Contrast and pragmatics in figurative language: Anything understatement can do, irony can do better

Abstract

Verbal irony (e.g., ‘Oh fantastic, there is no queue at all’) and understatement (e.g., “There seems to be a bit of a queue”) perform similar pragmatic functions because they both make use of a potential contrast between expected and experienced events. Since verbal irony and understatement both refer to the expected event (e.g., no queue or a relatively short queue at a theater), they create a contrast with the experienced event (e.g., a long queue at the theater). This makes verbal irony and understatement generally funnier, more criticizing, more expressive of a difference between expected and ensuing events and more protective of the speaker than literal remarks (e.g., ‘This queue is very long’). Verbal irony, however, creates a stronger contrast effect than understatement. This makes verbal irony perform the first three of these functions to a greater extent than understatement and it makes understatement perform the latter function to a greater extent than verbal irony. These results are used to argue that theories of figurative language comprehension need to better account for contrast and similar kinds of effects caused by the language structures used by speakers.