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Article published In: Issues in Humour Cognition
Edited by Marta Dynel
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 16:1] 2018
► pp. 19–47

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Special issue articles

Strongly attenuating highly positive concepts

The case of default sarcastic interpretations

 | Tel Aviv University
 | Tel Aviv University
 | Tel Aviv University
 | The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00002.gio
Abstract
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, R., Howman, H., Ralph-Nearman, C., & Giora, R. (in press). The role of defaultness in sarcasm interpretation: Evidence from eye-tracking. Metaphor and Symbol.; Giora, R., Fein, O., Ganzi, J., Levi, N. A., & Sabah, H. (2005). On negation as mitigation: The case of negative irony. Discourse Processes, 39(1), 81–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Giora, R., Livnat, E., Fein, O., Barnea, A., Zeiman, R., & Berger, I. (2013). Negation generates nonliteral interpretations by default. Metaphor and Symbol, 281, 89–115. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Giora, R., Drucker, A., Fein, O., & Mendelson, I. (2015a). Default sarcastic interpretations: On the priority of nonsalient interpretations. Discourse Processes, 52(3), 173–200. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Giora, R., Givoni, S., & Fein, O. (2015b). Defaultness reigns: The case of sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 30(4), 290–313. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Giora, R., Jaffe I., & Fein, O. (in progress a). Default sarcastic interpretations: The case of rhetorical questions.) 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.
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What does it take to be interpreted by default?
  • 3.What does it take to be interpreted sarcastically by default?
  • 4.Is it structural markedness that generates sarcastic interpretations by default?
  • 5.Is it really an attenuated highly positive concept that generates sarcasm by default?
  • 6.Will default negative interpretations prevail over nondefault affirmative counterparts?
  • 7.Whence pleasure: The case of Affirmative Sarcasm
    • 7.1Whence pleasure: The case of affirmative sarcasm in linguistic context
    • 7.2Whence pleasure: Will nonlinguistic contexts make a difference?
  • 8.Non-negative mitigation: The case of rhetorical questions
  • 9.Strongly attenuating highly positive concepts affects sarcastic interpretations by default: A corpus-based perspective
    • 9.1Strongly attenuating highly positive concepts: A corpus-based perspective
    • 9.2Resonating with default interpretations: A corpus-based perspective
    • 9.3Strengthening attenuation of highly positive concepts: A corpus-based perspective
  • 10.When strongly attenuating a highly positive concept is not enough: The case of doubly-hedged similes
  • 11.General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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