PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS OF HUMOR, SARCASM, AND IRONY IN SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTIONS

This analytical pilot explains how humor, sarcasm, and verbal irony can accomplish different pragmatic tasks in social-media interaction. Method: Thirty explicitly constructed, context-rich exchanges (ten provisionally illustrating each focal phenomenon) were examined through conversational implicature, speech-act theory, (im)politeness, and cyberpragmatics. The examples are researcher-designed demonstrations, not quotations from real users or a sampled platform corpus. Results: The coding illustrates affiliative joking, tension management, face-saving criticism, ridicule, stance-taking, norm enforcement, and repair as possible interactional outcomes. Contrastive readings show that the same words can enact solidarity or hostility depending on relationship, audience, reply context, and visual cues. Conclusion: Humor is an interactional effect, whereas sarcasm and irony are inference-sensitive strategies that may overlap with humor but need not do so. The pilot proposes a transparent coding protocol for subsequent validation with consent-appropriate, traceable social-media data.