Echoic Use Research Articles

Perceptual resemblance and the communication of emotion in digital contexts

AbstractOnline communication has created new ways to express emotions, including emoji and reaction GIFs. Emoji are often discussed as signs for meaning-making, adding emotional tone to communication. Reaction GIFs express emotions and attitudes in a playful manner. This study shows that through the lens of cognitive pragmatics, these phenomena are not distinct. Both are cases of non-verbal communication pointing to the communicator’s emotional state. Drawing on relevance-theoretic notions of theshowing-meaning continuumandperceptual resemblance, along with relevance-theoretic analyses of metaphor and irony, I argue that emoji and reaction GIFs provide clues to ostension and communicate emotions by virtue of perceptual resemblance between what they represent and the communicator’s emotional state. I will also argue that both emoji and GIFs can involve echoic use of language, enabling the communicator to convey their attitude.

Echo and Irony: Weapons in Political Campaigns

The theory of relevance presented by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson (1995) is a general theory of communication which has been developing over the past decades and apart from the theoretical developments it has been implemented as a tool for various analyses of discourse. The aim of the paper is to present a relevance theoretic account of a special kind of attributive use of campaign material which was employed by candidates in TV advertisements for the US presidential election campaign in 2012. Candidates use this special kind, echoic use, implementing it not only to criticise the opponent but also to justify their negative attitude towards the material mentioned. Echoic use proves to be a powerful tool not only to criticise and maintain credibility, but also allow irony which seems to be, along with discrediting the rival, the most powerful weapon at a politician's disposal.

Negacja jako operator dyskursywny

This paper is devoted to the discursive (metalinguistic) negation. Its functions (e.g. a rectification, emphasis, surprise), types (e.g. implicative, linguistic, prosodic) and properties (e.g. the ostensible inconsistency, pragmatic decoding, mention rather than use, no construction with the prefix ‘no’, no construction with negative pronouns) are discussed. Next, the possibility is considered that the discursive negation is only a special case of other types of negation, in particular contrastive or illocutionary negation. Then the question is raised whether in the case of the discursive negation we are dealing with a semantic or pragmatic phenomenon, as well as whether it is possible to include the discursive negation in the context of a conversational mechanism called ‘echoic use.’

When evaluation changes – An echoic account of appropriation and variability

In this paper I present a uniform account of two phenomena considered as independent so far: Appropriation of slurs and Variability of thick terms. My analysis relies on the notion of “echoic use” of language, proposed by Relevance Theory and employed by Bianchi (2014) to account for Appropriation. I argue that such echoic approach does not only explain Appropriation of slurs, as Bianchi claims, but it also accounts for Variability of thick terms. Moreover, I show how the relevance-theoretic distinction between merely attributive and echoic uses of language sheds light on the crucial distinction between the two often conflated phenomena of ‘suspension’ and ‘reversal’ of the evaluative content of slurs and thick terms. In addition to accounting for Appropriation and Variability, my proposal has the following theoretical outcome for the theory of thick terms: if variability cases are in fact derivative or parasitic uses of language, they do not challenge anymore the claim that the relation between thick terms and the associated evaluation is systematic.

Irony comprehension: A developmental perspective

This paper considers what light experimental work on the development of irony comprehension can shed on the relation between echoic and pretence accounts of irony, and how theoretical debates about the nature of irony might suggest fruitful directions for future developmental research. After surveying the results of developmental studies of three distinctive features of verbal irony – the expression of a characteristic attitude, the normative bias in the uses of irony and the ‘ironical tone of voice’ – it considers how echoic and pretence accounts of irony might explain these results. On the theoretical side, it argues that echoing and pretence are distinct mechanisms which can be used independently of each other, and that verbal irony necessarily involves echoic use, but does not necessarily involve pretence. On the experimental side, it argues that a range of disparate phenomena including hyperbole, jocularity, understatement and rhetorical questions, which are generally treated as forms of irony in the developmental literature, display none of the distinctive features of irony in most of their uses, and are not inherently ironical. However, these phenomena are worth investigating in their own right, and new theoretical accounts and experimental paradigms are needed to prise them apart.

Irony, relevance and pragmatic interpretation in Spanish

This article examines the interpretation of irony in Spanish. It first looks at traditional approaches such as the Gricean model, which classify irony together with other tropes like metaphor, hyperbole, or understatement. This type of approach analyses irony as resulting from an overt violation of the maxim of quality (involving the speaker saying a blatantly false statement). This violation forces the hearer to search for a related proposition that will save the application of the maxim, which in the case of irony is the opposite of what has been said and is taken as an implicature of the utterance. However, there are many counterexamples to this approach in Spanish, which suggest that an alternative analysis is needed. It is argued that the best alternative approach is provided by relevance theory, which relies on the idea that irony is a form of echoic use involving an implicit dissociative attitude. It is shown that this framework seems to solve the problems encountered by earlier approaches and its application to Spanish provides further evidence for this alternative account.

The pragmatics of verbal irony: Echo or pretence?

This paper considers two post-Gricean attempts to provide an explanatory account of verbal irony. The first treats irony as an echoic use of language in which the speaker tacitly dissociates herself from an attributed utterance or thought. The second treats irony as a type of pretence in which the speaker “makes as if” to perform a certain speech act, expecting her audience to see through the pretence and recognise the mocking or critical attitude behind it. The two approaches have sometimes been seen as empirically or theoretically indistinguishable, and several hybrid accounts incorporating elements of both have been proposed. I will argue that the echoic and pretence accounts are distinguishable on both theoretical and empirical grounds, and that while echoic use is essential to standard cases of verbal irony, pretence is not. However, the term irony has been applied to a very wide range of phenomena, not all of which can be explained in the same way, and I will end by briefly mentioning some less central cases where varieties of pretence or simulation do indeed achieve ironical effects.

Relevance Theory and the use of voice in poetry

This article explores the extent to which the Relevance Theory concepts of interpretive and echoic use can help to explain the complexities of the use of voice in poetry. Echoic use in Relevance Theory is a sub-type of interpretive use, a use which can allow a speaker to communicate one of many possible attitudes towards a proposition, ranging from endorsement through disapproval to ridicule. My argument is that this model could be extremely powerful in accounting for the differences and relationships between perceived poets’/authors’ views and views presented directly in literary works. This approach goes some way towards integrating the study of poetry into a general account of communication. The article develops these arguments by using the Relevance Theory model in analysing the use of voice in a selection of poems by Dorothy Parker, Robert Browning, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Fleur Adcock and Tony Harrison, and raises the question of whether all poetry might be considered interpretive.

Irony: Negation, echo and metarepresentation

Abstract There is a current debate on the nature of verbal irony. On one view, held by Sperber and Wilson (1981, 1986; Wilson and Sperber, 1992), verbal irony is a subtype of echoic use of language. On another view, advocated by Giora (1995, Giora and Fein, 1998), verbal irony is a form of indirect negation. This paper compares both approaches and looks at their predictions with regard to the cognitive abilities that the processing of verbal irony should demand. In particular, it concentrates on the degree of higher-order mental representations that interpreters of verbal irony should be able to manipulate. The results of the analysis favour the framework proposed by Sperber and Wilson.

Indirectness, rhetoric and interpretative use: communicative strategies in Browning's My Last Duchess

In this article I use a relevance theory framework to examine the intricacies of the communicative situation at work in Browning's My Last Duchess. I focus on the rhetorical nature of indirectness, as well as suggesting that the relevance-theoretic concepts of interpretive and echoic use can provide a useful means of re-theorising the use of voice in literature. In particular I show that authorial distance from the Duke of Ferrara's monologue in My Last Duchess can be accounted for in the same way as a speaker's dissociation from propositions expressed in ironic utterances. In addition I explore the ambivalent potential of both irony and authorial distance. I argue that relevance theory, in its recognition of the possible disjunction between what is said and what is communicated, is a model which overcomes some of the inadequacies of earlier pragmatic approaches to literature.

A truth-functional account of metalinguistic negation, with evidence from Korean

The metalinguistic use of ‘not’ has been brought to prominence by the work of Laurence Horn (1985, 1989), who characterizes it as a marked, non-truth-functional use of negation, not reducible to the standard truth-functional operator. We argue that the essential property of metalinguistic negation is that it involves the echoic use (in the sense of Sperber and Wilson (1986)) of material falling within the scope of the negation operator. An account in these terms dissolves the appearance of ambiguity in the negation operator itself. The negation operator is uniformly truth-functional in both its descriptive and metalinguistic uses, and the two uses fall out from a quite general fact about language: it may be used to represent states of affairs or to represent other representations, including other utterances. This analysis receives support from an investigation of data from Korean, a language which is unrelated to English and in which sentence negation may take two distinct linguistic forms, one of which has been claimed to favour a metalinguistic interpretation.

Christian Affirmation in The Book of the Duchess

Chaucer's elegy, The Book of the Duchess, has been read in the past either as an exercise in exclusively human consolation without religious meaning or—by the patristic critics—as so rigidly iconographic that the obvious dramatic situation has been sacrificed to accommodate patristic truths. Chaucer's real intention is more divinely directed than the former and more humanly directed than the latter. The poem offers Christian consolation complementary to the dramatic situation by weaving images of the resurrection into the warp and woof of mute pity. The recurrence of sleeping images, for example, in the case of the Dreamer himself and in the case of Ceys and Alcione, functions as a salubrious intermission between an anguished consciousness and a redemptive awakening. The repetition of horn blasts, both in the underworld episode and the hart-hunting scene, suggests the resurrectional trumpet of the New Testament. And the hunting scene, ambiguously involved as it is with the hart, suggests through the echoic use of resurrectional diction from the Canticle of Canticles further Christian affirmation about the mystery of immortality.