On saying what you mean without meaning what you say

Abstract

"Then you should say what you mean", the March Hare went on "I do", Alice hastily replied; "at least- at least I mean what I say- that's the same thing, you know". "Not the same thing a bit! " said the Hatter.- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. If Harry's boss says of him: (1) Harry's a real genius he may mean what he says; in that case he will probably say it in a tone of reverence and admiration. But he may on the other hand mean, and wish to say, quite the opposite, that Harry is anything but a genius; in this case he can still utter the words of (1), but he will express his meaning by superimposing a certain inton-ation contour which signals to his hearers that the utterance is intended to be ironic. It is with such utterances that this paper deals: utterances produced in such a way that they express a con-veyed meaning which is the converse of the literal meaning. The main concern of the paper is with the characteristics and distribution of ironically uttered sentences. It is not inten ded, for example, to investigate the details of the rules which apply to produce such cases, or at what point in a derivation they may apply. Nor will we be concerned with the specific supra-segmental correlates of irony. In fact, there are no invariable correlates; if cues from the context are strong enough, no inton-ational cues are necessary at all. When two people walk into an empty bar, for example, the utterance (2) Sure is lively here tonight will be understood as ironic regardless of the intonation used. At other times sentences spoken ironically may be identified as such in one or more of the following ways: (a) the entire sen-tence or part of it may be nasalised; (b) the rate of speaking may be slowed; (c) exaggerated stress may be applied to one or more words- particularly, stressed syllables may be lengthened in an exaggerated fashion.2 Yet again, it is possible in certain dialects of English to achieve the same effect by appending the words "I don't think " (with heavy stress on don't) to a sentence uttered with ironic intent. Additional intonational cues are op-tional. Thus (3) conveys the same meaning as the ironic reading of (1): (3) Harry's a real genius, I don't think