That's the understatement of the century: Understatement as a meta-rhetorical expression in the Corpus of American Soap Operas

Abstract

This study explores the use of the meta-rethorical expression (MRE) understatement in the Corpus of American Soap Operas. The high frequency of the nominal form shows (fictional) speakers' and script-writers’ awareness of and active engagement with the rhetorical concept. There are a minority of self-directed (the speaker's own utterance) versus a majority of other-directed uses (somebody else's utterance). MRE comments are to a large extent realised by a restricted number of five patterns, and show a narrow range of common modifying collocates, both of which may show conventionalized usage. The function of the MREs is to mark the utterance targeted as semantically too weak and to imply or explicitly provide a stronger version of it. Thus they show a critical and challenging attitude vis-à-vis the target statement and, in the case of other-directed instances, the other speaker.