Mark Liberman did an interesting post in his Language Log. He found six natural examples of people saying “Oh, Great” in all different kinds of situations and asks if they sound ironic. The bottom line is that people can’t really tell, and they make a lot of mistakes. So, does that mean that there is no such thing as an ironic tone of voice?
That’s a pretty basic question, actually. Do we express things like irony and sarcasm in our intonation? And, if we do, how? Strangely enough, we don’t really know. Or, rather, we cannot put our finger on how properties like irony and sarcasm are expressed in the human voice.
Personally, my gut feeling is that “Of course we have an ironic tone of voice.” But, that’s very different from knowing. And, it’s also very much less than knowing what an ironic tone of voice is. If we knew what it was, we could measure it and synthesize it.
The thing is, there are a lot of possible explanations for Mark’s little experiment:
- The recordings were taken from the “Switchboard” corpus. That corpus was recorded by pairing up two people who didn’t know each other and asking them to talk. As a result, perhaps they don’t really care about what the other person’s story. So, maybe when they are saying “Oh, Great!” in a supposedly supportive, non-ironic way, they are just following a social convention: just pretending to be enthusiastic. Likewise when they are being ironic. So, maybe irony exists, but those examples are all in the grey netherworld of half-hearted irony and half-hearted support.
- We don’t know these people that we listen to. Maybe we have to calibrate our ears for a person before we can detect irony. Maybe irony is all about being too enthusiastic compared to your personal “normal”, and maybe different people have a drastically different “normal”.
- We don’t see or hear much context. Maybe irony is some kind of mismatch between the words and the intonation, and we just don’t get enough of what is happening before and after to make the necessary comparison.
- Maybe the irony is so obvious from the context that people don’t feel the need to signal it in the intonation. After all, if the conversation goes like this A: “…and when I got home, the dog barfed over my carpet.” B:”Oh, great!” you can either believe that person B is being ironic, or else you can believe that they are rather strange. And, maybe we don’t allow ourselves to believe they are that strange, therefore (we conclude) they must be ironic.
The hard part is designing an experiment that eliminates all the possibilities, not just the five that I was able to think about in a few minutes. I’ll leave that as an exercise to my readers. How can you prove that irony exists, in an experiment that eliminates all reasonable possibilities?