Tuesday, February 16th, 2016.
3:00 pm.
Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, Room 4.
Abstract:
When being ironic our communicative intention clearly mismatches with the literal meaning of the utterance. Then, how are we able to transmit this communicative intention to our hearer? Many theories of irony explain this phenomenon with the so called "Theory of Mind" (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985; Bowler 1992) that allows "mindreading": the ability we have to attribute mental states to others (Sperber 2000a, 2001; Wilson 2009). Those are then attribute theories of irony, where the explanation is based in the attribution of a particular mental state to the speaker (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95; Wilson & Sperber 1992; Wilson 2006, 2009; Clark & Gerrig 1984). Nonetheless, based in recent studies with high-functioning autistic patients (Dufour et al. 2013; Wang et al. 2006, 2007), I advocate for a descriptive theory of irony where the ironic utterances are defined as descriptive instead of as attributive utterances, i.e. that describe a state of affairs (Garmendia 2007, 2010, 2011, 2015). That would explain why high-functioning autistic patients are able to understand irony under some circumstances (mastering then this "mindreading" ability), but not when irony is based in event-knowledge, this is, when the situation described by the utterance is blatantly incompatible with the ironic utterance (Wang et al. 2006, 2007). My hypothesis is that this inability reveals that in irony comprehension there is something else than the "mindreading" ability and I claim that a complete theory of irony should be able to give a proper explanation of it.
References
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