Responding to irony in different contexts: on cognition in conversation

Abstract

Abstract My article deals with responses to irony in two different contexts. As an interaction analyst, I am interested in what interlocutors do with the ironic in the co-construction of the ongoing conversational sequence. Many reactions to an ironic act reveal that, in irony, a gap in evaluative perspective is communicated as the most central information. The said represents a perspective which is combined with a counter-perspective—the intended. Listeners can in principle react to both perspectives. Reacting to the said continues the play with clashing perspectives and confirms the gap. I combine data analytic methods from interactional sociolinguistics with questions from cognition theory. I shall point out how an interaction analysis of different responses to an ironic act contributes to the development of irony theory. A look at two data sets (informal dinner conversations among friends, and pro and con TV debates) provides interesting differences in responses to irony. From the format of the responses, we can often (though not always) access the processing of irony. If there are responses to the literal meaning, this does not necessarily indicate that the listener was not able to bridge the ironic gap (as former theories of irony have suggested), but most often that both the implicated and the literal message are processed. The data confirm that there are definitely different types of responses to irony: from responses to the literal level of the ironic act, to the implicated, mixed, or ambiguous reactions, to just laughter. The data further confirm that the different types of responses to irony create different activity types. Responses to the literally said (the dictum) develop a humorous discourse type of joint teasing; they cultivate the clash of perspectives and are frequent in dinner table conversations among friends. In the context of pro and con debates, responses within the group differ in accordance with the line of arguing. Here, responses to the implicatum are more frequent; they recontextualize the serious debate.