Laura Alba-Juez
Full Professor of Linguistics, Ph.D
Specialist in Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis and Functional Linguistics
UNED - Madrid, Spain
WELCOME TO MY
PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE.
FROM: THE VARIABLES
OF THE EVALUATIVE FUNCTIONAL RELATION-SHIP: THE CASE OF HUMOROUS DISCOURSE
IN:
METAPRAGMATICS OF HUMOR
(p.13)
ALBA-JUEZ, LAURA
(2016)
02
“UNDOUBTEDLY, HUMOR AND IRONY ARE RELATED,
but by no means do they refer to the same phenomenon. Ironic utterances may be humorous or not and, similarly, humorous utterances may or may not be ironic. Thus, humor and irony share some characteristics, one of them being the fact that they can both be used for the expression of values, and that therefore they very often act as strong vehicles for stance-taking. As is the case with verbal irony, verbal humor may contain not only negative but also positive evaluative meaning, and considering that evaluation can have different manifestations, shades, and degrees, the stance hidden behind the joke may be placed at different points of the evaluation continuum –not just at the negative or positive poles– and can manifest at different linguistic levels and in different modes.”
04
FROM: PRAGMATICS: COGNITION, CONTEXT AND CULTURE
(p.36)
ALBA-JUEZ & MACKENZIE (2016)
"EXPLORING A LANGUAGE WITHOUT TAKING INTO ACCOUNT ITS PRAGMATIC ASPECTS
is like contemplating a flower without being able to smell its perfume: a great and fundamental part of the information that we should perceive is lost. Pragmatics is an extremely rich, healthy, and prosperous field of knowledge. We hope to have succeeded in making the readers enjoy the trip through all this richness, health, and prosperity.”
FROM:
THE MANY FACES AND PHASES OF EVALUATION. IN:
EVALUATION IN CONTEXT
(p.3-4)
ALBA-JUEZ & THOMPSON
(2014)
06
"ONE OF THE ASPECTS OF THE HUMAN MIND AND CULTURE THAT IS CERTAINLY MIRRORED IN LANGUAGE
is their system of values. But mirrors may have more than one face, and the system of values expressed by the different human cultures through their particular languages can certainly have many faces. The most long-established perspective on the human urge to externalize values verbally sees it in terms of an outward impulse from the individual, a form of self-expression. In more recent years, an equally compelling perspective has been elaborated which sees evaluation as essentially interpersonal: socially constructed and designed primarily, or at least as a major part of its function, to establish solidarity with the addressee.”
FROM:
ON THE CONVENTIO-NALIZATION OF VERBAL IRONY IN ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY
IN: PERSPECTIVAS PRAGMÁTICAS EN LINGÜÍSTICA APLICADA
(p.11)
ALBA-JUEZ
(1998)
08
"THE USE OF VERBAL IRONY DOES NOT ALWAYS REQUIRE THE WORKING OUT OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
on the part of the listener/reader. This argument is contrary to Grice's (and his followers') argument that a speaker who wants to convey an ironic meaning will always violate the Maxim of Quality and this will inevitably trigger conversational implicatures. The results of this study have thrown light on the fact that, even though the use of conversational implicatures is a frequent consequence of the use of ironic discourse, there is a considerable percentage of cases in which this explanation is not valid for the description of the ironic strategy being used by the ironist. In these cases, another of Grice's concepts, that of conventional implicature, is more useful that that of conversational implicature, for it is through the conventional implicatures of the utterance that the listener can understand the ironic intention.”
10
FROM: THE VARIABLES
OF THE EVALUATIVE RELATION-SHIP: THE CASE OF HUMOROUS DISCOURSE
IN:
METAPRAG-MATICS OF HUMOR (p.13)
ALBA-JUEZ, L.(2016)
"MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, THE EVALUATION OF SOME SITUATION, THING OR CHARACTER IS A KEY ELEMENT
to the interpretation of the humo-rous content of jokes or humorous narrations, and for this reason I propose that the stance/ evaluation component of humor be included as an element that permeates through all the knowledge resour-ces of humor, but that can be more specifically manifested (in the form of different markers or contextual-ization cues that trigger inferences) through the narrative strategy and language knowledge resources of the model.”
12
FROM: THE EVALUATIVE PALETTE OF VERBAL IRONY
IN:
EVALUATION IN CONTEXT
(p.101)
ALBA-JUEZ & ATTARDO
(2014)
so its analysis is no simple task. The positive/neutral/negative categories are not always so easily distinguished, for the ironist may opt for combining a positive and a negative evaluation in the same
utterance, in a similar fashion to the phenomenon occurring in the phrasal irony expressions which Partington (2011: 1789) places under the category of “evaluative oxymoron.”
"IRONY IS AS SLIPPERY A PHENOMENON AS A CAKE OF SOAP IN A BATHTUB,
01
“WORDS ARE NOT
JUST WORDS.
As speakers of a human language, we all know that our words can praise, hurt, convince or disappoint, among numerous other things. By way of illustration, if a friend told you that you are stupid, you would most likely report the event by saying that your friend insulted and therefore offended you, thereby referring more to the action(s) performed than to the actual words uttered by your friend. And indeed, by doing so you would be somehow expressing that what really affected you was what your friend DID to you with his words.”
03
FROM:
THE MANY FACES AND PHASES OF EVALUATION.
IN:
EVALUATION IN CONTEXT
(p.13)
ALBA-JUEZ & THOMPSON
(2014)
"WE NOW SEE AND THUS DEFINE EVALUATION AS A DYNAMICAL SUB-SYSTEM OF LANGUAGE,
permeating all linguistic levels and involving the expression of the speaker’s or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that s/he is talking about, which entails relational work including the (possible and prototypically expected and subsequent) response of the hearer or (potential) audience. This relational work is generally related to the speaker’s and/or the hearer’s personal, group, or cultural set of values.”
05
FROM: THE FUNCTIONS AND STRATEGIES OF IRONIC DISCOURSE: AN ANALYSIS
(p.588)
ALBA-JUEZ, LAURA
[1996 (2001)]
"THE STUDY OF VERBAL IRONY IS IN NO WAY DEFINITIVE NOR EXHAUSTIVE.
I am conscious of the fact that many questions remain unanswered, and that in spite of my attempts to characterise the phenomenon, it continues to be a mystery in many respects. But this is why, in my opinion, it is also fascinating. Irony is not only a topic of linguistic interest; it is also a philosophical problem, because life, in itself, is ironic. To study irony, therefore, may be very rewarding, for it may help us discover –or at least caress for a brief period of time– some of the mysteries of life.”
07
FROM: EVALUATION
IN THE HEADLINES
OF TABLOIDS AND BROAD-SHEETS: A COMPARATIVESTUDY
IN:
EVALUATION IN MEDIA DISCOURSE
(p.115-116)
ALBA-JUEZ, LAURA
(2017)
"BOTH SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES HAVE BEEN FOUND BETWEEN THE HEAD-LINES OF TABLOIDS AND BROADSHEETS.
The similarities might lead to the thought that broadsheets are undergoing a process of ‘tabloidization’ or at least that the differences between them are diminishing. And this is a process that might very well apply more to the headlines than to the body of the article, considering that the headlines are always meant to be eye-catching. The differences found, however, seem to indicate that this process is far from complete in the present state of affairs, since it has been made apparent that the broadsheet headlines make use of resources such as Invoked, Pragmatic Level evaluation, or pictures whose evaluative message does not coincide with the wording, in order to leave fewer inscribed marks than the tabloids, while the tabloids make more use of the Graduation resources, and appear to be more overt and coherent regarding their evaluative intentions. The marginal results obtained for some of the variables might confirm, however, that the distinction between tabloids and broadsheets is not so clear-cut or easily identified as might have been expected.”
09
"EVERYTHING PEOPLE DO, WHETHER THEY ARE SPEAKING OR NOT, OCCURS IN A CONTEXT.
Context has a powerful effect on discourse, not only for the hearer as he interprets a message but also for the speaker as she formulates it. Contexts are far from static: the contextual elements of any given situation may change once or several times in the course of a single conversation or any other type of discourse interaction. Even within a single utterance, the context is changed by what the speaker says, affecting both how she can complete her utterance and the ongoing interpretation by the hearer.”
11
"WHEN EXPRESSING EMOTIONS, PEOPLE NOT ONLY MAKE THEIR INTERNAL STATES VISIBLE, BUT ALSO
perform linguistic actions which are interpersonal in nature and have particular consequences. There is perhaps nothing more human than the verbal expression of emotion (animals may express certain basic emotions in non-verbal ways, but cannot talk about them!) and by doing so human beings reveal, and at the same time affect, certain aspects of the cognitive and social systems they form part of. It is high time the Humanities, and Linguistics in particular, paid more attention to them. We are now in the process of what might be labeled ‘a happy start’.”