Social identity, precision and charity: when less precise speakers are held to stricter standard

Recent has begun to show systematic connections between social information and pragmatic reasoning. These findings raise the question of whether social information shapes comprehenders' assessments of the correctness of linguistic description in light of a single known and determined fact. We explore this question by testing the impact of speaker identity on T(ruth)-V(alue) J(udgment)s based on the interpretation of number words. We find that imprecise statements from speakers socially expected to be less precise – i.e. “Chill" ones – are rejected at a higher rate, and thus held to more stringent evaluation standards, than those from speakers socially expected to speak more precisely – i.e. “Nerdy" ones. We explain the new finding by appealing to the idea that, by virtue of generally being perceived to be more precise, Nerdy speakers are granted higher epistemic credibility than Chill ones. The emerging picture is one in which TVJ assessments are affected by social considerations in a different way from other experimental tasks, suggesting a nuanced interplay between social information and different interpretation tasks and processe

Imprecision, personae, and pragmatic reasoning

Recent work at the interface of semantics and sociolinguistics showed that listeners reason about the semantic/pragmatic properties of linguistic utterances to draw social inferences about the speaker (Acton and Potts 2014; Beltrama 2018; Jeong 2021). These findings raise the question of whether reverse effects exist as well, i.e., whether (and how) social meanings can also impact the interpretation of semantic/pragmatic meanings. Using (im)precision as a case study, we provide experimental evidence that (i) numerals receive stricter interpretations when utteredbyNerdy(vs. Chill) speakers; and that (ii) this effect is stronger for comprehenders who don’t (strongly) identify with the speaker, suggesting that pragmatic reasoning is crucially shaped by social information about both the speaker and the comprehender. These findings suggest that different layers of meanings inform one another in a bi-directional fashion – i.e., semantic information can invite social inferences, and Misocial information can guide meaning interpretation

Default agreement with subjective assertions

This paper puts forward a formal proposal for a judge-dependent notion of assertion that derives asymmetries in the discourse profile of subjective and objective assertions while preserving a unary illocutionary profile for utterances of declarative sentences. We propose that when a speaker asserts a sentence, they commit to that sentence being true as judged by themself, but project acceptance of the truth of that sentence as judged by all interlocutors. This account makes different predictions, then, for assertions of declarative sentences with judge-invariant denotations, and assertions of declarative sentences with judge-variant denotations

Metalinguistic "just" and "simply": exploring emphatic exclusives

When occurring next to predicates located at the extreme of a scale, "just" and "simply" contribute an emphatic effect. In this paper, I propose to analyze these uses as exclusive operators over "metalinguistic alternatives", whereby the speaker signals that no more complex alternative description is assertable in the context. On this account, emphasis emerges as an indirect effect of the interaction between exclusivity and scalar extremeness: because all the alternatives to extreme predicates happen to be weaker than the predicate itself, ruling them out will induce an "anti-weakening" effect, whereby the prejacent is interpreted in its full strength, and not merely as a possible alternative among weaker ones

Or not Alternative Questions, Focus and Discourse Structure

Or not alternative questions like Are you coming or not? give rise to so-called ‘cornering effects’ (Biezma 2009), consisting of two parts: (i) they cannot appear discourse-initially, and (ii) they do not allow for follow-up questions. Building on recent experimental data (Beltrama, Meertens & Romero 2020), the present paper raises problems for current analyses (Biezma 2009, Biezma & Rawlins 2012, 2018), reframes the second part of cornering as not specific to NAQs but as a general constraint on questions in general, and develops a novel proposal for the first part of cornering. The key ingredients of the new proposal are the intrinsic focus structure of or not questions and its effects on discourse trees