Pragmatic violations affect social inferences about the speaker

Abstract

Listeners systematically extract two types of information from linguistic utterances: information about the world, and information about the speaker – i.e., their social background and personality. While both varieties of content have been widely investigated across different approaches to the study of language, research in pragmatics has mostly focused on the former kind. Here we ask how listeners reason about a speaker’s conversational choices to form an impression about their personality. In three experiments, we show that a speaker’s adherence to, or violation of, the pragmatic principles of Relevance and Informativeness, as well as the reasons underlying these violations, affect the evaluation of the speaker’s personality along the core social dimensions of Warmth and Competence. These findings highlight the value of enriching work in pragmatics with insights from sociolinguistics and social psychology about how people reason about human speech to draw inferences about the identity and personality of their interlocutors.

“Wait, how did you call this?”: Speaker-specific word choices are stored and generalized.

“…In a recent study, Beltrama and Papafragou (2023) also demonstrated social generalizations at the individual level. In their study, speakers who violated pragmatic expectations by being underinformative or irrelevant were rated as less “warm” (e.g., friendly and considerate) and less “competent” (e.g., knowledgeable) than speakers who were informative and relevant.…”

Prosocial speech acts: Links to pragmatics and aging.

“…Against this background, our study investigated whether general age-related differences in prosocial linguistic behavior would emerge at different stages of adult development, and whether these differences would vary as a function of contextual manipulations critical to everyday life (i.e., whether the recipient was directly affected by the bad news, whether the bad news was severe, and whether the bad news was health-related). In turn, our findings shed light on which contextual cues younger and older adults are more sensitive to when formulating their utterances, and to what degree their use of prosocial speech acts is pragmatically appropriate (i.e., used in contexts in which a social goal could be achieved), which is highly relevant for the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships (Beltrama et al, 2023; Holtgraves & Bonnefon, 2017; Lubben & Gironda, 2003).…”