La semántica inversa en el habla informal de maracaibo: Un estudio sociolingüistico

researchers in sociolinguistics have insisted on analyzing the close relationship between language and identity. evidence for this relationship can be found in the features a specific linguistic community uses in its dialectal variety. this article focuses on one of the characteristics of maracaibo speech, a feature we call inverse semantics, defined as the property of giving certain utterances an opposite meaning to the one expressed literally. a sample of fifteen phrases evidencing the use of inverse semantics was collected from the spontaneous speech produced by members of the communities of el saladillo and el empedrao. the pragmatic-semantic analysis of the linguistic realizations displaying inverse semantics suggests that speakers？ intentions underlying these utterances involve a great emotional load, where courtesy and irony are combined.