The paper discusses the relationship between irony and sense of humor. The point of departure is the popular category of irony, that is, whatever people in general consider to be irony or ironical will be accepted here as irony and ironical, respectively. On the other hand, we emphatically rely on the theoretical and methodological background assumption of functional cognitive pragmatics with respect to the interpretation of irony: the assumption that irony capitalizes on reflexivity, one of the fundamental properties of linguistic cognition, and in particular, participants’ metapragmatic awareness, in an emergent manner. The initial hypothesis of the paper is that sense of humor is positively correlated with both irony production and irony comprehension. The empirical study consists of two steps: we conducted two cascaded online questionnaire studies on the production and comprehesion of irony, respectively, in relation to sense of humor. We used standardized tests to measure the participants’ aptitude for producing/comprehending humor. The study of recognizing and producing irony took place with reference to 15 pictorial stimuli. In our statistical analyses we found that ironical utterances produced with high-level sense of humor were judged significantly more ironical by addressees than those produced by speakers with average or below-average sense of humor. On the other hand, the analyses showed that, in most cases, their own below-average vs. above-average sense of humor did not significantly help participants in judging the level of irony of the utterances presented to them.

Keywords: irony production, irony comprehension, sense of humor, humor styles, metapragmatic awareness, metapragmatic reflexivity.

Svindt Veronika
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet

Tátrai Szilárd
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem
Jagelló Egyetem

Seeking the sine qua non of irony in theoretical pragmatics

In this article, first, several theoretical pragmatic accounts of (verbal) irony are outlined and compared from Grice (1975, 1978) to present-day researchers. A number of examples, taken from musical anecdotes and the pragmatics literature, are discussed, including the controversial types. Then, the results of an empirical study are presented to shed light on the lay concept of irony: 100 Hungarian university students were asked to provide a definition, two examples and reasons why people use irony in communication. Based on their responses and the literature overview, it is argued that irony invariably conveys an implicit negative (sceptical, critical, dissociative, mocking, facethreatening) attitude that clashes with and overrides another, explicitly or less implicitly expressed evaluation. The ironic attitude is characterised as a continuum ranging from banter to sarcasm, with no sharp boundaries from both sides. This minimalist view of irony offers a natural explanation of the existence of humorous irony and ironic combinations of figurative language.

Keywords: irony, banter, sarcasm, humour, implicature, attitude.

Nemesi Attila László
Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem

The recognition of communicative components of irony and lyingin ages 5 to 10

In this paper, we investigate the recognition and assessment of speakers’ opinions, intentions, and attitudes with respect to utterances involving irony, lies, and literally true statements with 5 to 10-year-old children (nursery, first-form and third-form primary school children). The participants had to answer an opinion question, an intention question, and an attitude question in a multiple choice comprehension task based on a narrative. Their assessments were investigated in a binary (true/false) scale. While for nursery kids all three types of statements proved to be equally difficult, for third-formers they proved to be equally easy. Unexpectedly, first-formers were the least successful in recognizing lies as lies. There were three possible answers concerning the speaker’s intention: the speaker was kidding, he tried to put the listener off, or he meant what he had said. What the respondents found the most difficult was the recognition of the intention behind ironical satements: twe two younger groups performed at chance level, and even the oldest participants assessed the intention correctly in half of the cases only. The intention of misleading was somewhat easier to recognize for all three groups, and the literally true sentences proved to be the easiest to understand. The speaker’s attitude was measured against a five-point scale (from ‘nasty’ to ‘nice’). Irony and lying were not differentiated by any of the three groups, and all three groups assessed such speakers significantly nastier than those of literally true statements, although with ten-year-olds that difference was somewhat smaller than with the younger groups.

Keywords: pragmatic development, irony comprehension, metapragmatic awareness, speaker intention.

Babarczy Anna
Budapesti Muszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet

Szücs Márta Zita
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

An earlier form of Hungarian böszörmény was roughly beszermény, usually not found in etymological dictionaries. Its first attested occurrence is the place name Bezermen from the 13th century. Its meaning is ’Muslim’. Words of the same form and meaning are also found in Old Russian and in Old Czech. The first time the form besurmen occurred in Old Russian chronicles was in an 1184 entry of the Kievan Chronicle. In a 1282 entry of the Laurentian Chronicle, besurmen occurs once, and besermen occurs five times. The abrupt and unexpected change is probably due to an unintended effect of a later copier’s or compliler’s own language. The form besurmen probably comes from the language of Polovtsians. Based on the fact that Volga Bulgarians were later referred to in Old Russian as besermen in the 14th century, we can assume that Old Russian borrowed the word from the language of the Volga Bulgarians, one of the Chuvash-type Turkic languages. The form besermen was widespread in the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal first, and later it became dominant in the whole territory of Rus’. Hungarian beszermény may be a loanword from another Chuvashtype Turkic language, borrowed in the 9th century the latest. With respect to the origin of Old Czech Bezzermene (Besermené), Hungarian transmission is more probable than Eastern Slavic. In the thirteenth century, these words had the meaning ‘Muslim’ west of the Volga, as far as the Vltava River, with no particular ethnic reference. The same meaning is hidden in Bisermin as mentioned by Plano Carpini, mistakenly thought to be an ethnic name by the Franciscan monk. On the other hand, his fellow traveller, Benedictus Polonus, who was familiar with Slavic languages, took the Czech and Russian word to be a common noun, and did not mention the word Bisermin in his travelogue.

Keywords: Muslims, böszörmény, Old Hungarian beszermény, Old Russian besurmen ~ besermen, Old Czech bezzermene (pl.), the Bisermini of Plano Carpini, Chuvash-type Turkic languages, loanwords.

SengaToru