Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
McCarthy, Michael; Brian Clancy & Elaine Vaughan
24th International Association for World Englishes
Understatement in British and Irish English conversations
Limerick, Ireland
Oral Presentation
2019
()
0
Optional Fields
20-JUN-19
22-JUN-19
This paper looks at understatement in corpora of spoken British and Irish English and challenges the notion of peripherality by stressing the commonality of rhetorical strategy in the two varieties. Understatement presents general problems to researchers in the fields of pragmatics and in corpus linguistics; here we address some of those problems by using corpora to underpin pragmatic analysis. Foremost among the problems is defining understatement and its place in relation to previously more thoroughly researched areas of pragmatics such as overstatement and irony. While we follow the general principle that both hyperbole and understatement involve some distortion of the truth or factuality, we see no reason to presuppose that Leech’s (2014) view that hyperbole should generally correlate with polite beliefs and understatement with impolite ones holds firm, since evaluations are context-sensitive and may depend on other factors such as humorous intent or sarcasm. With regard to corpus linguistics, the main problem is the non-automatic retrieval of acts of understatement, a problem which has been addressed with some success in the study of hyperbole and types of idioms. Two recourses are open to the analyst: ‘reading’ the corpus data with manual retrieval of instances of understatement, and searches for lexical items likely to signal understatement, such as downtoners. We report on results of both types of analyses and further look at meta-pragmatic utterances indicating speakers’ awareness of understatement. We also bring listener reception and response to the fore.
Failte Ireland