Chapter 10
The Rolling Stones promoting Monty Python
The power of irony and banter
Based on , this chapter offers a fine-grained analysis of how irony and are likely to be processed by viewers watching a but also highlights the pragmatic functions of such an indirect strategy. It dissects a 1:40 tongue-in-cheek video which served as an introduction to the 2014
Live (Mostly) press conference. It features Mick Jagger accusing the coming troupe of being “wrinkly old men trying to relive their youth”, using irony and as powerful means of promotion. Bringing together different theoretical frameworks of irony that are usually described as competing, this chapter highlights how are twisted in the “” of the video through the use of (mock) , generating pragmatic paradoxes.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.
in the Text World
- 2.1Twisted
- 2.2Incongruous subject positions
- 3.Processing irony and
- 4.The pragmatic functions of irony
- 4.1
- 4.2Two birds (at least) with one stone
- 5.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
References
Attardo, Salvatore
2000 Irony as relevant inappropriateness.
Journal of Pragmatics 32: 793–826.
Barbe, Katharina
1993 Isn’t it ironic that…? Explicit irony markers.
Journal of Pragmatics 20: 578–590.
Barbe, Katharina
1995 Irony in Context [
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 34]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bednarek, M.
2012 The Language of Fictional Television. Drama and Identity. London: Continuum.
Black, Elizabeth
2006 Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: EUP.
Booth, Wayne
1974 A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago IL: Chicago University Press.
Clark, Herbert & Gerrig, Richard
1984 On the pretense theory of irony.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(1): 121–126.
Culpeper, Jonathan
2011 Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offense. Cambridge: CUP.
Culpeper, Jonathan & Haugh, Michael
2014 Pragmatics and the English Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dews, Shelly, Kaplan, Joan & Winner, Ellen
2007 Why not say it directly? The social functions of irony. In
Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader,
Raymond W. Gibbs &
Herbert L. Colston (eds), 297–317. New York NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Dynel, Marta
2009 Beyond a joke: Types of conversational humour.
Language and Linguistics Compass 3(5): 1284–1299.
Dynel, Marta
2011 “You talking to me?” The viewer as a ratified listener to film discourse.
Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1628–1644.
Dynel, Marta
2014 Isn’t it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony.
Humor. International Journal of Humor Research 27(4): 619–639.
Gavins, Joanna
2007 Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: EUP.
Gavins, Joanna & Lahey, Ernestine
2016 World building in discourse. In
World Building. Discourse in the Mind,
Joanna Gavins &
Ernestine Lahey (eds), 1–13. London: Bloomsbury.
Gibbs, Raymond W.
1994 The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language and Understanding. Cambridge: CUP.
Gibbs, Raymond W
2002 A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated.
Journal of Pragmatics 34: 457–486.
Gibbs, Raymond W., O’Brien, Jennifer & Doolittle, Shelley
1995 Inferring meanings that are not intended: Speakers’ intentions and irony comprehension.
Discourse Processes 20: 187–203.
Giora, Rachel
1995 On irony and negation.
Discourse Processes 19: 239–264.
Giora, Rachel
1997 Discourse coherence and the theory of relevance: Stumbling blocks in search of a unified theory.
Journal of Pragmatics 27: 17–34.
Giora, Rachel
2003 On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. Oxford: OUP.
Giora, Rachel & Fein, Ofer
1999 On understanding familiar and less familiar figurative language.
Journal of Pragmatics 31: 1601–1618.
Giora, Rachel, Fein, Ofer, Laadan, Dafna, Wolfson, Jon, Zeituny, Michal, Kidrons, Ran, Kaufman, Ronnie & Shaham, Ronit
2007 Expecting irony: Context vs. salience-based effects.
Metaphor and Symbol 22(2): 119–146.
Goffman, Erving
1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Grice, Herbert Paul
1975 Logic and conversation. In
Syntax and Semantics, Vol. III: Speech Acts,
Peter Cole &
Jerry L. Morgan (eds), 41–58. New York NY: Academic Press.
Grice, Herbert Paul
1991 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Holmes, Janet
2000 Politeness, power and provocation: How humour functions in the workplace.
Discourse Studies 2(2): 159–185.
House of Cards
.
2013-2015 Seasons 1-3. Network: Netflix. Writers: Beau Willimon, Michael Dobbs, Andrew Davies (among others). Directors: Robin Wright, David Fincher, James Foley, Joel Schumacher, Charles McDougall.
Hutcheon, Linda
1994 Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge.
Johnson, Kim “Howard”
1999 The First 280 Years of the Monty Python. New York NY: Thomas Dunne Books.
Kumon-Nakamura, Sachi, Glucksberg, Sam & Brown, Mary
2007 How about another piece of pie: The Allusional Pretense Theory of Discourse Irony. In
Irony in Language and Thought. A Cognitive Science Reader,
Raymond W. Gibbs &
Herbert L. Colston (eds), 57–95. New York NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Leech, Geoffrey
1977 Language and Tact [
Series A, Paper No. 46]. Trier: Linguistic Agency University of Trier. (Reprinted with revisions in Leech, Geoffrey. 1980.
Exploration in Semantics and Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond I:5], 79-117. Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
Leech, Geoffrey
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Leech, Geoffrey
2014 The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: OUP.
Lugea, Jane
2013 Embedded dialogue and dreams: The worlds and accessibility relations of Inception
.
Language and Literature 22(2): 133–153.
Marszalek, Agnes
2016 The humorous worlds of film comedy. In
World Building. Discourse in the Mind,
Joanna Gavins &
Ernestine Lahey (eds), 203–219. London: Bloomsbury.
Morini, Massimiliano
2016 Irony in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby: Rhetoric, pragmatics, voice and point of view. In
The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics,
Violeta Sotirova (ed.), 553–566. London: Bloomsbury.
Muecke, Douglas Colin
1969 The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen.
Norrick, Neal R.
1993 Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
O’Keeffe, Anne
2006 Investigating Media Discourse. London: Routledge.
Partington, Alan
2007 Irony and reversal of evaluation.
Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1547–1569.
Peleg, Orna, Giora, Rachel & Fein, Ofer
2008 Resisting contextual information: You can’t put a salient meaning down.
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4: 13–44.
Schegloff, Emanuel Abraham
1982 Discourse as interactional achievement: Some uses of ‘uh huh’ and other things that come between sentences. In
Analyzing Discourse. Text and Talk,
Deborah Tannen (ed.), 71–93. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Shelley, Cameron
2001 The bicoherence theory of situational irony.
Cognitive Science 25: 775–818.
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre, Wilson
1981 Irony and the use-mention distinction. In
Radical Pragmatics,
Peter Cole (ed.), 295–318. New York NY: Academic Press.
Stockwell, Peter
2002 Cognitive Poetics, An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Utsumi, Akira
2000 Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony.
Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1777–1806.
Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan
1992 On verbal irony.
Lingua 87: 53–76.
Wilson, Deirdre
2006 The pragmatics of verbal irony: Echo or pretence? Lingua 116: 1722–1743.
Werth, Paul
1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Statham, Simon & Rocío Montoro
2019.
The year’s work in stylistics 2018.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28:4
► pp. 354 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.