17th Oct 2012 4:30pm
Room E512, Checkland, Falmer
School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Research Lecture Series in Linguistics, Language and Discourse
Dr Mihaela Popa, University of Birmingham.
We argue that irony can embed in some logical/sentential operators. An example is the conditional ‘If Bill is such a fine friend, you shouldn’t call him anymore,’ which only makes sense if Bill is understood to be a bad friend. The ironic content embedded in this way seems to affect ‘what is said’ by the complex sentence—where what-is-said is determined compositionally through non-implicature contents. But when irony is unembedded, Griceans take it to be an implicature. So the challenge is to explain how embedded irony, if an implicature, can intrude into the compositional-determination of what-is-said. We explore two solutions to this puzzle. On a truth-conditional account, the ironic content is absorbed into what-is-said by allowing restricted forms of pragmatic effect into determining what-is-said. In doing so, however, the semantics-pragmatics distinction is undesirably undermined. We suggest that an implicature account allowing for the two following generalizations can do better: (i) implicatures can arise locally from suppositional clausal constituents; and (ii) as such they can affect the compositional-determination of what-is-said by the complex sentence. This requires, we argue, giving up a truth-conditional commitment of compositionality so that operators can target local implicatures of clausal constituents and bring them to determine what-is-said by complex sentences.
Keywords embedded irony, embedded implicatures, embedding criterion, compositionality.
