Metalinguistic Awareness and the Child's Developing Concept of Irony: The Relationship between Pictures and Text in Ironic Picture Books

Figure 1.

From Come Away from the Water, Shirley by John Burningham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977). Reproduced with kind permission of Random House UK Ltd.

Figure 2.

From Come Away from the Water, Shirley by John Burningham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977). Reproduced with kind permission of Random House UK Ltd.

Figure 3.

From Ein ganz gewoehnlicher Tag (Never Satisfied) by Fulvio Testa © 1982 Nord-Süd Verlag AG Gossau Zürich/Schweiz. Reproduced with kind permission of the publisher.

In the modern youth novel The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), written by the African-American author Virginia Hamilton, the shop owner Doum tries in vain to explain the meaning of irony to the street kid Buddy by means of a political poem. After he has illustrated the sense of this literary trope in detail, Buddy assumes in the end that irony might be identical with the notion of propaganda:

“Maybe it’s over your head,” Doum said. “You see, it’s caution and camouflage masquerading as irony—you know what is irony?” “No,” Buddy said. “Well, it’s to say just the opposite of what you mean. Like, the man takes everything you own and you say, thank you very much?” “So what about the poem?” Buddy said. Doum explained, “The poet says, go ahead, turn in your guns, but come the fight and you don’t have a gun, you going to be dead.” “Is that what’s known as propaganda too, sometimes?” Buddy asked him. Startled, Doum stared at Buddy. “It’s irony,” he said flatly. ¹

This literary example emphasizes the difficulties children have in understanding irony. Furthermore, it will be shown that even a correct explication of irony—to say the opposite of what one means ² —is not sufficient to lead to a full understanding of this literary trope. This is no wonder: irony is a linguistic and literary phenomenon that represents a complex discursive strategy presupposing a certain previous knowledge, since for even the most simple of verbal irony, for example, there would have to be mutual agreement on the part of both participants—the speaker and the addressee—about the following basic things: that words or sentences have literal meanings, but that words/sentences can, however, have more than one meaning; that there is such a thing as irony, where a spoken meaning is played off against implied but unspoken meaning; and that there will likely be some shared markers or ironic clues to signal both that irony is in play and how it is to be interpreted. Hence, the skills that constrain irony comprehension are the abilities to discriminate falsehood from truth, to infer another’s beliefs, and to infer another’s intentions. ³ The ability to note falsehood is necessary in order to avoid taking irony as literally true. The ability to infer beliefs is needed if one is to avoid taking irony as a mistake. And the ability to detect intentions is needed to avoid confusing irony with intent to deceive.

Psychologists and linguists working in the field of cognitive studies subsume these skills under the recently developed framework of “metalinguistic awareness.” At a general level this notion is defined as the ability to think about and reflect upon the nature and functions of language. This competence applies to the whole linguistic field and comprises, for instance, corrections of grammatical mistakes and comprehension of verbal ambiguity or verbal games, as well as understanding of nonliteral usage, like metaphor or irony. ⁴ Nonliteral language requires the listener/reader to consider statements that are contrary to fact, but which are still on some level true and authentic. Thus, in nonliteral utterances the relation between the two aspects of meaning is one of striking divergence: what is meant is not a logical extension of what is said and clashes with what is said.

It has been proven that even young children develop metalinguistic awareness...