Understanding Verbal Irony in Korean within a Multiple-Meaning Model

Hyun Jeong "Adriana" Park

Abstract for paper presented at
The 8th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC 8)
University of Logrono, La Rioja, Spain
July 20-25, 2003

The purpose of this paper is to show the existence of the same understanding system, as a multiple-meaning model, in Korean verbal irony as I have already checked in English through the experiments of Dews & Winner (1999) and in my multiple-meaning model (2001, 2002), which is somewhat different from previous approaches to irony in that it takes both sides, i.e., speaker and hearer into account. Understanding ironical utterances is more difficult than literal expressions since they have multiple-meaning levels. Therefore, it takes more time to understand verbal irony than any other literal statement. That will be examined by my own experiment with Korean data, comparing reaction time and error rate between irony and literal descriptions. In addition, I will argue that there is a difference in understanding positive irony, represented by positive expressions with negative attitude, and negative irony, represented by negative expressions with positive attitude. The results of the experiment will suggest that positive irony is used more frequently than negative irony as a politeness strategy, showing the asymmetry of attitude. In conclusion, the results of the experiments will not only give us plausible explanations of my own multiple-meaning model, but also prove that there exists the same understanding system in Korean verbal irony.

References

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CURCO, C. 2000. "Irony: Negation, echo and metarepresentation." Lingua 110: 257-80.

DEWS, S. and E. WINNER. 1999. "Obligatory Processing of Literal and Nonliteral Meanings in Verbal Irony." Journal of Pragmatics 31: 1579-99.

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PARK, H. 2001. "The Mechanism of Verbal Irony: Its Generation and Interpretation." MA Thesis. Sogang University.

PARK, H. 2002. "A Processing Model of Verbal Irony." Language & Information Society 3: 101-121. Sogang University.

SPERBER, D. and D. WILSON. 1981. "Irony and the Use-mention Distinction." In P. Cole, ed., Radical Pragmatics, 295-317. New York: Academic Press.

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UTSUMI, A. 2000. "Verbal Irony as Implicit Display of Ironic Environment: Distinguishing Ironic Utterences from Nonirony." Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1777-1806.

Adriana Park is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Hyun.J.Park@Colorado.EDU.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 1 - June 2004