Cruel to be Kind and Kind to be Cruel: Sarcasm, Banter and Social Relations

The present paper is concerned with the knowledge or cognitive representations which individuals must possess in order to understand utterances occurring in conversations. We examined Brown and Levinson's (1978) model which reconciles the Cooperative Principle of Grice (1975) with the face-wants of conversational interactants by relativising the operation of abstract principles of conversation to aspects of the social relationship between the speaker and hearer. In an empirical study of ironic sarcasm and banter, Brown and Levinson's model is found to require an additional relationship parameter, ‘relationship affect’, to account for the ways in which neutral observers interpret counter-to-fact insults and compliments. As predicted, the literal meanings of utterances are also found to influence observers' cognitive representations of the relationship between speaker and hearer. However, unexpected correlations among the relationship variables suggest that the model's additivity assumption may need to be relinquished.