The combined knowledge of word meanings and grammatical rules does not allow a listener to grasp the intended meaning of a speaker's utterance. Pragmatic inferences on the part of the listener are also required. The present work focuses on the processing of ironic utterances (imagine a slow day being described as "really productive") because these clearly require the listener to go beyond the l...

Irony is an important device in human communication, both in everyday spoken conversations as well as in written texts including books, websites, chats, reviews, and Twitter messages among others. Specific cases of irony and sarcasm have been studied in different contexts but, to the best of our knowledge, only recently the first publicly available corpus including annotations about whether a t...

Kenya over the last few decades, and the change from a nomadic lifestyle to communally owned ranches, wildlife in the Samburu District is under threat from deforestation, land degradation, overgrazing by livestock, and unsustainable water use. Alexander Njue, who is also involved in a separate Earthwatchsponsored project studying the wildlife habitats in this area, hopes that wildlife can also ...

in the persian eloquence, the imagination forms mainly comprise simile and metaphor. however, metonymy and irony as well are discussed under the same title. although in persian eloquence, rhetoric discusses such four important subjects, it is somewhat different in the western eloquence. the present study deals in brief with these four subjects. although the word metonymy can be considered as th...

Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an ironic tone of voice. Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in written form, revealed only a difference in amplitude variabili...