Metarepresentational awareness

Metarepresentational awareness, as we noted earlier, involves reflexive representations of the intentional states of self and other (as in their beliefs, thoughts, desires, attitudes, intentions etc.). It is thus most salient when we come to consider pragmatic meaning representations. This is because a particular meaning representation, for instance, what is (literally) said, can be embedded within another meaning representation, for instance, an attitude. Instances where there is a lower-order representation (e.g. what is literally said) embedded within a higher-order representation (e.g. an attitude) are termed metarepresentations, that is, a “representation of a representation” (Wilson 2000: 411). Irony, for example, arguably constitutes a case of metarepresentation where a meaning representation attributed to a particular speaker (or set of speakers) is further embedded within “a wry, or sceptical, or mocking attitude” towards that attributed meaning representation (Wilson 2000: 433).

Consider the following example from a segment broadcast throughout the US, where comedian Steven Colbert spoke at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner for then US President George W. Bush:

[8.6]

Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert, and tonight it is my privilege to celebrate this president, ‘cause we’re not so different, he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we’re not some brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut. Right, sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ‘cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.

(“Colbert Bush Roast”, White House Correspondent’s’ Dinner, Washington DC, 29 April 2006, C-SPAN Cable television; cf. Gibbs 2012: 110–111)

Colbert is alluding to the way former US President George W. Bush frequently made references in the media to “trusting his gut” when making decisions. Whether the ironic attitude (higher-order representation) Colbert expresses towards this kind of decision-making (lower-order representation) is wry, sceptical or even mocking is open to debate (LaMarre et al. 2009). But the point stands that we are dealing here with a meaning representation being embedded within another meaning representation, and thus metarepresentational awareness on the part of users.

Relevance theorists have argued that irony, reporting talk (including quotations of others’ talk), echoing questions and interrogatives can be productively analyzed as involving higher-order representations within which lower-order representations are embedded. Quotations, for instance, involve a higher-order utterance that attributes a lower-order utterance to someone other than the speaker. Wilson (2000) suggests that metarepresentations inevitably involve resemblances, which are either metalinguistic (i.e. involve a resemblance in form) or interpretive (i.e. involve a resemblance in semantic or logical properties). Direct quotations – where the speaker claims the words being reported match exactly what the prior speaker literally said – involve metalinguistic resemblances, while indirect quotations – where the speaker claims the words being reported match what the prior speaker was taken to mean – involve interpretive resemblances. Irony, on the other hand, involves only interpretive resemblances, through which the speaker echoes a tacitly attributed thought or utterance with a tacitly dissociative attitude (Wilson and Sperber 1992). This thought or utterance may be attributed to someone specifically or may simply be attributed to the participants’ common ground (e.g. cultural stereotypes), while the dissociative attitude may be wry, sceptical or mocking, as we noted in relation to the example from Colbert (see also the example of sarcasm).