Abstract
This paper sets up to show how irony and reservations are explicitated in online media discourse, comparing their realizations in French and Hebrew online op-eds in leading journals. A corpus-based qualitative and quantitative analysis relies on two sets of big corpora for each language. The pragmatic analysis distinguishes between explicitating self- and other's presumed ironic intents, the target of irony, its locus and overall speaker's meanings. The findings indicate that the French data-set uses the verb ironiser, which has no comparable equivalent in Hebrew. More puzzling are the similarities between the two data-sets: both in French and in Hebrew journalists choose to explicitate irony and reservations, and they do so using similar discursive patterns. Conflicting forces are at play: interpretation paths are opened by irony, and are then narrowed down by the journalist's interpretations. The results are interpreted in terms of informativeness, accountability and commitment to speaker's meaning.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-29 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| Journal | Contrastive Pragmatics |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Elda Weizman, 2022.
Funding
This paper is dedicated to the late Prof. Shoshana Blum-Kulka, my teacher, advisor, colleague and friend, with deep appreciation for her guidance and inspiration. I am most grateful to Prof. Il-Il Yatziv-Malibert for delving with me into the context of the French data, and to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this paper.
Keywords
- French journalistic discourse
- Hebrew journalistic discourse
- accountability
- explicitation
- informativeness
- irony
- online op-eds
- redundancy