Attaching Feelings and Emotions to Propositions. Some Insights on Irony and Internet Communication

Abstract

Feelings and emotions, typically non-propositional, play an important part in the eventual quality of the interpretations to which they are attached. However, relevance theory has preferred to focus on how hearers build up propositions that fill the gap between what is meant and what is eventually inter-preted (Carston 2002). These are easier to handle, possess a mental representation and are a genuine ob-ject of analysis for linguistics (Chapman 2001, García-Carpintero 2010, Moeschler 2009). In this paper, a review is provided of several ways in which feelings and emotions play an important part in the even-tual quality of interpretations, specifically focusing on irony (Yus 2016a, 2016b) and Internet-mediated communication (Yus 2016c, forthcoming).