LingLunch : Francesca Panzeri

Francesca Panzeri
Irony: Sound and Vision

Ironic speakers communicate their contemptuous attitude toward the thought echoed by the ironic remark. If interlocutors do not recognize speakers’ ironic intent, misunderstandings take place. To avoid communication failures, speakers may resort to irony markers, i.e., metacommunicative cues that alert interlocutors that their comment should be re-interpreted. In this talk, I will present data from a series of studies we ran to evaluate the reliability of acoustic and visual irony markers. In a first series of experiments, we assessed their relative weight in facilitating the detection of the speakers’ ironic intent. In a second study, we verified whether these markers are cross-linguistically recognizable. In an ongoing study, then, we aim at identifying specific acoustic parameters and facial expressions linked to the expression of irony.