Believing What You're Told: Politeness and Scalar Inferences

Abstract

The experimental pragmatics literature has extensively investigated the ways in which distinct contextual factors affect the computation of scalar inferences, whose most studied example is the one that allows “Some X-ed” to mean Not all X-ed. Recent studies from Bonnefon et al. (2009, 2011) investigate the effect of politeness on the interpretation of scalar utterances. They argue that when the scalar utterance is face-threatening (“Some people hated your speech”) (i) the scalar inference is less likely to be derived, and (ii) the semantic interpretation of “some” (at least some) is arrived at slowly and effortfully. This paper re-evaluates the role of politeness in the computation of scalar inferences by drawing on the distinction between “comprehension” and “epistemic assessment” of communicated information. In two experiments, we test the hypothesis that, in these face-threatening contexts, scalar inferences are largely derived but are less likely to be accepted as true. In line with our predictions, we find that slowdowns in the face-threatening condition are attributable to longer reaction times at the (latter) epistemic assessment stage, but not at the comprehension stage.

Different scalar terms are affected by face differently

“…At first sight, these results are opposed to those of Bonnefon and his colleagues but another recent study using response times (Mazzarella et al, 2018) suggests how they could be made compatible. Replicating the methodology followed by Bonnefon and his colleagues and positing that the prevalence of one-sided readings in their studies was due to a failure to distinguish between (initial) comprehension of the SI and its (subsequent) acceptance, they divided the experimental task into two parts and elicited subjects' responses as well as reaction times to two different questions.…”

“…The fact that face-threat is best construed as a matter of situational context (section 3.1) highlights the importance of a few other situational factors, starting with participant gender. The nexus of im/politeness and gender has been primarily studied by sociolinguists (for a recent overview, see Chalupnik et al, 2017; for a recent experimental study using ERP s, see Jiang & Zhou 2015: 257-259), who found that women tend to use more indirect strategies overall, one explanation for which is that they tend to construe the same acts as more face-threatening than men do.14 The fact that samples were not balanced for gender in any of the previous experiments (women outnumbered men by as much as 4.5 to 1 in Bonnefon et al, 2009;Feeney & Bonnefon, 2012;Holtgraves, 2014;Holtgraves & Perdew, 2016; men outnumbered women in Mazzarella et al, 2018) could be yielding a somewhat biased picture in this regard. To alleviate this concern, a gender-balanced sample was used in the study reported below.…”

“…Previous research on scalars utilized an inference task asking participants to indicate the likelihood that the stronger term is true, given the speaker's utterance (see (4) above). Both the inference task (Van Tiel et al, 2016) and the verification task also common in SI research (Doran et al, 2009) focus on whether the implicature is true.24 Unlike this research and closer to the approach taken by Mazzarella et al (2018), we asked participants whether the speaker could have meant the stronger term (see (9) above). Focusing on the speaker's intention means that it is not enough for the inference to be available in the context.…”

“…However, even in this experiment, the story as well as the rest of the utterance context around the scalar term remain exactly the same across the two conditions (face-boosting vs. face-threatening), meaning that, when impact on face is expected, determining the direction of impact (boost or threat) essentially comes down to the lexical semantics of the predicate used. 8Mazzarella et al (2018) adopt this understanding of face-threatening vs. face-boosting, whileHoltgraves & Kraus (2018) opt for the more accurate "non-face-threatening" for the latter.Downloaded from Brill.com03/19/2020 08:09:11AM via free access…”

Social meaning in semantics and pragmatics

“…For example, Bonnefon and Villejoubert (2006) argue that the face‐saving flavour of modal expressions such as possible is crucially arrived at pragmatically, taking into account both the form's conventional content and the utterance context. Evidence for this is that the process whereby politeness is inferred also carries important consequences for other aspects of the semantic interpretation of the expression; for example, it inhibits the scalar implicatures that the use of such expressions would normally license (see Bonnefon, Feeney, & Villejoubert, 2009; Mazzarella, Trouche, Mercier, & Noveck, 2018 for further discussion). In a similar vein, Jeong (2019) suggests that the politeness effects linked to rising declaratives can be derived via the same primitive communicative principles that inform other kinds of non‐truth‐conditional inferences.…”