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While prosody is thought to play a major role in the production and comprehension of irony, the manner in which prosody is used to signal ironic intentions is still poorly understood. The complexity and variety of ironic interactions create divergences in the observations of irony production and interpretation, making the theoretical "ironic tone of voice" a challenging concept to define. To examine the possibility of such a concept, acoustic and perceptual measurements were performed on literal or ironic criticisms and compliments. Our goal was to isolate cues specific to different attitudes conveyed and to relate these cues to the recognition and interpretation of particular attitudes. The very accurate discrimination between literal and ironic utterances in the perceptual judgements contrasted with the diversity in prosodic strategies between and within each attitude. We found that ironic criticisms (sarcasm) could often be distinguished from literal compliments based on increased utterance duration and reduced pitch variability. However, none of the acoustic measures significantly predicted the distinction between ironic compliments (teasing) and literal criticisms. This asymmetry in the prosodic strategies, when related to the asymmetries in production and interpretation of ironies, highlighted the interdependence between prosodic consistency and functional interpersonal interactions in ironic speech.

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Brown and Levinson proposed that three sociological variables—Distance, Power, and Ranking of the imposition—affect politeness assessments. Later scholarship, however, argued that these variables can be operationalized in several ways and are too abstract to capture the realities of im/polite discourse. We focus on one variable, Distance, whose operationalization has produced mixed results, and argue that introducing another variable (Relationship Affect) does not solve this problem, as further variables, such as the Speaker’s Emotional State, can override the latter, leading to an unnecessary proliferation of variables. We propose that local politeness assessments can be better accounted for under a frame-based approach, and report on two studies, a metalinguistic judgment task and a vignette study focusing on the Greek address term re malaka, that support this point.

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