Subjectivity out of irony
-
Louis de Saussure
Abstract
Subjectivity plays an important role in how meaning is created and construed. It concerns the expression of self and the representation of a speaker's perspective or point of view in the interaction with somebody else. The subjectivity explored in this article concerns mainly one special form of self-awareness insofar as it is related to irony. The argument of this article will be carried out in three steps: We first will deal with the main linguistic theories regarding irony. This will lead us to the conclusion that irony — at least in some cases — involves a form of non-propositional knowledge that needs to be identified and captured for irony. In a second step, we will describe this type of non-propositional knowledge, in particular distinguishing it from propositional knowledge. The discussion of non-propositional knowledge as one marker of subjectivity will then lead us to discuss irony — beyond its semantic utterances — as a personal disposition. When we call utterances ironic we are referring to them as linguistic constructs and we deal with the respective content of their declarative statements, technically speaking, the proposition. In this contribution we are interested in showing how ironic utterances lead back to a personal disposition.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
