Sarcasm in american and british television comedies and dramas

Abstract

In the recent decades, many studies on the subject of sarcasm have been conducted, though not as abundantly as irony has been investigated into. However, the expression of sarcasm seems to be as relevant as the expression of irony in the general study of the main aspects and dimensions involved in the configuration of pragmatic meanings that are characteristic of conversational interactions. Sarcasm has often been intermingled with irony in the research conducted in different academic disciplines. Within linguistic studies, there is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are part of the same communicative phenomenon or whether they are related to each other hierarchically, such that irony may be viewed as constituting the superordinate category and sarcasm may be regarded as a manifestation of the former. In fact, the latter has been defined, in broad terms, “as an overtly aggressive type of irony” (Attardo, 2000:795). However, some other specialists, such as Barbe (1995), contend that the expression of either sarcasm or irony involves different, if not opposite, principles of pragmatic behaviour: on the one hand, an ‘ironic utterance’constitutes a ‘face-saving’ act; on the other, a sarcastic utterance is a ‘face-threatening act’ (cf. Brown and Levinson, 1987).