How salient are sarcastic questions (original) (raw)

Abstract

Français English Cet article explore le lien entre la saillance et le sarcasme en se concentrant sur trois constructions interrogatives qui peuvent véhiculer à la fois des significations sarcastiques et littérales-les questions WH suivies d'une auto-réponse, les questions alternatives et les questions polaires disjonctives. Une recherche de corpus à grande échelle a été menée sur trois corpus distincts d'anglais américain afin de déterminer comment ces constructions interrogatives utilisent la saillance pour encoder le sarcasme, et comment la saillance contribue à la préférence de leur sens sarcastique par rapport au sens littéral. Tout d'abord, nous examinerons la saillance du sarcasme en comparant la distribution des questions sarcastiques entre un corpus télévisé parlé et non scénarisé (COCA), un corpus téléphonique parlé (Switchboard) et un corpus web écrit (NLDS). L'objectif principal de cette comparaison était d'explorer si le sarcasme est significativement plus saillant dans un corpus que dans les autres. Les résultats montrent qu'il y a significativement plus de questions sarcastiques dans le corpus web écrit que dans les corpus parlés non scriptés, ce qui suggère que le sarcasme est significativement plus saillant dans ce corpus que dans les autres. Nous attribuons ces résultats à la saillance situationnelle et émotionnelle provenant des arènes discursives distinctes. Deuxièmement, nous examinerons la distribution des différents types de questions pour voir si le sens sarcastique est significativement plus saillant dans l'une des trois constructions interrogatives que dans les autres. Les résultats montrent que les questions WH suivies d'une auto-réponse sont la construction la plus sarcastique des trois examinées, et que son sens sarcastique est plus saillant que celui des questions alternatives et des questions polaires disjonctives. Nous attribuons ces résultats à des propriétés syntaxiques intrinsèques et à la notion de prévisibilité et l'inattendu. Nous concluons l'article par des réflexions sur les travaux futurs nécessaires pour approfondir notre compréhension des questions sarcastiques saillantes. This article explores the connection between salience and sarcasm through focusing on three interrogative constructions that can convey both sarcastic and literal meanings-WH-questions followed by a self-answer, alternative questions, and disjunctive polar questions. A large-scale corpus research was conducted throughout three distinct corpora of American-English to determine how these interrogative constructions use salience to encode sarcasm, and how salience contributes to the preference of their sarcastic meaning over the literal one. Firstly, we examine the salience of sarcasm by comparing the distribution of sarcastic questions between a spoken, non-scripted TV-corpus (COCA), a spoken telephone-corpus (Switchboard), and a written web-corpus (NLDS). The main goal of this comparison was to explore if sarcasm is SEARCH All OpenEdition 11/19/24, 4:39 PM How salient are sarcastic questions?

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  1. Sarcasm is significantly more salient in written web discourse than in spoken corpora, with 40.19% sarcastic questions in NLDS.
  2. WH-questions followed by a self-answer (SIs) exhibit the highest sarcasm salience, surpassing alternative and disjunctive questions.
  3. A large-scale analysis of 6,202 utterances revealed 1,188 relevant sarcastic questions across three corpora.
  4. The study identifies that situational context and discursive environments influence the salience of sarcasm in language.
  5. The research addresses gaps in understanding the interplay between salience and sarcasm in interrogative constructions.

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