2011/09/15 by Elisabeth Camp · 8 citations
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #linguistics and terminology studies
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00822.x
Abstract Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, ‘expressivists’ have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe ‘meaning’ more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis.