
Marta DynelUniversity of Łódź · Chair of Pragmatics
Marta Dynel
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130
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Introduction
Thank you for taking an interest in my work! In order to get access to the full texts (author versions) of most of my papers, please visit
http://martadynel.com/publications/ or follow the links to the publishers' websites, where Open Access texts are available.
Skills and Expertise
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September 2020 - August 2025
Publications
Publications (130)
This article explores children's and adults’ online fandom and engagement with the children's animated television programme Bluey. This Australian cartoon has proven extremely popular worldwide with its primary recipients, that is children, and has also received significant attention and positive evaluation from parents, who – we suggest – offer a...
This article reports the findings of a diachronic sociopragmatic study on the politically loaded Italian hashtag #HaStatoPutin based on an automatically generated corpus of tweets ( N = 31,334), encompassing two datasets from before and after what Putin originally called Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine that commenced on 24 February...
This paper contributes to the fledgling pragmatic research on social media swearing. The concept of “hashtag swearing” is proposed to capture the practice of using hashtags centred on swear words. The empirical focus is on tweets marked with #FuckPutin and submitted in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, the article repo...
This paper discusses metalanguage, metadiscourse, metacommunication and meta-
pragmatics testifying to users’ conscious awareness enacted in human-AI interactions, based on a corpus of posts sent to Reddit’s r/ChatGPT. The emphasis falls on users’ foci of attention as they perform linguistic tests on ChatGPT and on how the “meta” practices manifest...
This paper explores the interactional pragmatic characteristics of multimodal memetic content facilitated by Twitter affordances, notably the functions of retweeting and quote tweeting. These Twitter affordances enable reposting a previous multimodal tweet (with or without a preceding commentary), which is conducive to nested memetic posts involvin...
This paper contributes to the nascent research on Internet memes examined as items of (de)legitimising discourse, its empirical focus being memes addressing NFTs (non-fungible tokens). The mystifying NFT trade became hype in 2021, attracting massive media coverage and stimulating heated discussion across social media, which includes memetic content...
This entry aims to chart the landscape of impoliteness research on social media. Impoliteness is conceptualized as a theoretical framework with which to capture discursive aggression. Impoliteness is prevalent across social media, facilitated by their affordances. A number of key issues and notions relevant to pragmatic research on social media imp...
ChatGPT caused a worldwide sensation upon its launch, as evidenced by the extensive coverage across traditional and new media. This paper delves into the diverse evaluative discourses about this AI chatbot both in YouTube news videos (originally, television broadcasts) and in user comments facilitated by YouTube’s interactivity. The qualitative-qua...
This study investigates international users’ reception of a dark-humour meme tweeted by Ukraine’s governmental Twitter (X) account on 7 December 2021 as part of its exceptional cultural practice of posting humorous memes. Tweeters’ responses to the ‘headaches meme’ are examined through a discourse-analytic lens. An emphasis is placed on the appreci...
The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought offers the first comprehensive collection of chapters in multidisciplinary irony scholarship. These chapters explore the significance of irony, both verbal and situational, in language, thought, human action, and artistic expression. They cover five main themes: the scope of irony in human experience; iro...
Despite the abundance of research into conspiracy theories, including multiple studies of Covid-19 conspiracy theories in particular, user reactions to conspiracy theories are an underexplored area of social media discourse. This study aims to fill this gap by examining a dataset of humorous responses to proliferating COVID-19 conspiracy theories b...
Taking as its point of departure a fine-tuned definition of an Internet meme (vis-à-vis a memetic construct), this paper reports the findings of the first diachronic study of memes, the focus being on mask memes on the vast COVID-19 mask memescape evolving in the wake of the pandemic, relative to the changing socio-political situation. The study ca...
While online deception has attracted a lot of attention in psychology and communication studies, not much has been written about the formal features of this phenomenon from the vantage point of linguistics or philosophy. Advocating the notion of multimodal deception, this chapter aims to address this gap and takes a pragmatic perspective on social...
This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as ‘Black Lives Matter memes’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter memes’. The central aim is to flesh out the memetic trends representing the discourses and ideologies on the Black and blue memescape, which is explored in the wake of the mos...
This paper postulates a distinction between two types of discursive aggression in the context of humour production. This theoretical argument is supported by a qualitative (meta)pragmatic analysis of posts on the RoastMe subreddit devoted to an online community's original humorous practice based on jocular insults. The study of emic (community memb...
With a focus on the online phenomena of scamming and scambaiting, this article explores users’ communicative activities on Reddit’s r/scambait subreddit. Drawing on a representative corpus viewed through grounded theory, we establish the basic categories of posts and then unpack those further to reveal the deceptive practices being undertaken by bo...
This paper gives a theoretical introduction to the pragmatic research on the communication of public humour in traditional and new media, notably on social media. It discusses some of the central problems relevant to humour research and media communication. It describes, among other things, how the technological affordances of traditional and new m...
This paper addresses theoretical and methodological issues central to the study of insults (realised ad hoc or as rituals) on social media. After revisiting the well-entrenched but problematic distinction between personal insults and ritual insults, a proposal is made to distinguish between genuine insults, which are intended to offend the target (...
Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatica...
This paper explores the nature of public tweets posted on the
ShitMyReviewersSay (@YourPaperSucks) Twitter account. The focus is on the
content of recontextualized extracts from peer reviews, as well as the formal
properties and the socio-pragmatic functions of the sharing practice on Twitter.
The examination of a corpus of tweets (n = 397) yields...
This paper gives a comprehensive account of a humorous practice on the IncelTears subreddit, whose aim is to poke fun at, and give a social commentary on, the notorious online community of incels (hateful involuntary celibate men). Based on a representative corpus, the predominant categories of user-generated multimodal items are teased out relativ...
Fast food chain Wendy's has a reputation for its salient humorous promotional campaign on Twitter involving snappy posts commonly called“roasting”. Based on a corpus of tweets posted by Wendy's and duly metapragmatically labelled“roast(ing)”, this paper examines the nature of the company's humour on Twitter. It is thus shown that only some part of...
This article reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative study of seemingly aggressive but inherently benevolent humorous jibes that involve the sexualisation of women in the RoastMe practice performed by a growing social media community on Reddit. Based on a corpus of jocular insults, six forms of sexualisation comments are proposed: hy...
This paper offers a cross-cultural contrastive study of what we term ‘nation memes’. These are humorous internet memes which refer to a particular country/nation. Our analysis of cultural scripts in memes related to Switzerland is based on a tripartite corpus of digital items shared by Polish, Swiss and international communities. By adopting a grou...
This article gives an eclectic theoretical account of deception in multimodal film narrative in the light of the pragmatics of film discourse, the cognitive philosophy of film, multimodal analysis, studies of fictional narrative and – last but not least – the philosophy of lying and deception. Critically addressing the extant literature, a range or...
This paper addresses the topic of social media users’ polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in the context of a threat of a regime. The focus of attention is political humour on the r/HongKong subreddit, specifically the posts pertinent to the ong...
This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal a...
This article offers a qualitative and quantitative socio-cultural examination of RoastMe, a peculiar humorous practice deployed on Reddit and reposted on various social media. First, RoastMe is characterized from the emic (user) perspective and conceptualized in the light of humor theory (superiority and incongruity approaches). RoastMe consists in...
Camilla Vásquez, Language, creativity and humour online. London: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 190. Pb. £29. - Marta Dynel
Taking as its point of departure a neo-Gricean definition of irony, this article critically revisits the proposal of non-deliberate and unintentional irony, which is shown to address a variety of phenomena captured under the “irony” label. In the light of this critique, a refined version of the production-reception model of the figure of irony is e...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024384119302268?dgcid=author
At first blush, the notions of humour and deception (together with lying, 1 its salient type) may be considered to be incompatible, if not mutually exclusive. Deception is no laughing matter, because it carries negative interpersonal repercussions (if it should be discovered) and is typically regarded as being immoral and manipulative (e.g., Barnes...
This paper gives the first academic description of RoastMe e a prevalent, but hitherto unexplored, humorous practice formed on Reddit and re-posted on various social media, notably Imgur e in the light of the relevant socio-pragmatic literature on humour and (im) politeness. Taking into account the emic perspective of the RoastMe community of pract...
This paper aims to distil the essence of deception performed by means of withholding information, a topic hitherto largely neglected in the psychological, linguistic, and philosophical research on deception. First, the key conditions for deceptively withholding information are specified. Second, several notions related to deceptively withholding in...
This essay offers insights into the problematic notions of irony, sarcasm and mock politeness, inspired by Charlotte Taylor’s recent monograph Mock Politeness in English and Italian. A Corpus-Assisted Metalanguage Analysis. Different understandings of the concept of mock politeness, as well as sarcasm and irony, are succinctly depicted. Some explan...
This article is meant to give a state-of-the-art picture of cognitive linguistic studies on humour. Cognitive linguistics has had an immense impact on the development of humour research and, importantly, humour theory over the past few decades. On the one hand, linguists, philosophers and psychologists working in the field of humour research have p...
The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter is the first book-length study analysing irony and banter together. This approach, inherited from Geoffrey Leech’s research, implies that the two notions are intrinsically related. In this thought-provoking volume, the various contributors (linguists, stylisticians, discourse analysts and literary scholars), while...
In this article, we examine dark humour in Internet posts commenting on an online Italian newspaper report published by Il Fatto Quotidiano and devoted to the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice. The analysis focuses on the linguistic forms and socio-pragmatic functions of this dark humour in the wake of the tragedy. We argue that the creative humorous p...
Professionals and individuals who invest in equity markets rely on financial analysts’ recommendations and reports to decide on what to invest in and when to trade. This study examines the role of two groups of communication strategies, evaluation markers and mitigators, in establishing analysts’ credibility. The sample consists of 80 reports writt...
This book deals with the construction of diverse forms of humor in everyday oral, written, and mediatized interactions. It sheds light on the differences and, most importantly, the similarities in the production of interactional humor in face-to-face and various technology-mediated forms of communication, including scripted and non-scripted situati...
This introductory article gives a state-of-the-art picture of the research on conversational humour in cultural contexts. The most important categories of conversational humour are briefly introduced, followed by an overview of the existing research on conversational humour within and across languages and cultures. The focus is both on topical stra...
This paper addresses a thorny theoretical problem concerning the workings of conversational humour, which is frequently seen as a special mode/frame of communication but, simultaneously, as a vehicle for communicating meanings outside this frame. The first aim is to tease out the different terms prevalent in humour studies that attempt to capture t...
Drawing on a corpus of academic examples, this paper addresses the vexing notion of “verisimilar irony” from a philosophical-pragmatic perspective. This species of irony escapes a neo-Gricean definition of prototypical irony based on the assumption that the speaker utters what he/she believes to be false (cf. untruthfulness) in order to convey an i...
This chapter presents a new look at the concepts of participation structure and receiver-oriented design of messages in social media, where the traditional dyadic model of communication is largely inapplicable. This fact necessitates new frameworks of participation in order to capture the nature of multi-party interactions on various social media p...
Companies listed in stock exchanges need to actively engage with investors but little research has been done into corporate communication practices in emerging markets. The goal of this book is to describe the textual communication between companies listed at the Warsaw Stock Exchange, equity analysts and investors.
We present the results of three...
This philosophical-pragmatic paper discusses several forms of irony which rest on other figures of speech contingent on overt untruthfulness, namely the figures arising as a result of flouting the first maxim of Quality. It is argued that an ironic implicature may be piggybacked on another implicature, called "as if implicature", originating from f...
This introductory paper aims to demystify the concept of untruthfulness. Drawing on the scholarship on deception, the author reports on a distinction between the (objective) truth and (subjective) truthfulness, as well as their respective opposites: falsehood and untruthfulness. An attempt is made to discriminate between truthfulness and sincerity,...
This paper aims to differentiate between lying (seen as a type of deceiving) and irony, typically addressed independently by philosophers and linguists, as well as to discuss the cases when deception co-occurs with, and capitalises on, irony or metaphor. It is argued that the focal distinction can be made with reference to Grice's first maxim of Qu...
This paper aims to distill the essence of Internet trolling, a prevalent intercultural online communicative phenomenon which appears in many forms and guises. However, the label “trolling” tends to be (mis)used in reference to communicative practices which are not trolling in the traditional sense. It is argued that trolling necessarily relies on d...
The primary goal of this paper is to tease out the concepts denoted by the etic and emic labels "irony" and "sarcasm" (i.e. as they are viewed by linguists, and lay language users, here, primarily of American English). Several species of irony are elucidated, most importantly the rhetorical figure and situational irony. The author critically examin...
Though “pejoration” is an important notion for linguistic analysis and theory, there is still a lack of theoretical understanding and sound descriptive analysis. In this timely collection, the phenomenon of pejoration is studied from a number of angles. It contains studies from phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and deals with...
This introductory chapter sheds light on a number of issues pertinent to the study of humorous intent/intention in interaction. First of all, attention is paid to the notion of intention, as studied across disciplines, and the problems which it invites. Secondly, we revisit a number of recurrent topics in humour research (e.g. humour cues, the play...
This paper addresses the methodology and theory of research on conversational humour in the context of (im)politeness theory,
focusing on the production and reception ends (the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s evaluation respectively). In the light of a
critical overview of the relevant scholarship from both humour and impoliteness studies, s...
Drawing on pragmatic and cognitive philosophical theory, this paper discusses the nature of contrived (un)intentional humour in film talk. The paramount goal is to theoretically depict the processes of intention attribution with regard to humour arising from fictional interactions, as viewed by the recipient. Thus, one blanket category of intention...
This paper explores the workings of deception performed in multi-party interactions, a topic hitherto hardly ever examined by deception philosophers. Deception is here discussed in the light of a neo-Goffmanian classification of (un)ratified hearers and a neo-Gricean version of speaker meaning, anchored in non-reflexive intentionality and accountab...
This introductory chapter gives an overview of empirical approaches to deception and lying that are considered to be of relevance to the pragmatics of the two focal concepts. Attention is thus paid to: the use of natural language data in theoretical debates, the studies of verbal and nonverbal cues for deception, the explorations of people's unders...
This paper gives a critical overview of Jörg Meibauer's (2014) monograph entitled Lying at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface and addresses a selection of theoretical issues pertinent to lying and deception. Thus, following a brief summary of the volume's contents, more attention is paid to the speaker's intention to deceive as a potentially necess...
This article attempts to give a state-of-the-art picture of impoliteness studies and to indicate a few prospective research directions to enrich them. It
critically surveys a number of theoretical and methodological problems (impoliteness vs. rudeness; intention; sanctioned face-threat; and impoliteness
strategies), as well as the paramount topic...
The goal of this paper is to determine how disclosures of goodwill impairment tests under IAS 36 are prepared in conditions of high uncertainty. The data come from Polish companies listed at the Warsaw Stock Exchange, where economic and legal developments have been dynamic as compared to the main global equity markets. We use qualitative methods, i...
This paper takes as its bedrock a neo-Gricean definition of the trope of irony, championing two essential conditions for diagnosing its presence: overt untruthfulness (or pretence) arising from flouting the first maxim of Quality, together with evaluative implicature, i.e., implied (negative) evaluation. The paramount aim here is to delineate the b...
Drawing on the literature on interaction in new media and on participation models underlying (non)fictional multi-party media talk, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on computer-mediated communication. Specifically, this article advocates a new participatory framework holding for multi-party interaction on YouTube, which is compar...
This paper critically revisits the recent volume entitled “Intercultural Pragmatics” by Istvan Kecskes in the context of the Gricean notions which offer bedrock assumptions for a number of postulates put forward by the author. Attention is paid to the Gricean view of the Cooperative Principle, the speaker’s intention and speaker meaning, as well as...
This paper aims to elucidate the categories of listening ratified participants in multi-party interactions in the light of the existing literature on participation frameworks. First of all, a distinction is drawn between an addressed ratified participant, the addressee, and an unaddressed ratified participant, dubbed the third party, whose subtypes...
The paramount goal of this paper is to tease out a number of universal communicative phenomena which carry humour appreciated by the recipient of a drama series, based on data culled from a famous medical drama series, “House”. This broad-range study aims to shed light on the humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse, which evinces greater similitud...
This paper, representing theoretical pragmatics, aims to shed new light on the workings of irony, drawing on the research from the field of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of language. To meet this objective, the present article takes as its departure point the Gricean (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) philosophy, which is endorsed...
The primary objective of this paper is to elucidate the workings of (intentional) impoliteness in multi-party film talk. The departure point is the diversification of hearer types, coupled with the premise that film discourse operates on two communicative levels, namely the inter-character level and the recipient's level, at which the audience inte...
This theoretical paper addresses the (im)politeness of swear words. The primary objective is to account for their nature and functions in anonymous Internet communication, represented by YouTube commentaries (and exemplified by those following snatches of "Borat"), in the light of recent approaches to (im)politeness, notably: second order (im)polit...
The primary objective of this paper is to postulate a tripartite division of jokes according to three major incongruity-resolution mechanisms underlying their incremental development, and to review the existing models of joke interpretation in the light of the joke categories advanced here. Most of these well-entrenched frameworks, as will be shown...
This paper differentiates between several types of verbal deception and related notions: lying, bald-faced lies, bullshit, and deception without lying, inclusive of half-truths/lies of omission and withholding information. This is done in the light of the Gricean work on speaker meaning materialised by what is said and implicature, both being depen...
This article addresses the issue of non-verbal communication in the light of the Gricean conceptualisation of intentionally conveyed meanings. The first goal is to testify that non-verbal cues can be interpreted as nonnatural meanings and speaker meanings, which partake in intentional communication. Secondly, it is argued that non-verbal signals, e...