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Notes
Terminology: I take “meiosis” and “hyperbole” to be synonymous with “understatement” and “overstatement” respectively. I use the latter more transparent, less formal terms in the text.
“In understatement the expressed meaning is mild, and the intended meaning intense …. In overstatement, … the reverse is true.” (O'Conner 1965: 407). Some take under- and overstatement to be saying less or more than one has a right to say, or one could say, or what might have been said, or what is expected, or what one believes to be true. These alternatives are all less helpful for my purposes than the less-/more-than-one-means formulation.
The accounts that I will offer fit many or most generally recognized paradigmatic examples of these figures of speech. I will not be concerned if they conflict with intuitions about other cases. I am proposing a coherent and I hope illuminating partial taxonomy of figures of speech, not attempting to capture the, or any, ordinary notion(s) of understatement and overstatement.
If Toto simply meant (f) literally and straightforwardly, if he is reporting no more than a vague impression that he is no longer in Kansas, because things are somewhat different from how they were, the utterance counts as an understatement only in the sense of saying less than is true. It is a figurative understatement if Toto meant to imply something like: “… it is not just that we are in Nebraska or Colorado, or even New York or London! We are really, really, not in Kansas!”.
(g) and (h) are massive understatements of how ruinous a nuclear bomb would be. Understood as a comment on (g), (h) is an understatement of how understated (g) is.
Some Grice influenced theorists will understand (1) to mean, literally, that there are at least a couple of cops on the corner, possibly more. On this view (1) is literally true in the situation I envisage and the speaker means it literally. (Likewise for Toto’s “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”) I count the utterance of (1) a figure of speech nonetheless. The point of the speaker’s assertion, in this context, is not to affirm the literal truth of (1) (that there are two or more cops on the corner); she is claiming that there are not just two cops there but lots more. Wayne Davis (2014: §3) observes that when speaking figuratively one generally does not mean what one says, but he cites litotes as an exception. Litotes (e.g. “I am not opposed …” in place of “I am in favor …”) are usually classified as understatements. (An at least reading seems not to be available for “The number of cops is two,” or for “A couple” in answer to the question, “How many cops are there?”) Many but not all understatements, and some overstatements, are arguably like (1) in these respects.
We can allow some flexibility in the notion of explicit content. A first thought will be that it is what the sentence uttered, understood literally, means in the context. On the Gricean view mentioned above (note 5), the explicit content of (1) would be (1a) that there are at least a couple of cops on the corner. That there are no more than a couple is merely a common implicature of utterances of (1), these Griceans will say, not part of its meaning. But even on the Gricean view, we can reasonably count (1b) that there are a couple of cops there and no more, as the explicit content of (1), as “what the speaker says.” The implicature (if that is what it is) is a generalized one. (Cf. e.g., Levinson 2000; Horn 2004.) It is present in utterances of (1) by default, in the absence of any particular contextual interference. Taken literally, (1) not only means what it does but, absent a special context, carries the implicature that there are no more than two cops on the corner. I take this to justify understanding (1b) as the speaker’s explicit content, in our example. [(1a) would work for our purposes, however, with some modification of the discussion below.] I am following the lead of several linguists here: “A generalized implicature is, in effect, a default inference, one that captures our intuitions about a preferred or normal interpretation.” (Levinson 2000: p.11). “What is said in an utterance is systematically underdetermined by the linguistic content of what is uttered.” (Horn 2004: 19–20). See also Levinson 2000: §3.2.1, “Grice’s Circle: Implicatural Contributions to ‘What Is Said’” and §3.2.6 “Generality Narrowing.” For further discussion see Carston (2002) and Noveck and Sperber (2012).
More accurately, the magnitude that figures in the explicit content is less than, smaller than, the magnitude that figures in the assertive content.
When (1) is an understatement and (2) an overstatement. In certain circumstances (1) might be an overstatement and (2) an understatement, as we shall see.
Cf. the discussion in Horn (2004: §3, §5) of “It’s not warm, it’s hot.”
We will think of (3) mainly as an overstatement if we are used to and expect astronomical medical bills, but have suddenly acquired good health insurance, so the hospitalization cost (only), say, $500, rather than the expected thousands. The speaker utters (3) by way of pointing out that, surprisingly, the expense was trivial. “We had to spend a few dollars for a month’s hospitalization—big deal! Well, yes, it was $500; I exaggerated. No matter!”.
In some cases the words used imply that the salient contrast lies in one direction on the relevant scale or the other, regardless of the context. The salient contrast of “There are few X’s” (taken literally) is probably that there are more than a few; that of “There are a few X’s” is likely to be that there are none. The assertive content of both utterances is probably approximately the same. “There are only a couple of cops …” apart from its context, indicates that the salient contrast is that there are more than that, although “There are a couple of cops …” can go either way.
But see §6 below.
We might stretch the notion of echoing further than Wilson and Sperber probably intend to, but at the risk of rendering it vacuous. Even if there was no thought at all about cops on the corner until a speaker notices them and utters (1), it probably was assumed, implicitly, that, as usual, there were fewer than “quite a few” there. Might the speaker be “echoing” this tacit assumption? I don’t rule out the possibility of her expressing something like sarcasm concerning it. Even if the people whom the speaker of (21) or (22) is addressing had no inkling of the tsunami and don’t know what tsunamis are, they presumably assumed, implicitly, that no significant natural disaster happened that morning. Might the speaker have echoed this assumption? I wouldn’t expect Wilson and Sperber to go this far. But I am not sure that there is a non-arbitrary way of drawing the line.
Adressees might detect from her tone of voice that she means to be ironic, however, even if they don’t understand what she is getting at.
“As Gibbs points out, in the course of its history, the term ‘irony’ has been applied to a very wide range of loosely related phenomena. … What this diversity clearly shows is that irony is not a natural kind. For Gibbs, this ‘poses an important challenge for cognitive science theories of irony’; but why assume that the goal of a cognitive science theory of irony should be to capture the very broad and vague extension of the ordinary language sense of the term?” (Wilson 2014).
Wilson (2014) has recently denied that overstatement is a kind of irony, for reasons different from, though not unrelated to mine.
Irene’s utterance then amounts to an indirect rather than a direct quotation of Terry’s claim, but still, I take it, an “echoing” of his opinion. Cf. Wilson and Sperber (1992), who consider an example (which they attribute to Paola Fanutza) of exaggeration involving irony, from Jane Austin’s Emma. Emma echoes opinions expressed by Mr. Knightley, and in doing so caricatures them. I would understand this as an instance of ironic understatement, like my last example, as well as exaggerating caricature. Thanks to Victor Durà-Vilà (personal communication) for a similar (hypothetical) example, although he didn’t construe it as I would (i.e. as similar to some of my examples).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Sarah Buss, Victor Durà-Vilà, David Hills, Mihaela Popa, Richmond Thomason, and two anonymous referees.
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An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0820-2.
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Walton, K.L. Meiosis, hyperbole, irony. Philos Stud 174, 105–120 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0546-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0546-6