Expectation Resonance in Affirmative Irony: A Multimodal Analysis of Verbal Humor in Cecilia

Abstract

Humberto Solás’s 1982 film Cecilia does something unusual with verbal irony. Characters who occupy subordinate social positions use it not just to criticize or tear down, but to build up solidarity and sketch alternative possibilities. The study calls this affirmative irony. The study examines five key scenes with a multimodal lens, drawing on the evaluative synergy framework and expectation linguistics. From that synthesis emerges a proposal, which is the expectation resonance hypothesis, to explain how ironic evaluation and expectation modulation feed into each other as voice, body, and camera converge. Five ironic types and four recurring multimodal configurations surface in the analysis. The paper also lays out a replicable, annotation-based method and argues that taking ironic discourse as merely negative misses half the picture.