Processamento de críticas e elogios irônicos e literais no português brasileiro

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the comprehension of ironic utterances by Brazilian Portuguese (BP) adult speakers in the context of experimental Psycholinguistics. Two subtypes of irony are considered and contrasted with literal criticisms and compliments: ironic criticism (= positive statements with intended negative meaning) and ironic compliment (= negative statements with intended positive meaning). The processing of ironic utterances has been investigated in several surveys based on English (NILSEN; GLENWRIGHT 2011; GLENWRIGHT; PEXMAN 2009; PEXMAN; GLENWRIGHT 2007; GIBBS 2000; COLSTON 1997; DEWS; WINNER 1995; among others). Regarding BP, although previous studies have addressed non-literal language processing in the context of experimental psycholinguistics (LAGE 2005; RICCI 2016; BARRETO 2017; AVELAR 2018), studies whose focus was specifically irony were not identified. Given that irony can convey both criticism and compliment, one question to be researched is to what extent the comprehension of an ironic statement (critical or complimentary) would be equivalent to the comprehension of a criticism or a literal compliment; another relevant question is the extent to which prosodic cues could influence the understanding of irony. The following questions were considered in this research: 1) are ironic criticisms and ironic compliments processed in a similar way? (GLENWRIGHT; PEXMAN 2007); 2) to what extent are literal criticisms perceived as more "offensive" than ironic criticisms? (“Tinge Hypothesis”, DEWS; WINNER 1995); 3) does the comprehension of ironic statements seem to be influenced by the way they are presented (reading versus listening)? To investigate these issues, two experiments were conducted: in Experiment 1, the reading and judgment of ironic statements was investigated; in Experiment 2, the statements were presented as auditory stimuli. In both cases, the participants were introduced to a short narrative, with two characters, whose outcome could be negative or positive. Each narrative was followed by a statement made by one of the characters in the story, which may be congruent or incongruous with the outcome of the situation. The independent variables were: discursive context (positive or negative event) and type of statement (congruent or incongruous with the context). The resulting experimental conditions were: (i) positive context + congruent statement (= literal compliment); (ii) positive context + incongruous statement (= ironic compliment); (iii) negative context + congruent statement (= literal criticism); and (iv) negative context + incongruous statement (= ironic criticism). The dependent variables were: reaction time (in reading or listening task) before the target statement and utterance judgment according to two scales: (i) sincerity of the character who utters the statement; and (ii) kindness of the statement according to the point of view of the receiving character. The results of Experiment 1 revealed statistically significant effects compatible with a greater difficulty in understanding irony when compared to literal utterances, and, between the two subtypes analyzed, ironic compliment seemed to be the most difficult to understand. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that the presentation of statements in an auditory way helps to understand irony. These results can be taken as indicative that information of a prosodic nature could provide relevant clues for the understanding of non-literal statements.