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Why not say it directly? The social functions of irony

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TLDR
This paper investigated the social payoffs of speaking ironically and found that irony served to protect the speaker's face by showing the speaker as less angry and more in control, and that irony damaged the speaker-addressee relationship less than did literal criticism.
Abstract
In three experiments, we investigated the social payoffs of speaking ironically. In Experiment 1, participants rated videotaped ironic remarks (criticisms and compliments) as funnier than literal remarks, but no more or less status enhancing. In Experiment 2, participants listened to audiotaped ironic criticisms and compliments. Ironic compliments were rated as more insulting than literal compliments, but ironic criticisms were found to be less insulting than literal criticisms. In Experiment 3, participants read literal or ironic criticisms. Ironic comments were rated as more amusing than literal ones. When irony was directed at the addressee's poor performance, it served to protect the addressee's face by softening the criticism. When irony was directed at the addressee's offensive behavior, it served to protect the speaker's face by showing the speaker as less angry and more in control. In addition, irony damaged the speaker—addressee relationship less than did literal criticism. Taken together, these ...

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Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence

TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce the notion of impoliteness and define a metadiscourse for understanding it: face and social norms, intentionality and emotions, and co-texts and contexts.
Journal ArticleDOI

Irony in Talk Among Friends

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report the findings of a single study examining irony in talk among friends, which revealed varying linguistic and social patterns and suggested several constraints on how and why people achieve ironic meaning.
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From humor recognition to irony detection: The figurative language of social media

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Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony☆

TL;DR: The authors proposed an implicit display theory of irony in order to provide a plausible explanation of how irony is distinguished from nonirony, which is consistent with the empirical findings from psycholinguistics.
References
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Politeness : Some Universals in Language Usage

TL;DR: Gumperz as discussed by the authors discusses politeness strategies in language and their implications for language studies, including sociological implications and implications for social sciences. But he does not discuss the relationship between politeness and language.
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Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage

TL;DR: This paper presents an argument about the nature of the model and its implications for language studies and Sociological implications and discusses the role of politeness strategies in language.
Book

Principles of pragmatics

TL;DR: In this article, Leech akan memaparkan pengertian pragmatik complementer dalam setiap kajian bahasa sebagai sebuah sistem komunikasi.
Journal ArticleDOI

Understanding by Addressees and Overhearers

TL;DR: This paper found that addressees are more accurate at arranging the figures than overhearers even when the overhearers heard every word, whereas the very process of understanding is different for addresseees and overhearers.
Book

A Rhetoric of Irony

TL;DR: Booth as discussed by the authors analyzed how we manage to share quite specific ironies and why we often fail when we try to do so, and showed that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision.