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Contents › Section 3: Semantics and pragmatics › answer 9 of 24

What are common non-lexical indicators of sarcasm expressed orally in English

Answered 13 December 2014✓ Accepted answer

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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).