For my final exploring the field entry, I want to talk about an article that gives me hope that sarcasm actually will occur in the conversations I will be setting up for my comp next year. At the same time, it also makes me rethink my design and makes me wonder if perhaps I want to use friends AND "strangers", or some different combination of participants, but that is something for me to ponder about over the summer and not something to ramble on about here. The main focus about Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.'s article Irony in Talk Among Friends for me was the overwhelming prevalence of sarcastic exchanges in conversations between college student's and their friends.
For his study, Gibbs set up college students into 10 minute conversations with their friends, recorded the conversations and analyzed it look for verbal irony. One of the types of irony he found was sarcasm. Gibbs flat out states that coding conversations for irony is a subjective matter, but he defines sarcasm as "where speakers spoke positively to convey a more negative impact" (p. 12).
In his overall results, Gibbs found that 8% of the conversations were made up of ironic utterances. 31% of sarcastic remarks were about the present situation the participants were instructed to discuss, 21% were about the recipient, 8% were about other people not involved in the conversation, and 14% referred to something that had taken place in the past. Since Gibbs' participants were already friends, these references were easily understood. Gibbs also noted that with all ironic utterances, the intonation of voice with which the statement was said was important to decoding the statement as ironic, though an exact pattern did not necessarily exist.
So, onto the big picture things from this article. Sarcastic statements are fairly prevalent in conversations among friends. Also, the participants relied on common ground and verbal cues to portray and comprehend the sarcastic utterances. This follows along with what has been said all along, that common ground is almost always necessary to insure sarcasm is understood correctly. It also leads us to believe that something has to happen over CMC to take the place of these verbal cues to indicate sarcasm. This also brings up some questions for me to mull over. These participants were already friends when the study took place, so as I said before, I wonder if I need to use friends for my study, or if a topic about something common to all Allegheny students will be enough to induce the level of comfort and common ground necessary to make enough sarcasm occur. At this point, I see just how far I've come and yet how much farther I have to go.
Gibbs, R. W. Jr. (2000). Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol,
15(1&2), 5-27.
Comments (1)
You know you are making great progress on your project when you identify how much you don't yet know. Students who suggest they have "run out" of articles or can't find any have most likely not yet tapped into key concepts and broader connections for their work. So, it's good to know you have a lot left to do. I really like your specificity in terms of looking for linguistic markers of sarcasm in CMC...I think that is a precise, manageable topic for your comp. The manipulations, then, should primarily be ones that you think will increase sarcasm. Let's keep talking.
Posted by Prof Knupsky | April 28, 2009 9:13 AM
Posted on April 28, 2009 09:13