A History of Sarcasm: Effects of Balanced Use of Sarcasm in a Relationship

We often think of sarcasm as a way to be mean—and it usually is. For instance, sarcasm has been shown to be victimizing, offensive, and anger-provoking to its targets (Toplak & Katz 2000, Bowes & Katz 2011). However, the reported valence (or emotional value) of sarcasm improves dramatically when two members of a conversation share some common ground (knowledge, perceptions & experiences), becoming more appropriate ( Kreuz, Kassler, Coppenrath, & Allen 1999), understandable (Pexman & Zvaigzne 2004), and memorable (Gibbs 1986). To test the hypothesis that the balanced use of sarcasm can similarly improve its valence, we examined differences in pragmatic uses and impressions of sarcastic dialogues, with either a balanced (two sarcastic speakers) or unbalanced (one sarcastic speaker) use of sarcasm. We conclude that a history of sarcasm in a relationship does not reduce its negative valence

Politeness of Discourse and Vocabulary Teaching

The article is a review of the few existing publications dealing with problem of politeness of discourse in the process of vocabulary teaching. While communicatively teaching vocabulary, we should keep in mind that the goal is not just memorization by learners of lists of words, their semantics, combinability, etc. and successful performance of some exercises, but first of all it is the formation of learner’s ability to communicate in the target language (to apply the acquired vocabulary as efficiently as possible). From this point of view some issues of politeness of discourse are more crucial than the correct pronunciation of the word or some other aspect of linguistic correctness. Not only stylistic appropriateness makes our utterances polite, but also tact. Though “tact†is definitely not a linguistic category, it has to be taught in vocabulary classes. Minorities (taking into consideration their gender, age, race, nationality, physical defects, etc.), for example, should be labeled very carefully. What kind of utterance is considered to be polite / rude depends on the degree of formality / informality of the situation (the so-called “insider†or “outsider†talk). Language learners should also be aware that irony and sarcasm can turn any polite word into an impolite one. Language learners need both information about unpleasant words and strategies that will permit them to be not only linguistically, but also “politically†correct. Some of such strategies and ways to form them are discussed in the article.politeness of discourse, unpleasant words, slang, curse words, taboo words, irony, dropping the negative, strategies of political correctness.

Debbie, the Debate Bot of the Future

Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with companies switching to bot services for customer support, and new applications for users interested in casual conversation. One style of casual conversation is argument, many people love nothing more than a good argument. Moreover, there are a number of existing corpora of argumentative dialogues, annotated for agreement and disagreement, stance, sarcasm and argument quality. This paper introduces Debbie, a novel arguing bot, that selects arguments from conversational corpora, and aims to use them appropriately in context. We present an initial working prototype of Debbie, with some preliminary evaluation and describe future work.Comment: IWSDS 201

Online Shaming

Online shaming is a subject of import for social philosophy in the Internet age, and not simply because shaming seems generally bad. I argue that social philosophers are well-placed to address the imaginal relationships we entertain when we engage in social media; activity in cyberspace results in more relationships than one previously had, entailing new and more responsibilities, and our relational behaviors admit of ethical assessment. I consider the stresses of social media, including the indefinite expansion of our relationships and responsibilities, and the gap between the experiences of those shamed and the shamers’ appreciation of the magnitude of what they do when they shame; I connect these to the literature suggesting that some intuitions fail to guide our ethics. I conclude that we each have more power than we believe we do or than we think carefully about exerting in our online imaginal relations. Whether we are the shamers or the shamed, we are unable to control the extent to which intangible words in cyberspace take the form of imaginal relationships that burden or brighten our self-perceptions