Beyond verbal irony: Nonliteral evaluative stance in Mandarin-speaking family interaction with preschool children

<p>This exploratory corpus study examines naturally occurring ironic and teasing evaluations in dinner-table interaction involving Mandarin-speaking preschool children and their families. We analyzed 71 video-linked sessions from the ZhouDinner corpus (23.67 hours; 20,055 transcribed utterances). Independent screening yielded 212 candidate entries; after adjudication, 137 episodes were retained, including 32 literal comparison cases, 8 cases of strict verbal irony, and 97 cases of non-oppositional teasing. Teasing was about 12.1 times as frequent as strict irony and occurred at 4.10 episodes per hour (4.84 per 1,000 utterances), compared with 0.34 per hour (0.40 per 1,000 utterances) for strict irony. Adult caregivers produced all eight strict-irony episodes and 90 of the 97 teasing episodes; target children produced seven teasing episodes and no strict irony. Nearly half of the teasing episodes served behavioural regulation (48/97, 49.5%), while 38 (39.2%) served affiliative play. Six of the seven child-produced teases were responsive or collaboratively established rather than independently initiated. Recipient uptake also differed descriptively: strict irony was followed mainly by compliance/repair or no observable response, whereas teasing elicited a wider range of receipts, including laughter and playful denial. Verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources overlapped substantially across the two categories. These findings show that strict irony is rare within this dinner-table ecology, whereas play-framed evaluation is a recurrent resource for both affiliation and everyday norm regulation.</p>