Audiovisual prosody and verbal irony
This dissertation takes an integrated approach to the study of audiovisual cues to verbal irony. While pragmatic studies have mainly focused on the role of the discourse context in irony detection, little is known about the role of prosodic and gestural cues in this process. The thesis includes four...
| Autor: | |
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2017 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/670309 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/670309 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Verbal irony Audiovisual cues Ironia verbal Marcas audiovisuales Marques audiovisuals 81 |
| Sumario: | This dissertation takes an integrated approach to the study of audiovisual cues to verbal irony. While pragmatic studies have mainly focused on the role of the discourse context in irony detection, little is known about the role of prosodic and gestural cues in this process. The thesis includes four experimental studies—each one described in a separate chapter—addressing a set of questions using a variety of experimental designs. The first one is a case study of a professional comedian and reveals (a) that ironic utterances display a higher density of prosodic and gestural markers than non-ironic utterances; and (b) that gestural markers can appear both temporally aligned with prosodic prominence but can also appear independently, as gestural codas. The second study includes two experiments: (a) a production experiment eliciting spontaneous ironic speech which reveals that in non-professional spontaneous speech, too, speakers employ a higher density of prosodic and gestural markers in ironic compared to non-ironic utterances; and (b) a perception experiment on the contribution of gestural codas to the detection of verbal irony, which shows that speakers detect ironic intent significantly better when post-utterance gestural codas are present than when they are not. Following up on this idea, the third study presents three perception experiments on the relative contribution of contextual vs. prosodic vs. gestural cues to verbal irony understanding. Overall, results of the three experiments emphasize the role of contrast effects in irony perception. The first experiment shows that (a) listeners detect irony more accurately when they have access to both prosodic and gestural cues than when they just rely on prosodic information, (b) that listeners rely more strongly on gestural information than on prosodic information, and (c) that listeners rely more heavily on gestural cues than on prosodic or contextual ones for detecting irony. Finally, the fourth study addresses the contribution of prosodic and gestural cues to children’s early understanding of verbal irony, showing that mismatched multimodal cues of emotion facilitate the detection of irony by 5-year-old children. Altogether, this dissertation shows that both prosodic and gestural markers of irony aid in guiding the hearer in the interpretation of an utterance by providing overt clues about the assumptions, emotions and attitudes held by the speaker. Together with recent studies on the general pragmatic effects of prosody and gesture, the claim is that audiovisual markers of irony are strong triggers of implicature strength which help decode speech intentions in interaction. In addition, the dissertation presents novel empirical evidence of the stronger effects of multimodal—and especially gestural—cues in comparison with contextual cues, both in adult and child populations. This crucial finding leads us to claim that the study of prosodic and gestural cues to verbal irony should be at the core of any pragmatic or psycholinguistic account of verbal irony production and comprehension. |
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