1887
Volume 16, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1877-9751
  • E-ISSN: 1877-976X
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Abstract

What are the constraints rendering stimuli, such as ; ? sarcastic ? Recent findings ( Filik, Howman, Ralph-Nearman, & Giora, in press ; Giora et al., 2005 , 2013 , 2015a , 2015b , in progress a ) suggest that strongly attenuating a highly positive concept, e.g., (associated here with ), induces sarcastic interpretations . To be interpreted sarcastically , items should be construable as such in the absence of factors inviting sarcasm. They should, thus, be (i) novel, noncoded in the mental lexicon, (ii) potentially ambiguous between literal and nonliteral interpretations, so that a preference is allowed, and (iii) free of specific and biasing contextual information. Online and offline studies, collecting self-paced reading times, eye-tracking data during reading, sarcasm rating, and pleasure ratings, alongside corpus-based studies, further support this view.

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2018-05-31
2025-02-13
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): attenuation; default interpretation; pleasure; sarcasm
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