Sarcasm's Inversion of Meaning [Ryan Tarbet]

Sarcasm’s Inversion of Meaning:

Is sarcasm an assertion of the negation of the semantic content of a sentence and/or is it an expression of an evaluative attitude of a position?  Are those two things different?  Take for example the sarcastic utterances of:

1.       “Thanks for holding the door”

2.       “I never  eat cake frosting directly from the container”

First off, there’s the question as to whether or not you consider 1. and 2. sarcastic but what I want to discuss is how Elisabeth Camp approaches the inversion of meaning that occurs in sarcasm. 

                Camp makes a case for sarcasm in a way that mediates a semanticist approach, one which takes sarcasm to be a syntactic operator indicated by speaker-tone, and an expressivist approach, one that disregards the compositionality of an utterance in favor of the illocutionary force.  She argues that sarcasm, similar to metaphor, embodies a function in our use of language that cannot entirely be reduced to “what is said” nor to the illocutionary dimension of speech.  To me this seems like an obvious move, especially given that indirect speech as we have viewed it through Grice is an analysis of semantic content, context and illocutionary force.  Ultimately, the view attempts to break the traditional view that sarcasm is more than the negation of its semantic content.

                So, for example, is 1. Saying that the speaker is not thankful? Well, yes but that doesn’t seem to be the full story. 1. More accurately is drawing attention to the fact that the audience didn’t save the speaker a seat. It communicates the (passive aggressive) perlocutionary effect of shaming or embarrassment.  So, it seems like this utterance isn’t merely asserting “It’s not the case that I thank you for…” but rather it is drawing attention to where that utterance would be appropriate and contrasting it with what happened.   Here, Camp draws attention to some ignored instances of sarcasm where the inversion isn’t strictly semantic but takes place on a perlocutionary or illocutionary level.  Camp argues that much of the discussion on sarcasm has revolved around assertions, something like 2., and we ought to extend our gaze to more perplexing examples of verbal irony.

                I take her account of the inversion of perlocutionary effect or illocutionary force quite accurate in how we use sarcasm.  Does this account make sense?     

Camp, E.. (2012). Sarcasm, Pretense, and The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction. Noûs, 46(4), 587–634. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41682690