Dissociative attitude

The term dissociative attitude applies to attitudes such as scepticism, mockery and rejection, i.e. attitudes in which speakers distance themselves from the committment to the truth or appropriateness of a proposition or utterance.

The expression of a dissociative attitude has been claimed to be a key ingredient of linguistic irony (see e.g. Wilson 2006):

"The main point in typical cases of verbal irony ... is to express the speaker's dissociative attitude to a tacitly attributed utterance or thought ..., based on some perceived discrepancy between the way it represents the world and and the way things actually are ..." (Wilson 2006: 1724)

References

Wilson, Deirdre. 2006. The pragmatics of verbal irony. Lingua 116: 1722-1743.