Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A Zits on the difficulty of interpreting brief responses when you don’t have the full context of the responses or knowledge of the speaker’s intentions — and especially when the speaker is a stereotypically laconic teenager:

Sarcasm? Irony? Rhetorical question?

[Added December 28, discussion by Mark Liberman and commenters on Language Log: 12/27/10: Txt and context (link), 12/27/10: Oh great (link)]

This entry was posted on December 26, 2010 at 8:29 am and is filed under Language of teenagers, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.