Irony, Deception and Humour: Seeking the Truth about Overt and Covert Untruthfulness

by Marta Dynel

Overview

This book offers fresh perspectives on untruthfulness entailed in various forms of irony, deception and humour, which have so far constituted independent foci of linguistic and philosophical investigation. These three distinct (albeit sometimes co-occurring) notions are brought together within a neo-Gricean framework and consistently discussed as representing overt or covert untruthfulness. The postulates that represent the interface between language philosophy and pragmatics are illustrated with scripted interactions culled from the series House, which help appreciate the complexities of the three concepts at hand. Apart from affording new insights into the nature of irony, deception and humour, this book critically examines previous literature on these notions, as well as relevant aspects of Grice's philosophy of language. Giving a state-of-the-art picture of untruthfulness, this publication will be of interest to both experienced and inexperienced researchers studying Grice’s philosophy, irony, deception and/or humour.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501507892
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	03/19/2018
Series:	Mouton Series in Pragmatics [MSP] , #21
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	503
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Marta Dynel, University of Łódź, Poland

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements v

Preface vii

Chapter 1 Theoretical preliminaries, terminological conundrums and empirical foundations 1

1 Truth vs (un)truthfulness 1

2 Truthfulness vs sincerity 4

3 Covert vs overt untruthfulness 8

4 Irony vs lying 12

5 Language data in the scholarship on irony, deception and humour 20

5.1 Irony 20

5.2 Deception 24

5.3 Humour 25

6 Scripted interactions as data 27

7 On House and data collection 29

Chapter 2 (Neo-)Gricean views of cooperation and (un)truthfulness 33

1 Approaching Grice's model of communication 34

1.1 Forms of maxim nonfulfilment and their effects 35

1.2 Whose implicature? 38

1.3 Intention (recognition) and speaker meaning 40

1.4 Hearer(s) 44

2 Quality and truthfulness 45

3 Truthfulness and saying vs asserting 49

4 Covert untruthfulness and maxim violations 56

4.1 Gricean and neo-Gricean views of deception 57

4.2 Covert explicit or implicit untruthfulness 62

5 Overt untruthfulness and Quality floutings 65

5.1 Irony, metaphor, meiosis and hyperbole 65

5.2 Grice's remarks on irony and criticism thereof 69

5.3 Quality-based figures as an alleged flaw in Grice's proposal of implicature 73

6 Humour, Grice's framework and (un)truthfulness 78

6.1 Does Grice's framework encompass humour? 78

6.2 Humour and the truthfulness maxim (non)fulfilment 82

Chapter 3 Overt untruthfulness: Irony 88

1 Approaching the figure of irony 89

2 A neo-Gricean definition of irony 94

2.1 Flouting the first maxim of Quality and overt untruthfulness 94

2.1.1 Transparency of overt untruthfulness 98

2.1.2 Overt untruthfulness, opposition and reversal 102

2.2 Negatively evaluative implicature 106

2.3 Optional positive evaluation 118

2.3.1 Previous examples of 'positively evaluative irony' 121

2.3.2 Negatively evaluated antecedent 124

2.3.3 Implicated positive and negative evaluations 127

2.4 Interpretative stages: Meaning reversal and implicature(s) 129

3 Boosting or mitigating negative evaluation 130

4 Irony vs sarcasm 136

4.1 Previous uses of the labels and definitional differences 137

4.2 Sarcastic irony 150

5 Hearers vs targets of irony 152

6 Types of irony from a neo-Gricean perspective 157

6.1 Propositional meaning reversal irony 157

6.2 Pragmatic meaning reversal irony 162

6.3 Local lexical meaning reversal irony 169

6.4 Surrealistic irony 171

6.5 Verisimilar irony 177

6.5.1 Previous neo-Gricean accounts of verisimilar irony 181

6.5.2 A neo-Gricean approach to verisimilar irony 184

6.5.3 Previous examples of verisimilar irony 189

6.5.4 Disputable examples of verisimilar irony 194

7 Irony and the other Quality-based figures 207

7.1 Irony coupled with meiosis or hyperbole 207

7.2 Irony coupled with metaphor 215

Chapter 4 Covert untruthfulness: Deception 224

1 Approaching deception 225

1.1 Defining deception 225

1.2 Previous classifications of deception strategies 232

1.3 Non-verbal deception 236

2 Lying 242

2.1 Target 244

2.2 Beliefs and untruthfulness 247

2.3 Two types of intentions to deceive the hearer 250

2.4 Untruthful stating/saying/asserting 262

2.5 Non-verbal saying via asserting 267

2.6 Lying as the violation of the first maxim of Quality 270

2.7 Lying by saying or making as if to say 272

3 Covertly untruthful implicature 279

3.1 Revisions and extensions 280

3.2 Deceptive implicatures based on irony or metaphor 287

3.3 Non-prototypical lying or-deceiving by implicating? 294

4 Deceptively withholding information 299

4.1 Withholding information (non)deceptively 299

4.2 Withholding information and similar notions 303

4.3 Conceptualising deceptively withholding information 308

4.4 Previous examples of deceptively withholding information 310

4.5 Pragmatic forms of deceptively withholding information 319

5 Bullshit 325

5.1 Bullshit vs nonsense 325

5.2 Previous examples of bullshit 330

5.3 Bullshit in neo-Gricean terms 334

6 Deception via other maxim violations 339

6.1 Covert irrelevance and covert ambiguity 339

6.2 Deception via covert irony and metaphor 345

7 Bald-faced lying 349

8 Deception in multi-party interactions 362

8.1 (Un)ratified hearers and inferring speaker meaning 363

8.2 Previous postulates on deception and multiple hearers 368

8.3 A new look at deception in a multi-party participation framework 375

Chapter 5 Interfaces between humour and (un)truthfulness 387

1 Approaching humour 388

1.1 Previous conceptualisations of humour 388

1.2 Humour coupled with seriousness 393

1.3 (Un)truthfulness as a dimension of humour 395

1.3.1 Autotelic humour 405

1.3.2 Speaker-meaning-telic humour 413

2 Humourand irony 420

2.1 Humorous irony 421

2.2 Humorous irony vs non-ironic humour 424

3 Humour and deception 431

3.1 Previous observations 432

3.2 Categories of humour involving deception 435

3.2.1 Garden-path humour 435

3.2.2 Put-ons and other deception-based teasing 438

3.3 Genuine deception coupled with humour 441

3.3.1 Humorous deceptive utterances 441

3.3.2 Genuine deception in multi-party interactions 444

Epilogue 449

References 455

Index 481