Two studies using multimodal stimuli collected from television situation comedies show that there exist markers of irony and sarcasm which involve intonational and visual clues. Our first conclusion is that there exists no "ironical intonation" per se, but rather that pitch is a contrastive marker for irony or sarcasm. Our second conclusion is that there exists a facial expression, characterized as a "blank face," which is a visual marker of irony or sarcasm. We further discuss paracommunicative and metacommunicative alerts to ironicallsarcastic intent.
This is a research into the concept of humor as it manifests itself in linguistic activities^that more often than not also appear in writing (such as puns and jokes).The author starts off with a discussion of the unsuccessful attempts at definitions of humor and ends up with an analysis of certain humorous texts (mainly jokes, with the exception of chapter 8), i.e. of their semantic structure and their functions in a wider situational context. Attardo distinguishes 3 different approaches to the concept of humor, viz. an essentialist that would enumerate the necessary and sufficient conditions of a text or action to be humorous, a teleological^ that investigates the aims of humor, and a substantialist that deals with the contents of humorous actions.Chapter 1 gives a survey of the literature on the subject, ranging from Plato down to Freud and -of course -Raskin. Among others the author touches on the work of such illustruous personalities as Theophrast,
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