How do we identify sarcasm?

By Will Jacobs

Sarcasm has been around as long as we can remember but how do we know when someone is being sarcastic or genuinely serious? Many theorists have given their suggestions as to how we identify sarcasm.

According to Richard Chin, the writer of an article called, 'The Science of Sarcasm? Yeah, Right', sarcasm has developed over time due to phrases which are used to be sarcastic, have changed. For example, Richard Chin claims that the phrase 'big deal' used to be a positive way of responding to someone but has since been peojorated to be a negative way of telling someone what they've mentioned is not so impressive. John Haiman, a linguist at Macalester College revealed he believes that sarcasm is "the primary language" in our society. This would imply it's just something that's happened and it takes no thought process in order to be sarcastic or identify it.

Christine Liebrecht a PHD Candidate who studies stylistic feature language intensity wrote an article called, "The perfect solution for detecting sarcasm in tweets #not". This was great insight for readers to find out how we can detect sarcasm online. Liebrecht took us through her step by step journey to finding what sarcastic tweets have in common. On Twitter, Christine searched for the hashtag #sarcasm which exposed hundreds of sarcastic tweets. The one thing Liebrecht found the tweets had in common was they were usually signalled by hyperbole. They also used exclamations. Attardo et all, (a full professor at Texas A&M University–Commerce), agreed that a tweet using hyperbole is easier to identify than one without. For example, he argued that if it was a rainy day, if someone wrote "fantastic weather", the reader would be able to identify the intended sarcasm with more ease rather than if someone wrote, 'the weather is good'.

On the 23rd of May, 2005, an article called 'How Does The Brain Handle Sarcasm?' was published on a site where articles are written by professional journalists from JAMA, BMJ, Lancet, BMA, revealed that Israeli psychologists who led the research shared their theory that in order for sarcasm to work, the listener must understand the speakers intentions in the context of the siutation. They went on further to say autistic people have problems understanding irony as their "theory of mind" is limited so they don't understand sarcasm.

Overall I have learnt that verbally, we can identify sarcasm by the phrase which is used. The majority of the time the phrase has been pejorated over time or like written sarcasm, uses hyperbole which makes it seem odd or over exaggerated. Some theorists believe that sarcasm is something that comes naturally and we pick up without any intention while others say it is vital that you know the context and understand what the speaker is trying to say in order to fully get sarcasm.

References

'The science of Sarcasm? Yeah, right' - Richard Chin, November 14, 2011.

'The perfect solution for detecting sarcasm in tweets #not' - Christine Liebrecht, Feb 1, 2013.

'How Does The Brain Handle Sarcasm?' - May 23rd, 2005