Cover not available
Part of
Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language: In memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926-2015)
Edited by Paul Simpson
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 34] 2019
► pp. 171–192

Chapter 10
“Americans don’t do Irony”

Cross-cultural perspectives on the pragmatics of irony

| Liverpool University
This chapter probes the common (and perhaps controversial) perception of many in the UK and Ireland that people from North America “don’t do” irony. Stimulated by the type of discussion found in Nash’s The Language of Humour (1985), the author interrogates this folk belief by developing a quantitative methodology to capture the ways in which ironic situations are interpreted by people from diverse national backgrounds. This methodology comprises an anonymous online experiment which gathers reactions to six narrative scenarios from over 300 informants world-wide. Each informant is required to provide a one-word response to each scenario after which they may offer an optional, longer free-text commentary on the same story. In the course of the chapter, the author advances a theoretical model of situational irony, while the results elicited from the survey shed some light on what people from different parts of the world understand as an ironic situation.
Keywords: ‘folk’ linguistics, humorous language, ironic situations, irony, non-ironic situations, quantification, situational irony
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology: “Six Little Stories in Need of a Response”
  • 3.Results and discussion
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.34.12sim
References (37)
References
Attardo, S. 2000. Irony as relevant inappropriateness. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 793–826. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015. Humorous Metaphors. In Cognitive Linguistics and Humor Research, G. Brône, K. Feyaerts & T. Veale (eds), 91–110. Berlin / Boston: Walter de Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barbe, K. 1993. Isn’t it ironic that …?: Explicit irony markers. Journal of Pragmatics 20: 578–590. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L. & Trudgill, P. 1998. Language Myths. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Benwell, B. 2004. Ironic discourse and masculinity. Men and Masculinities 7(1): 3–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. & Gerrig, R. 1984. On the pretense theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113: 121–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Daily Mail. 2011. [URL] (2 March 2018).
Dynel, M. 2014. Isn’t it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony. HUMOR 27(4): 619–639. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Egidi, G. & Gerrig, R. 2006. Readers’ experiences of characters’ goals and actions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 32(6): 1322–1329.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. Jr., O’Brien, J. & Doolittle, S. 1995. Inferring meanings that are not intended: Speakers’ intentions and irony comprehension. Discourse Processes 20: 187–203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. Jr., & H. Colston (eds). 2007. Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giora, R. 1995. On irony and negation. Discourse Processes 19: 239–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, E. 1986. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience Boston: Northeastern University Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [Second edition.] London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiesson, C. M. I. M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar [Third edition.] London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Huitema J. S., Dopkins, S., Klin, C. M. & Myers, J. L. 1993. Connecting goals and action during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19: 1053–1060.Google Scholar
Jeffries, L. 2010. Opposition in Discourse: The Construction of Oppositional Meaning London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Kapogianni, E. 2011. Irony via “Surrealism”. In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, M. Dynel (ed.), 51–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016. The ironic operation: Revisiting the components of ironic meaning. Journal of Pragmatics 91: 16–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kelsey, D. and Bennett, L. (2014) Discipline and resistance on social media: discourse, power and context in the Paul Chambers “Twitter Joke Trial”. Discourse, Context and Media 3: 37-45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Metro 2013. [URL] (2 March 2018)
Minsky, M. 1975. A framework for representing knowledge. In The Psychology of Computer Vision, P. H. Winston (ed.) 211–278. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Nash, W. 1980. Designs in Prose. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar
1985. The Language of Humour. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Partington, A. 2007. Irony and reversal of evaluation. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1547–1569. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poyner, D. V. & Morris, R. K. 2003. Inferred goals in narratives: Evidence from self-paced reading, recall, and eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 29: 3–9.Google Scholar
Rapp D. N. & Gerrig, R. 2006. Predilections for narrative outcomes: The impact of story contexts and reader preferences. Journal of Memory and Language 54(1): 54–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schank, R. 1982. Dynamic Memory. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Shelley, C. 2001. The bicoherence theory of situational irony. Cognitive Science 25: 775–818. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shen, D. 2009. Non-ironic turning ironic contextually: Multiple context-determined irony in “The Story of an Hour”. Journal of Literary Semantics 38: 115–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson, P. 2011. “That’s not ironic, that’s just stupid”: Towards an eclectic model of the discourse of irony. In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, M. Dynel (ed.), 33–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson, P., Mayr, A. & Statham, S. 2019. Language and Power 2nd edn London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1981. Irony and the use-mention distinction. In Radical Pragmatics, P. Cole (ed.), 295–318. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Utsumi, A. 2000. Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1777–1806. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 1992. On Verbal Irony. Lingua 87: 53–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Du, Yiran
2024. The Impact of Emojis on Verbal Irony Comprehension in Computer-Mediated Communication: A Cross-Cultural Study. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Kuczmierowska, Julia, Duygu Kandemirci-Bayız, Büşra Akdeniz, Yasemin Abayhan, Maria Zajączkowska, Melanie Glenwright, Penny M. Pexman & Natalia Banasik-Jemielniak
2024. Examining the Structure of the Sarcasm Self-Report Scale Cross-Culturally: Evidence from Canada, Poland, and Türkiye. In Studying Verbal Irony and Sarcasm, ► pp. 303 ff. DOI logo
Statham, Simon
2020. The year’s work in stylistics 2019. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 29:4 ► pp. 454 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 june 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.