Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought
- Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology
- The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Part I Introduction
- Part II The Scope of Irony
- Part III Irony’s Impact
- Part IV Irony in Linguistic Communication
- 8 Constructions in Verbal Irony Production: The Case of Rhetorical Questions
- 9 Tracking the Ironical Eye: Eye Tracking Studies on Irony and Sarcasm
- 10 Inferring Irony Online
- 11 Irony and Thought: Developmental Insights
- 12 Vocal Strategies in Verbal Irony
- 13 Great Expectations and EPIC Fails: A Computational Perspective on Irony and Sarcasm
- Part V Irony, Affect, and Related Figures
- Part VI Irony in Expressive, Nonlinguistic Media
- Index
- References
12 - Vocal Strategies in Verbal Irony
from Part IV - Irony in Linguistic Communication
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2023
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought
- Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology
- The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Part I Introduction
- Part II The Scope of Irony
- Part III Irony’s Impact
- Part IV Irony in Linguistic Communication
- 8 Constructions in Verbal Irony Production: The Case of Rhetorical Questions
- 9 Tracking the Ironical Eye: Eye Tracking Studies on Irony and Sarcasm
- 10 Inferring Irony Online
- 11 Irony and Thought: Developmental Insights
- 12 Vocal Strategies in Verbal Irony
- 13 Great Expectations and EPIC Fails: A Computational Perspective on Irony and Sarcasm
- Part V Irony, Affect, and Related Figures
- Part VI Irony in Expressive, Nonlinguistic Media
- Index
- References
Summary
The sound of people’s voices when speaking to others is sometimes a clue to their possible ironic intent. This chapter presents an overview of some of the specific vocal strategies employed when people express ironic meaning. Speakers signal their ironic intentions through local and global features of prosody, along with vocal impressions (e.g., spectral information that depicts a different person or imagined agent), laughter, and other nonverbal vocalizations. Experimental studies demonstrated that these vocal strategies are key indices for listeners when they infer that speakers convey irony, including sarcasm, through their talk. Bryant describes the evolutionary roots of these different vocalizations (e.g., the desire for play) and argues how vocal strategies are an important element in how people coordinate and cooperate during verbal interaction. He emphasizes that different vocal strategies are not fixed, but vary in different situations to create a wide range of contextually appropriate pragmatic messages that others may readily interpret.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought , pp. 197 - 215Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023
References
Aguert, M. (2022). Paraverbal expression of verbal irony: Vocal cues matter and facial cues even more. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 46(1), 45–70.Google Scholar
Anikin, A., Bååth, R., & Persson, T. (2018). Human nonlinguistic vocal repertoire: Call types and their meaning. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 42(1), 53–80.Google Scholar
Anolli, L., Ciceri, R., & Infantino, M. G. (2002). From “blame by praise” to “praise by blame”: Analysis of vocal patterns in ironic communication. International Journal of Psychology, 37(5), 266–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Attardo, S., Eisterhold, J., Hay, J., & Poggi, I. (2003). Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 16, 243–260.Google Scholar
Bryant, G. A. (2010). Prosodic contrasts in ironic speech. Discourse Processes, 47(7), 545–566.Google Scholar
Bryant, G. A. (2011). Verbal irony in the wild. Pragmatics and Cognition, 19(2), 291–309.Google Scholar
Bryant, G. A. (2012). Is verbal irony special? Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(11), 673–685.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryant, G. A. (2013). Animal signals and emotion in music: Coordinating affect across groups. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 990.Google Scholar
Bryant, G. A. (2020). Evolution, structure, and functions of human laughter. In Floyd, K. & Weber, R. (Eds.), Handbook of communication science and biology (pp. 63–77). Routledge.Google Scholar
Bryant, G. A. (2021). The evolution of human vocal emotion. Emotion Review, 13(1), 25–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryant, G. A., & Barrett, H. C. (2007). Recognizing intentions in infant-directed speech: Evidence for universals. Psychological Science, 18(8), 746–751.Google Scholar
Bryant, G. A., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Recognizing verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Metaphor and Symbol, 17(2), 99–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryant, G. A., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2005). Is there an ironic tone of voice? Language and Speech, 48(3), 257–277.Google Scholar
Burgers, C., van Mulken, M., and Schellens, P. J. (2011). Finding irony: An introduction of the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP). Metaphor and Symbol, 26(3), 186–205.Google Scholar
Cheang, H. S., & Pell, M. D. (2008). The sound of sarcasm. Speech Communication, 50(5), 366–381.Google Scholar
Cheang, H. S., & Pell, M. D. (2009). Acoustic markers of sarcasm in Cantonese and English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126(3), 1394–1405.Google Scholar
Chen, A., & Boves, L. (2018). What’s in a word: Sounding sarcastic in British English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 48(1), 57–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H., & Gerrig, R. J. (1984). On the pretense theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113(1), 121–126.Google Scholar
Cole, J. (2015). Prosody in context: A review. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(1–2), 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colston, H. L. (1997). Salting a wound or sugaring a pill: The pragmatic functions of ironic criticism. Discourse Processes, 23(1), 25–45.Google Scholar
Colston, H. L. (2000). On necessary conditions for verbal irony comprehension. Pragmatics & Cognition, 8(2), 277–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cowen, A. S., Laukka, P., Elfenbein, H. A., Liu, R., & Keltner, D. (2019). The primacy of categories in the recognition of 12 emotions in speech prosody across two cultures. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(4), 369–382.Google Scholar
Cutler, A. (1974). On saying what you mean without meaning what you say. In Lagaly, M., Fox, R., & Bruck, A. (Eds.), Papers from the tenth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (pp. 117–127). Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Dews, S., & Winner, E. (1995). Muting the meaning: A social function of irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 10(1), 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eady, S. J., & Cooper, W. E. (1986). Speech intonation and focus location in matched statements and questions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 80(2), 402–415.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eisterhold, J., Attardo, S., & Boxer, D. (2006). Reactions to irony in discourse: Evidence for the least disruption principle. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(8), 1239–1256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A. (1992). Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 391–428). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Féry, C. (2013). Focus as prosodic alignment. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 31(3), 683–734.Google Scholar
Fish, K., Rothermich, K., & Pell, M. D. (2017). The sound of (in)sincerity. Journal of Pragmatics, 121, 147–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fujisaki, H. (1983). Dynamic characteristics of voice fundamental frequency in speech and singing. In MacNeilage, P. (Ed.), The production of speech (pp. 39–55). Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gibbs, R. W. (2000). Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol, 15(1–2), 5–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, R. W., Bryant, G. A., & Colston, H. L. (2014). Where is the humor in verbal irony? Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 27(4), 575–595.Google Scholar
González-Fuente, S., Prieto, P., & Noveck, I. (2016). A fine-grained analysis of the acoustic cues involved in verbal irony recognition in French. Speech Prosody, 2016, 902–906.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, N. D., & Frank, M. C. (2016). Pragmatic language interpretation as probabilistic inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(11), 818–829.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (Eds.), Syntax and semantics. Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). Academic Press.Google Scholar
Heintz, C., Blancke, S., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2019). Methods for studying cultural attraction. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 28(1), 18–20.Google Scholar
Jun, S. (2019). (Ed.). Prosodic typology II: The phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
Kotthoff, H. (2003). Responding to irony in different contexts: On cognition in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(9), 1387–1411.Google Scholar
Kreuz, R. J., & Roberts, R. M. (1995). Two cues for verbal irony: Hyperbole and the ironic tone of voice. Metaphor and Symbol, 10(1), 21–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lucariello, J. (1994). Situational irony: A concept of events gone awry. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123(2), 129.Google Scholar
Mazzocconi, C., Tian, Y., & Ginzburg, J. (2020). What’s your laughter doing there? A taxonomy of the pragmatic function of laughter. IEEE Trans. Affective Computing, 1–19.Google Scholar
McRoberts, G. W., Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Shankweiler, D. P. (1995). The role of fundamental frequency in signaling linguistic stress and affect: Evidence for a dissociation. Perception & Psychophysics, 57(2), 159–174.Google Scholar
Owren, M. J., & Rendall, D. (2001). Sound on the rebound: Bringing form and function back to the forefront in understanding nonhuman primate vocal signaling. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews: Issues, News, and Reviews, 10(2), 58–71.Google Scholar
Pell, M. D. (2001). Influence of emotion and focus location on prosody in matched statements and questions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109(4), 1668–1680.Google Scholar
Pell, M. D., Monetta, L., Paulmann, S., & Kotz, S. A. (2009). Recognizing emotions in a foreign language. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33(2), 107–120.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A., & Lee, J. J. (2008). The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 833–838.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pisanski, K., & Bryant, G. A. (2019). The evolution of voice perception. In Eidsheim, N. S. &Meizel, K. L. (Eds.), Oxford handbook of voice studies (pp. 269–300). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pisanski, K., Bryant, G. A., Cornec, C., Anikin, A., & Reby, D. (2022). Form follows function in human nonverbal vocalisations. Ethology Ecology & Evolution, 34(3), 303–321.Google Scholar
Rockwell, P. (2000). Lower, slower, louder: Vocal cues of sarcasm. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(5), 483–495.Google Scholar
Scott-Phillips, T. (2014). Speaking our minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special. Macmillan International Higher Education.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1984). Verbal irony: Pretense or echoic mention? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 130–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1981). Irony and the use-mention distinction. In Cole, P. (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 295–318). Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed.). Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trivers, R. (2000). The elements of a scientific theory of self-deception. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 907(1), 114–131.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, D., & Wharton, T. (2006). Relevance and prosody. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(10), 1559–1579.Google Scholar
Winkler, S. L., & Bryant, G. A. (2021). Play vocalisations and human laughter: A comparative review. Bioacoustics, 30(5), 499–526.Google Scholar