Are There Necessary Conditions for Inducing a Sense of Sarcastic Irony?

Abstract

This article investigates the contextual components utilized to convey sarcastic verbal irony, testing whether theoretical components deemed as necessary for creating a sense of irony are, in fact, necessary. A novel task was employed: Given a set of statements that out of context were not rated as sarcastic, participants were instructed to either generate discourse context that would make the statements sarcastic or meaningful (without further specification). In a series of studies, these generated contexts were shown to differ from one another along the dimensions presumed as necessary (failed expectation, pragmatic insincerity, negative tension, and presence of a victim) and along stylistic components (as indexed by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program). However, none of these components were found to be necessary. Indeed, in each case, the items rated as highest in sarcasm were often at the lowest levels on the putative “necessary” characteristic. These data are taken as consistent with constraint satisfaction models of sarcasm processing in which various linguistic and extralinguistic information provide probabilistic (but not necessary) support for or against a sarcastic interpretation.