Contents › Section 3: Semantics and pragmatics › answer 9 of 24
What are common non-lexical indicators of sarcasm expressed orally in English
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You pretty much summarised the main linguistic indicators of things like sarcasm or irony:
- intonation
- pause
- stress
- emphasis or volume of voice
But there are also many paralinguistic signals such as:
- gestures
- facial expressions
- symbols (in writing) such as emoticons, quotation marks, italics, etc.
However, often sarcasm is not overly indicated. The things that are used to disambiguate include:
- context
- situational knowledge
- speaker negotiation (the extreme being holding a sarcasm sign as in Big Bang Theory)
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).