Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm

Two studies using multimodal stimuli collected from television situation comedies show that there exist markers of irony and sarcasm which involve intonational and visual clues. Our first conclusion is that there exists no "ironical intonation" per se, but rather that pitch is a contrastive marker for irony or sarcasm. Our second conclusion is that there exists a facial expression, characterized as a "blank face," which is a visual marker of irony or sarcasm. We further discuss paracommunicative and metacommunicative alerts to ironicallsarcastic intent.