The effects of speaker's mention on understanding of ironies.
Sperber and Wilson's (1981) Mention Theory gives an explanation of how to be understood an ironical utterance. Ironies are mentions of meaning conveying a derogatory attitude to the meaning mentioned (Sperber, 1984). The validity of this theory was evaluated in three experiments. All experiments required subjects to rate a sarcastic degree of an utterance. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the meaning of an utterance was interpreted as sarcastic when the utterance was positive, independent of speaker's mention. In Experiment 3, which examined the effect of the marker of mention, “You said…”, the utterance mentioned was interpreted as sarcastic. These results suggested that Mention Theory only partially give correct prediction of understanding of ironies. The addressee's inferences concerning speaker's intention was discussed.
Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussion in middle school literature study: (a) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how can overall literature instruction be characterized? (b) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how well do students achieve in the focal classroom? (c) What, if any, are the links between oral narrative and discussion? (d) If discussion and narrative co-occur, what sorts of oral narratives do narrators tell in discussions? and (e) If discussion and narrative co-occur, how can we characterize the overlap in terms of interaction? In the frequent conversational narrative discussions, where oral narrative and discussion discourse overlapped, teacher and students used various kinds of oral narrative genres to prime, sustain, ratify, and amplify discussion.