Affirmative Sarcasm, Negative Sarcasm: Which will be faster to process? Which will rely on cueing?
Which will be more entertaining?
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1
Tel Aviv University, Israel
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2
Beit Berl, Israel
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3
Academic College Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Israel
Given equal degree of novelty, nonliteralness, and strength of contextual support, (i) will Affirmative Sarcasm (He is the most organized student) and Negative Sarcasm (He is not the most organized student) differ processing-wise? (ii) Will they differ in the extent to which they rely on (linguistic) cueing for their derivation? (iii) Will they differ in terms of pleasurability?
(i) According to the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora et al., 2015), it is only degree of defaultness that matters. To be considered default, responses, such as utterance interpretations, must be activated unconditionally, initially and directly, regardless of other factors assumed to affect processing, such as degree of novelty, nonliteralness, negation/affirmation, or strength of contextual support.
Once degree of defaultness is established when items are presented in isolation (see Giora et al., 2015, Exp. 1), default interpretations (here, Negative Sarcasm and Affirmative Literalness) are expected to be processed faster than nondefault counterparts (here, Negative Literalness and Affirmative Sarcasm), even when embedded in equally supportive contexts. As mentioned above, this should be true, regardless of factors known to affect processing, such as negation/affirmation, equal degree of novelty, equal degree of nonliteralness, or equal degree of contextual support.
Results indeed show that, when in equally strong contexts, default Negative Sarcasm (He is not the most organized student, meaning ‘he is messy’) was processed directly, faster than nondefault Affirmative Sarcasm (He is the most organized student, meaning ‘he is messy’), which further involved default Affirmative Literalness in the process (meaning ‘he is orderly’). Furthermore, default Negative Sarcasm was processed faster than nondefault Negative Literalness (He is not the most organized student, meaning ‘he is organized, but others are more organized than him’), which, in turn, involved default Negative Sarcasm in the process (meaning ‘he is messy’). These results were also replicated for default Affirmative Literalness which was faster to process than nondefault Affirmative Sarcasm and nondefault Negative Literalness. (For replications of these comparisons, see Filik et al. forthcoming; Giora et al. forthcoming). In all, as predicted, default interpretations were processed faster than nondefault counterparts, irrespective of all factors assumed to affect processing.
(ii) Given the speed superiority of defaultness, the Defaultness Hypothesis further predicts that nondefault rather than default interpretations will rely heavily on cueing for their derivation (see Giora, Jaffe, Becker, & Fein, 2018; Givoni, Giora & Bergerbest, 2013). Based on the automaticity of default interpretations, prompting them by cues will be futile. However, prompting nondefault interpretations by cues rejecting as unintended their default alternatives, while inviting their intended nondefault counterparts, will benefit the latter’s activation.
Indeed, as shown by Becker and Giora (submitted), corpus-based evidence, collected from HeTenTen corpus (including informal, semi-spoken Hebrew; see Kilgarriff et al., 2014), reveals that when default Negative Sarcasm is intended, it is not cued; however when it is nondefault literal interpretation that is intended, speakers apply various cues, such as but not Y either, (as in she is not the most exciting person in the world, but not extremely boring either), aimed at rejecting the unintended default sarcastic interpretations (‘boring’) in favor of its nondefault literal counterpart (‘somewhat less than boring’).
Findings indeed show that, when raters, versed in sarcasm, were presented with these negative constructions, only short of this cue, they were rated as significantly more sarcastic than literal (for a similar methodology, see Kreuz & Caucci, 2007). Specifically, of the 116 negative constructions extracted from HeTenTen, originally followed by a cue, such as but not Y either (while short of this cue), 67.2% (78/116=67.2%) were judged as sarcastic by at least 2 of the 3 raters; only 32.8% (38/116=32.8%) such instances (when short of that cue) were judged as literal by at least two raters. As predicted by the Defaultness Hypothesis, explicitly rejecting default Negative Sarcasm, while inviting nondefault Negative Literalness, was significantly more prevalent than rejecting nondefault Negative Literalness (p=0.0003, binomial test). When unintended, it is default interpretations that are often explicitly rejected, while disclosing speakers’ sensitivity to defaultness.
Along the same lines, 238 out of 239 cases, extracted from the corpus, reveal that it is nondefault Affirmative Saracsm that relies heavily on cueing (e.g., just kidding, as in she is the most exciting person in the world. Just kidding), rejecting its default Affirmative Literalness in favor of its nondefault Affirmative Sarcasm. As predicted, nondefaultness, being difficult to derive, benefits from cueing. Defaultness, however, is hardly cued.
(iii) According to the revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis (Giora et al., 2017; see also Giora et al., 2004), following from the Defaultness Hypothesis, it is stimuli’s nondefault responses, involving default (yet retainable) responses, that determines their degree of pleasantness. Such nondefault responses (e.g., Affirmative Sarcasm) qualify for Optimal Innovativeness (Giora et al., 2017). They will therefore be pleasing, more pleasing than (a) default (e.g., Negative Sarcasm) and (b) counterparts not qualifying for Optimal Innovation (e.g., Affirmative Literalness). Results of 2 experiments support the revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, while further corroborating the Defaultness Hypothesis. They show that nondefault Affirmative Sarcasm is pleasing, more pleasing than default Negative Sarcasm, regardless of whether the context is linguistic (t1(39) = 2.30, p < .05; t2(11) = 2.38, p < .05), or pictorial (t1(29) = 3.23, p < .005; t2(11) = 3.95, p < .005). (For pictorial contexts, see Figure 1; for pleasure ratings see Figure 2):
Although Affirmative Sarcasm is more difficult to derive than Negative Sarcasm (see Giora et al., 2015), it benefits from the involvement of a default interpretation (i.e., Affirmative Literalness) in the process, which renders it Optimally Innovative and therefore gratifying.
And if we accept that constructions, such as Negative Sarcasm, even if infrequent, may convey default yet noncoded, constructed interpretations, then the results reported here can be viewed as supportive of Construction Grammar (e.g., Goldberg, 1995) as well as of Ariel’s (2008) concept of “salient discourse profiles”, the latter demonstrating a strong, though not necessarily coded, form/function association. In all, however, these results support the view that defaultness plays a major role in various areas, including comprehension, production, and affect.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by The Israel Science Foundation grant (no. 436/12) to Rachel Giora and by the British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Scheme (PM140296) awarded to Prof. Ruth Filik and Prof. Rachel Giora
References
Ariel, Mira. (2008). Pragmatics and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Becker, Israela, & Rachel Giora. (Submitted). The Defaultness Hypothesis: A quantitative corpus-based study of non/default sarcasm and literalness production.
Filik, Ruth, Howman, Hannah, Ralph-Nearman. Christina, & Giora, Rachel. (Forthcoming). The role of defaultness in sarcasm interpretation: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading. Metaphor and Symbol.
Giora, Rachel, Cholev, Adi, Fein, Ofer, & Peleg, Orna. (Forthcoming). On the superiority of defaultness: Hemispheric perspectives of Processing Negative and Affirmative Sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol.
Giora, Rachel, Fein, Ofer, Kronrod, Ann, Elnatan, Idit, Shuval, Noa and Zur, Adi. (2004). Weapons of mass distraction: Optimal Innovation and Pleasure Ratings. Metaphor and Symbol, 19, 115-141.
Giora, Rachel, Jaffe, Inbal, Becker, Israela & Fein, Ofer. (2018). Strongly attenuating highly positive concepts: The case of default sarcastic interpretations. Review of Cognitive Linguistics.
Giora, Rachel, Givoni, Shir, & Fein, Ofer. (2015). Defaultness reigns: The case of sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 30/4, 290-313.
Giora, Rachel, Givoni, Shir Heruti, Vered, & Fein, Ofer. (2017). The role of Defaultness in affecting pleasure: The Optimal Innovation Hypothesis revisited. Metaphor & Symbol, 32/1, 1-18.
Givoni, Shir, Giora, Rachel, & Bergerbest, Dafna. (2013). How speakers alert addressees to multiple meanings. Journal of Pragmatics, 48(1), 29-40.
Goldberg, Adele E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Kilgarriff, Adam, Baisa, Vít, Bušta, Jan, Jakubíček, Miloš, Kovář, Vojtěch, Michelfeit, Jan, et al. (2014). The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography, 1(1), 7-36.
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Keywords:
Default interpretations,
Nondefault interpretations,
processing speed,
Cueing,
Pleasure
Conference:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Poster or Oral
Topic:
Experimental Pragmatics
Citation:
Giora
R,
Givoni
S,
Becker
I,
Heruti
V and
Fein
O
(2018). Affirmative Sarcasm, Negative Sarcasm: Which will be faster to process? Which will rely on cueing?
Which will be more entertaining?
.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00017
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Received:
04 May 2018;
Published Online:
14 Dec 2018.
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Correspondence:
Prof. Rachel Giora, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, rachel.giora@gmail.com