly or via sarcasm. Participants completed a questionnaire for each passage about why the criticism was made. A set of reasons discriminated sarcastic from direct criticism, with twice as many discriminating reasons being observed when one considers what is in the mind of the person making the sarcastic comment (Study 1) relative to what is in the mind of the person who receives it (Study 2). Factor analyses indicated that many of the seemingly separate reasons reflect a common basis, primarily verbal aggression, though separate factors indicated that verbal aggression made via sarcasm differs in some ways from that when made directly. Finally, there were some differences found in point-of-view, indicating that the effect the speaker believes his criticism has sometimes differs from the effect as seen by the victim.
Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog
Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have received little attention to date. We expand a small dataset from previous work, presenting a corpus of 10,270 RQs from debate forums and Twitter that represent different discourse functions. We show that we can clearly distinguish between RQs and sincere questions (0.76 F1). We then show that RQs can be used both sarcastically and non-sarcastically, observing that non-sarcastic (other) uses of RQs are frequently argumentative in forums, and persuasive in tweets. We present experiments to distinguish between these uses of RQs using SVM and LSTM models that represent linguistic features and post-level context , achieving results as high as 0.76 F1 for SARCASTIC and 0.77 F1 for OTHER in forums, and 0.83 F1 for both SARCASTIC and OTHER in tweets. We supplement our quantitative experiments with an in-depth characterization of the linguistic variation in RQs.
An Eye-Tracking Investigation of Written Sarcasm Comprehension: The Roles of Familiarity and Context
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2016
This article addresses a current theoretical debate between the standard pragmatic model, the graded salience hypothesis, and the implicit display theory, by investigating the roles of the context and of the properties of the sarcastic utterance itself in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted where we manipulated the speaker’s expectation in the context and the familiarity of the sarcastic remark. The results of the first eye-tracking study showed that literal comments were read faster than unfamiliar sarcastic comments, regardless of whether an explicit expectation was present in the context. The results of the second eye-tracking study indicated an early processing difficulty for unfamiliar sarcastic comments, but not for familiar sarcastic comments. Later reading time measures indicated a general difficulty for sarcastic comments. Overall, results seem to suggest that the familiarity of the utterance does indeed affect the time course of sarcasm processing (supporting the graded salience hypothesis), although there is no evidence that making the speaker’s expectation explicit in the context affects it as well (thus failing to support the implicit display theory).
Educational College Journal, 2021
There is no doubt that "Impoliteness theory" has been given much attention by many linguists, and recently there has been an increasing amount of literature in this field. Culpeper is a pioneer linguist who extensively investigates the concept of impoliteness, in his impoliteness theory; he relies on Brown and Levinson"s Politeness Theory, in accordance with Goffman"s concept of face. Culpeper has referred to a number of impoliteness superstrategies. The present study is on "sarcasm" super strategy. Sarcasm was not given much attention by linguists. It was imbedded under different labels, it was merged within Brown and Levinson"s off-record politeness. This study aims to review " Impoliteness Theory" with reference to Brown and Levinson"s conception of "face". Besides, it investigates the concept of sarcasm as one of impoliteness superstrategies. The study also refers to some concepts that are used interchangeably with sarcasm, but differs in certain points. The study adopts Jonathan Culpeper"s theory of impoliteness, for its importance in distinguishing sarcasm as being an independent superstrategy and not imbedded within another label. The data for analyses are chosen from different modern short stories. The pragmatic analyses of the data shows that sarcasm intersects with certain labels but at the same time has its own features that make it differs from these labels. Moreover, sheds the light on a number of elements that assist in raising any sarcastic utterance.