Irony, deception and humour : seeking the truth about overt and covert untruthfulness / Marta Dynel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dynel, Marta, author.

Series:

Mouton series in pragmatics ; 1864-6409 21.

Mouton series in pragmatics, 1864-6409 ; volume 21

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grice, H. P. (H. Paul).

Grice, H. P.

House, M.D. (Television program)--Philosophy.

House, M.D. (Television program).

House, M. D. (Television program).

Deception.

Wit and humor.

Irony.

Pragmatics.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

xvi, 487 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Other Title:

Irony, deception and humor

Place of Publication:

Boston : De Gruyter Mouton, [2018]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Theoretical preliminaries, terminological conundrums and empirical foundations p. 1

1 Truth vs (un)truthfulness p. 1

2 Truthfulness vs sincerity p. 4

3 Covert vs overt untruthfulness p. 8

4 Irony vs lying p. 12

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

5.1 Irony p. 20

5.2 Deception p. 24

5.3 Humour p. 25

6 Scripted interactions as data p. 27

7 On House and data collection p. 29

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

1 Approaching Grice's model of communication p. 34

1.1 Forms of maxim nonfulfilment and their effects p. 35

1.2 Whose implicature? p. 38

1.3 Intention (recognition) and speaker meaning p. 40

1.4 Hearer(s) p. 44

2 Quality and truthfulness p. 45

3 Truthfulness and saying vs asserting p. 49

4 Covert untruthfulness and maxim violations p. 56

4.1 Gricean and neo-Gricean views of deception p. 57

4.2 Covert explicit or implicit untruthfulness p. 62

5 Overt untruthfulness and Quality floutings p. 65

5.1 Irony, metaphor, meiosis and hyperbole p. 65

5.2 Grice's remarks on irony and criticism thereof p. 69

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

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

6.1 Does Grice's framework encompass humour? p. 78

6.2 Humour and the truthfulness maxim (non)fulfilment p. 82

Chapter 3 Overt untruthfulness: Irony p. 88

1 Approaching the figure of irony p. 89

2 A neo-Gricean definition of irony p. 94

2.1 Flouting the first maxim of Quality and overt untruthfulness p. 94

2.1.1 Transparency of overt untruthfulness p. 98

2.1.2 Overt untruthfulness, opposition and reversal p. 102

2.2 Negatively evaluative implicature p. 106

2.3 Optional positive evaluation p. 118

2.3.1 Previous examples of 'positively evaluative irony' p. 121

2.3.2 Negatively evaluated antecedent p. 124

2.3.3 Implicated positive and negative evaluations p. 127

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

3 Boosting or mitigating negative evaluation p. 130

4 Irony vs sarcasm p. 136

4.1 Previous uses of the labels and definitional differences p. 137

4.2 Sarcastic irony p. 150

5 Hearers vs targets of irony p. 152

6 Types of irony from a neo-Gricean perspective p. 157

6.1 Propositional meaning reversal irony p. 157

6.2 Pragmatic meaning reversal irony p. 162

6.3 Local lexical meaning reversal irony p. 169

6.4 Surrealistic irony p. 171

6.5 Verisimilar irony p. 177

6.5.1 Previous neo-Gricean accounts of verisimilar irony p. 181

6.5.2 A neo-Gricean approach to verisimilar irony p. 184

6.5.3 Previous examples of verisimilar irony p. 189

6.5.4 Disputable examples of verisimilar irony p. 194

7 Irony and the other Quality-based figures p. 207

7.1 Irony coupled with meiosis or hyperbole p. 207

7.2 Irony coupled with metaphor p. 215

Chapter 4 Covert untruthfulness: Deception p. 224

1 Approaching deception p. 225

1.1 Defining deception p. 225

1.2 Previous classifications of deception strategies p. 232

1.3 Non-verbal deception p. 236

2 Lying p. 242

2.1 Target p. 244

2.2 Beliefs and untruthfulness p. 247

2.3 Two types of intentions to deceive the hearer p. 250

2.4 Untruthful stating/saying/asserting p. 262

2.5 Non-verbal saying via asserting p. 267

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

2.7 Lying by saying or making as if to say p. 272

3 Covertly untruthful implicature p. 279

3.1 Revisions and extensions p. 280

3.2 Deceptive implicatures based on irony or metaphor p. 287

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

4 Deceptively withholding information p. 299

4.1 Withholding information (non)deceptively p. 299

4.2 Withholding information and similar notions p. 303

4.3 Conceptualising deceptively withholding information p. 308

4.4 Previous examples of deceptively withholding information p. 310

4.5 Pragmatic forms of deceptively withholding information p. 319

5 Bullshit p. 325

5.1 Bullshit vs nonsense p. 325

5.2 Previous examples of bullshit p. 330

5.3 Bullshit in neo-Gricean terms p. 334

6 Deception via other maxim violations p. 339

6.1 Covert irrelevance and covert ambiguity p. 339

6.2 Deception via covert irony and metaphor p. 345

7 Bald-faced lying p. 349

8 Deception in multi-party interactions p. 362

8.1 (Un)ratified hearers and inferring speaker meaning p. 363

8.2 Previous postulates on deception and multiple hearers p. 368

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

Chapter 5 Interfaces between humour and (un)truthfulness p. 387

1 Approaching humour p. 388

1.1 Previous conceptualisations of humour p. 388

1.2 Humour coupled with seriousness p. 393

1.3 (Un)truthfulness as a dimension of humour p. 395

1.3.1 Autotelic humour p. 405

1.3.2 Speaker-meaning-telic humour p. 413

2 Humourand irony p. 420

2.1 Humorous irony p. 421

2.2 Humorous irony vs non-ironic humour p. 424

3 Humour and deception p. 431

3.1 Previous observations p. 432

3.2 Categories of humour involving deception p. 435

3.2.1 Garden-path humour p. 435

3.2.2 Put-ons and other deception-based teasing p. 438

3.3 Genuine deception coupled with humour p. 441

3.3.1 Humorous deceptive utterances p. 441

3.3.2 Genuine deception in multi-party interactions p. 444.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 455-480) and index.

ISBN:

1501516426

9781501516429

OCLC:

1011679992