Acoustic Representation of Prosodic Cues during the Production of Persian Irony and Sarcasm in Spontaneous Discourse

Objective: The present study has tackled to assess the interaction between lexical-syntactic and prosodic cues of irony, and the fact that how the cues are represented during the production of irony and sarcasm (as one of highly functional irony subtypes) in spontaneous discourse through an auditory modality. Methods: For this purpose, spontaneously produced ironic and non-ironic (baseline) utterances via pairs of friends in conversational dyads during and after watching video stimuli were elicited and analyzed for pragmatic, prosodic contrasts. Thereupon any pragmatic strategies (irony subtypes), the observed lexical-syntactic cues accompanied by the prosodic features of the target utterances coded considering TOBI system and using Praat software, were annotated manually in different ELAN tiers. Results: The statistic results showed higher values of auditory characteristics in ironic utterances versus baseline utterances. The ultimate probing indicated that the prosodic cues, in production task of Persian irony, operate together as a single system and contribute to intelligibility and detection of an ironic speech even in the absence of verbal markers. Furthermore, there were no correlated patterns between certain types of irony and certain pitch patterns and intonational contours. Conclusions: The results of the present research can be used in Persian language classes in schools and universities.