A corpus study of the prosodic features accompanying verbal irony in English

Abstract

The present study attempts to show the results of a survey made in order to analize one of the various pragmatic strategies that a speaker who wants to be ironic has at his/her disposal: the use of prosodic features. Sixty-four texts from the “London Lund Corpus of English Conversation” (Svartvick &Quirk;1980) were scrutinized to identify the prosodic features constituting the variables involved in the so-called u ironic tone of voice”. Eightysix instances of verbal irony were found in these texts; and the variables identified as potentially affecting the meaning of these utterances (i.e. providing them with the ironic tonic of voice) were the following: 1) Intonation; 2) Stress on key word; 3) High pitch on key words; 4) Strategic laughter and 5) Strategic silence/pauses. The main concerns were a) to see whether there is always a specific tone used in ironic utterances; and b) to investigate to what degree prosodic features other than tone also influence and co-occur with tone. The quantitative analysis yielded the following results: ¡)there is not only one exclusive tone used in ironic utterances. Both falling and rising tones (as well as combinations of both) occur in this kind of utterance. However; the x2(Chi-square) results show that there is a significant difference in the distribution of tones betwen ironic and non-ironic utterance; 2) other prosodic features; like stress on key words; high pitch on key words and speaker's or hearer’s strategic laughter present a high frecuency ofocurrence within ironic utterances. Strategic silence/pauses do not occur very frecuently; but all these features seem to be handled by the speakers in different combinations as a powerful strategy to convey ironic meanings. The most frequent combinations found as a result of the statistical analysis are given herein; as evidence showing the tendencies of ironic discourse in this respect.