Are Irony and Metaphor Understood Differently?

Abstract

In 4 experiments we examined differences in how people understand ironic and metaphoric statements. Our hypothesis was that irony requires more complex inferencing to understand than does metaphor because irony reflects speakers' second-order, metarepresentational thoughts. We investigated the implications of this idea for how people process identical statements (e.g., "This one's really sharp") that had either ironic or metaphoric meaning in different contexts. Experiment 1 showed that people take longer to understand these statements when used ironically than when seen as metaphors. Experiment 2 revealed that people draw second-order metarepresentational inferences about speakers' intentions and beliefs when understanding ironies but not metaphors. Experiments 3 and 4 studied the processes and meaning products associated with understanding statements that were either simple ironies or metaphoric ironies. Overall, the data from these experiments lend support to the idea that irony is understood differently than metaphor partly because of the metarepresentational reasoning needed to infer ironic messages.