ABSTRACT
How does a receiver know that humor is intended? The communicator may say so explicitly (“Wanna hear a joke?” “Listen, this is funny”), but she may also signal humor in less overt ways. Not much research exists that investigates signals of humorous devices (but see Hay, 2001; Attardo et al., 2011; Adams, 2012). Irony, however, is one of the best-researched types of humor (see Colston, 2017), and therefore the study of irony markers is more advanced and may also help to detect cases of humor. Although irony and humor are related to a certain degree (in that some irony is funny, and some humor is ironic), care should be taken to not equate the two. This contribution focuses on irony and sarcasm markers. Prosodic markers of humor are reviewed elsewhere (see Gironzetti, 2017).
