Lexical Influences on the Perception of Sarcasm

Summary

Sarcasm is usually seen as a pragmatic phenomenon that depends on context and on knowledge shared between speakers. This view has led some to doubt that software could ever recognize it. Kreuz and Caucci test whether word-level cues also shape how readers judge sarcastic intent. Instead of invented stimuli, they used real narrative passages from Google Book Search. They took 100 excerpts where an author had written "said sarcastically" and removed the adverb. They added 15 control excerpts containing a plain "I/he/she said." Undergraduates rated how likely each highlighted utterance was to be sarcastic. Two judges coded each utterance for adjectives or adverbs, interjections, and exclamation or question marks. Readers reliably told the originally sarcastic passages apart from the controls. A regression controlled for excerpt length, and only interjections such as gee or gosh significantly predicted the ratings, explaining about 5% of the variance. The authors conclude that sarcasm is partly formulaic. Simple lexical cues could therefore help NLP systems flag non-literal language without fully modeling pragmatics.

Key points

Data: 115 excerpts from Google Book Search (100 sarcastic, 15 control) with a mean length of 110 words. The highlighted target utterances averaged 6.45 words.
Participants: 101 undergraduates took part. Each rated 20 sarcastic excerpts, drawn from one of five sets, plus all 15 controls on a 7-point likelihood scale.
Rating difference: Sarcastic excerpts were rated higher (M = 4.85) than controls (M = 2.89), with t(100) = 19.35 and p < .001.
Regression results: Inter-judge coding agreement was 95%. Excerpt length was not significant (R² = .024). Interjections were significant (F(1,111) = 6.10, p = .015, R² = .051). Adjectives/adverbs and punctuation were not significant predictors.
Qualitative observations: Sarcastic utterances often contained set phrases, foreign expressions, rhetorical remarks, and repetitions, though the sample was too small to analyze these. Some authors used "sarcastically" loosely to mean angrily or jokingly.

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Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cited by

34 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 15 of them have a page here, 19 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{kreuz2007lexical,
  title = {{Lexical Influences on the Perception of Sarcasm}},
  author = {Kreuz, Roger and Caucci, Gina},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Figurative Language},
  year = {2007},
  doi = {10.3115/1611528.1611529},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1611528.1611529}
}

References

11 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Herbert H. Clark, 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
Shelly Dews and Ellen Winner, 1997. Attributing meaning to deliberately false utterances: The case of irony. In C. Mandell and A. McCabe (Eds.), The Problem of Meaning: Behavioral and Cognitive Perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier. find
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., 2003. Nonliteral speech acts in text and discourse. In A. C. Graesser, M. A. Gernsbacher, and S. R. Goldman (Eds.), Handbook of Discourse Processes (pp. 357-393). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ↗
Rachel Giora, 2003. On our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. New York: Oxford University Press. find
Roger J. Kreuz, 1996. The use of verbal irony: Cues and constraints. In J. S. Mio and A. N. Katz (Eds.), Metaphor: Implications and Applications (pp. 23-38). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Roger J. Kreuz, Megan L. Dress, and Kristen E. Link, 2006, July. Regional Differences in the Spontaneous Use of Sarcasm. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, Minneapolis, MN. find
Roger J. Kreuz and Sam Glucksberg, 1989. How to be sarcastic: The echoic reminder theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118:374-386. ↗
Roger J. Kreuz, Max A. Kassler, Lori Coppenrath, and Bonnie McLain Allen, 1999. Tag questions and common ground effects in the perception of verbal irony. Journal of Pragmatics, 31:1685-1700. ↗
Roger J. Kreuz and Kristen E. Link, 2002. Asymmetries in the use of verbal irony. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21:127-143. ↗
Roger J. Kreuz and Richard M. Roberts, 1995. Two cues for verbal irony: Hyperbole and the ironic tone of voice. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10:21-31. ↗
Geoffrey Nunberg, 2001. The Way we Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Akira Utsumi, 2000. Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony. Journal of Pragmatics, 32:1777-1806. find

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