That's the understatement of the century: understatement as a meta-rhetorical expression in the Corpus of American Soap Operas

  • This study explores the use of the meta-rethorical expression (MRE) understatement in the Corpus of American Soap Operas. The high frequency of the nominal form shows (fictional) speakers' and script-writers’ awareness of and active engagement with the rhetorical concept. There are a minority of self-directed (the speaker's own utterance) versus a majority of other-directed uses (somebody else's utterance). MRE comments are to a large extent realised by a restricted number of five patterns, and show a narrow range of common modifying collocates, both of which may show conventionalized usage. The function of the MREs is to mark the utterance targeted as semantically too weak and to imply or explicitly provide a stronger version of it. Thus they show a critical and challenging attitude vis-à-vis the target statement and, in the case of other-directed instances, the other speaker.

Download full text files

Export metadata

Statistics

Number of document requests

Additional Services

Share in Twitter Search Google Scholar
Metadaten
Author:Claudia ClaridgeORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:bvb:384-opus4-1173488
Frontdoor URLhttps://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/117348
ISSN:0378-2166OPAC
Parent Title (English):Journal of Pragmatics
Publisher:Elsevier BV
Place of publication:Amsterdam
Type:Article
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2025
Publishing Institution:Universität Augsburg
Release Date:2024/12/06
Volume:235
First Page:75
Last Page:87
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.002
Institutes:Philologisch-Historische Fakultät
Philologisch-Historische Fakultät / Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Philologisch-Historische Fakultät / Anglistik / Amerikanistik / Lehrstuhl für Englische Sprachwissenschaft
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik
Licence (German):CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0: Creative Commons: Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitung (mit Print on Demand)