Inferring meanings that are not intended: Speakers’ intentions and irony comprehension

Abstract

Most cases of verbal irony involve a situation in which a speaker says one thing and deliberately intends for his or her listener to infer an ironic meaning (e.g., “What lovely weather!” spoken in the midst of a downpour). However, there are occasions when listeners infer ironic meanings for utterances even though speakers do not intend their utterances to convey irony. For example, listeners may infer that the expression “I would never be involved in any cheating” may have an ironic meaning if the speaker, unbeknownst to him or her, actually contributed to someone's cheating in a class exam. Numerous instances of dramatic irony in literature are based on situations like this in which listeners or readers recognize the unintended irony in what speakers say. We report the results of four experiments to show that people can recognize ironic meanings that are not intended by speakers and that processing unintended irony can be done quite easily precisely because speakers’ utterances, unbeknownst to them, spontaneously create ironic situations. These findings have significant implications for psycholinguistic theories of irony comprehension and, more generally, for intentional theories of ordinary language use.