ABSTRACT
Nine experiments and seven corpus-based studies tested the Defaultness Hypothesis. Defaultness is defined in terms of an unconditional, automatic response to a stimulus. To be interpreted by default, stimuli should be novel, free of internal cues, such as semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, and free of contextual information. To prompt sarcasm by default, items should involve strong attenuation by means of negation of highly positive concepts; to prompt metaphoricalness by default, items should involve a negation marker. Results show that as predicted, such constructions were interpreted sarcastically and metaphorically by default. This was true of English, Russian, and German.
