Does Irony Go Better With Friends?

Abstract

Common ground between speaker and addressee is thought to be important to comprehension of verbal irony (e.g., Gibbs, 1986). We investigated the effects of one type of common ground (solidary relationships, which are close, liking, and mutually supportive) on production and interpretation of ironic insults and ironic compliments. The relationship manipulation (solidary vs. nonsolidary) influenced participants' ratings of several pragmatic functions of irony, including humor and teasing. This manipulation was particularly important to the interpretation and production of ironic compliments and less important to ironic insults. We argue that a solidary relationship between speaker and addressee facilitates the metarepresentational inferences needed to understand irony.