English language and linguistics research seminar: Camilo Ronderos, Lund University: ERC project presentation: Irony Re-examined in Interactive Settings (IRIS): Towards a paradigm change in Experimental Pragmatics.

Understanding how language is used often involves going beyond a literal meaning by thinking about the intentions of speakers. While theoretical work in pragmatics typically aims to account for how addressees (intended recipients of an utterance) understand a speaker’s intentions, most experiments testing pragmatic theories have studied the comprehension of participants in laboratory experiments who do not take part in the conversation and are not the explicitly intended recipients of an utterance – the overhearers. A prime example of this is irony, a language strategy that relies on a contrast between the literal and intended meaning of an utterance (e.g., hearing someone say that a football player who missed an easy goal ‘took a beautiful shot’). The focus on the overhearer’s perspective has been particularly problematic for the study of irony, where experiments have resulted in contradictory and inconclusive results. In. This talk,  I will introduce my ERC-funded project IRIS, which seeks to bring about a paradigm shift in experimental pragmatics by studying differences in comprehension between conversational roles (i.e., addressees and overhearers), using irony as a test case. IRIS will pioneer an experimental paradigm that studies both groups, combining accuracy and rating-scales measures with recent technical advances in cognitive pupillometry. The paradigm will be used to test a novel irony comprehension account that stipulates how, why, and when addressees and overhearers differ in how they understand irony.