Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language
by Paul Simpson
2020-04-19 08:27:22
Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language
by Paul Simpson
2020-04-19 08:27:22
This chapter probes the common (and perhaps controversial)perception of many in the UK and Ireland that people from North America“don’t do” irony. Stimulated by the type of discussion found in Nash’s The Language ofHumour (198...
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This chapter probes the common (and perhaps controversial)perception of many in the UK and Ireland that people from North America“don’t do” irony. Stimulated by the type of discussion found in Nash’s The Language ofHumour (1985), the author interrogates this folkbelief by developing a quantitative methodology to capture the ways in whichironic situations are interpreted by people from diverse nationalbackgrounds. This methodology comprises an anonymous online experiment whichgathers reactions to six narrative scenarios from over 300 informantsworld-wide. Each informant is required to provide a one-word response toeach scenario after which they may offer an optional, longer free-textcommentary on the same story. In the course of the chapter, the authoradvances a theoretical model of situational irony, while the resultselicited from the survey shed some light on what people from different partsof the world understand as an ironic situation.
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