The ironist’s intentions

Kapogianni, Eleni

doi:10.1075/pc.23.1.07kap

Cited by 11 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Consequently, they may have struggled to appropriately anticipate the emotional responses to the ironic comment. This finding supports previous literature, which has shown impairments in representing the mental states of others in autism [Agostino, Im‐Bolter, Stefanatos, & Dennis, 2017; Baron‐Cohen, Tager‐Flusberg, & Cohen, 1994; Baron‐Cohen, 1997; Frith, 2003; Hamilton, 2009; Happé, 1994; Jolliffe & Baron‐Cohen, 1999; Kapogianni, 2016; Sabbagh, 1999], including intentions (for discussion, see Williams & Happé, 2010). Ideally, this causal relationship would be tested by correlating ToM scores with the reading measures during irony comprehension.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Emotional Processing of Ironic Versus Literal Criticism in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults: Evidence From Eye‐Tracking

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Typically developing adults are able to keep track of story characters' emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio‐emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and nonautistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticized in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the nonautistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al., supporting the two‐stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two‐stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic versus literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples' communicative intentions (i.e., infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio‐emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real‐life social interactions. Autism Res 2020, 13: 563–578. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary In line with research showing that autistic people have difficulties considering others' mental states, we found autistic adults were impaired at distinguishing the emotions and intentions experienced by story characters who received sarcastic comments (e.g., “That was fantastic parking” in a context where someone's parking was particularly bad). These findings highlight the difficulties that autistic people experience taking into account other peoples' intentions during communication to appropriately anticipate their emotional responses. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Emotional Processing of Ironic Versus Literal Criticism in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults: Evidence From Eye‐Tracking

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…use ToM) to appropriately anticipate the emotional responses to the ironic comment. This finding supports the previous literature, which has shown impairments in representing the mental state of others in autism (Agostino, Im-Bolter, Stefanatos, & Dennis, 2017;Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 1994;Baron-Cohen, 1997;Frith, 2003;Hamilton, 2009;Happé, 1994;Jolliffe, & Baron-Cohen 1999;Kapogianni, 2016;Sabbagh, 1999), including intentions (for discussion, see Williams & Happé, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Emotional processing of ironic vs. literal criticism in autistic and non-autistic adults: Evidence from eye-tracking

Barzy¹,

Filik²,

Williams³

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Typically developing (TD) adults are able to keep track of story characters’ emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. (2017) showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing. We examined these processes in autistic adults, since previous research has demonstrated socio-emotional difficulties among autistic people, which may lead to problems processing irony and its related emotional processes despite an intact ability to integrate language in context. We recorded eye movements from autistic and non-autistic adults while they read narratives in which a character (the victim) was either criticised in an ironic or a literal manner by another character (the protagonist). A target sentence then either described the victim as feeling hurt/amused by the comment, or the protagonist as having intended to hurt/amused the victim by making the comment. Results from the non-autistic adults broadly replicated the key findings from Filik et al. (2017), supporting the two-stage account. Importantly, the autistic adults did not show comparable two-stage processing of ironic language; they did not differentiate between the emotional responses for victims or protagonists following ironic vs. literal criticism. These findings suggest that autistic people experience a specific difficulty taking into account other peoples’ communicative intentions (i.e. infer their mental state) to appropriately anticipate emotional responses to an ironic comment. We discuss how these difficulties might link to atypical socio-emotional processing in autism, and the ability to maintain successful real-life social interactions.

show abstract

The Irony of Irony: Irony Based on Truthfulness

Dynel

2017

Corpus Pragmatics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing on a corpus of academic examples, this paper addresses the vexing notion of ''verisimilar irony'' from a philosophical-pragmatic perspective. This species of irony escapes a neo-Gricean definition of prototypical irony based on the assumption that the speaker utters what he/she believes to be false (cf. untruthfulness) in order to convey an implicit message which is to be gleaned on the basis of meaning opposition. Verisimilar irony, as defined here, relies on the speaker's expression of his/her evaluative belief at the level of Grice's what is said or implicated (if another figure is involved). A proposal is put forward that verisimilar irony does rest on untruthfulness, manifesting itself in as if implicature (untruthful implicature serving as an intermediate interpretative step) caused by flouting the Relation maxim. This as if implicature, in turn, necessitates meaning reversal so that the ultimate evaluative implicature can be inferred. In the course of the paper, the previous examples of verisimilar irony found in the scholarship (constituting the present corpus) are critically revisited to indicate that the spectrum of forms the focal type of irony can take is narrower than other authors have suggested. It is shown that some of the examples claimed to represent what is here called ''verisimilar irony'' either are not irony at all or represent other categories of the focal figure.

show abstract

The ironist’s intentions

Cited by 11 publications

References 38 publications

Emotional Processing of Ironic Versus Literal Criticism in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults: Evidence From Eye‐Tracking

Emotional Processing of Ironic Versus Literal Criticism in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults: Evidence From Eye‐Tracking

Emotional processing of ironic vs. literal criticism in autistic and non-autistic adults: Evidence from eye-tracking

The Irony of Irony: Irony Based on Truthfulness

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About