Speech act matters: Commitment to what's said or what's implicated differs in the case of assertion and promise

Yuan, Wen; Lyu, Siqi

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2022.01.012

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…On the face of it, such a framing ties directly into work on plausible deniability (see e.g. Oswald, 2022;Yuan and Lyu, 2022;Bonalumi et al, 2023;Hall and Mazzarella, 2023;Mazzarella, 2023). That is, it may seem that the lessened punishment is driven by the possibility that the listener is confused, which is strategically exploited by the listener.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambivalence by Design: A Computational Account of Loopholes

Qian,

Bridgers,

Taliaferro

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Loopholes offer an opening. Rather than comply or directly refuse, people can subvert an intended request by an intentional misunderstanding. Such behaviors exploit ambiguity and under-specification in language. Using loopholes is commonplace and intuitive in everyday social interaction, both important and trivial. Loopholes are also of concern in the law, and increasingly in artificial intelligence. However, the computational and cognitive underpinnings of loopholes are not well understood. Here, we propose a utility-theoretic recursive social reasoning model that formalizes and accounts for loophole behavior. The model captures the decision process of a loophole-aware listener, who trades off their own utility with that of the speaker, taking into account an expected social penalty. The social penalty is grounded as recursive reasoning about a naive observer's inference of a naive listener's social intent. Our model captures qualitative patterns in previous data, and also generates new quantitative predictions consistent with novel studies. We consider the broader implications of our model for other aspects of social reasoning, including plausible deniability and humor.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ambivalence by Design: A Computational Account of Loopholes

Qian,

Bridgers,

Taliaferro

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…One argument for why loopholes mitigate social costs is that they offer plausible deniability. Previous work on plausible deniability has primarily focused on speakers' decision to choose ambiguous phrasing for their requests, sacrificing some clarity to afford a social retreat if the request is denied by a listener (Hall & Mazzarella, 2023;Lee & Pinker, 2010;Mazzarella, 2023;Oswald, 2022;Pinker et al, 2008;Yuan & Lyu, 2022). In this context however, plausible deniability might allow the person to pretend to have genuinely misunderstood rather than deliberately dodged a request.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Skirting the Sacred: Moral Contexts Increase the Cost of Intentional Misunderstandings

Parece,

Bridgers,

Qian

et al. 2023

Preprint

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When people have conflicting goals, they sometimes use intentional misunderstandings (loopholes) to get around direct defiance. Both adults and children expect exploiting loopholes to be less costly than non-compliance (Bridgers et al., 2021; Bridgers et al., 2023; Qian et al., 2023). However, the mitigating effect of loopholes may not hold if they are used to dodge a moral obligation. Here, we replicated the finding that loopholes are less costly than non-compliance in neutral contexts, but found that loopholes were as bad as non-compliance in moral contexts (Experiment 1, N = 360). We then directly compared the behaviors to see if, in moral contexts, exploiting a loophole might be even worse than non-compliance (Experiment 2, N=150). We replicated the finding that loopholes are more exonerating in neutral than moral contexts, and that moral context has a differential effect, but did not find a reversal (Experiment 2, N=150). Finally, we assessed three negative indirect costs of loopholes (blame, permissibility, and offense) and again found a differential effect of moral context (Experiment 3, N = 453). We discuss why using loopholes in moral violations may be uniquely unacceptable.

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“…In addition, Leech (1993) also explains that in pragmatics, there are principles of politeness that can be used in speech which are mentioned in many maxims, namely, the maxim of wisdom, the maxim of acceptance, the maxim of praise, the maxim of humility, the maxim of agreement, and the maxim of sympathy. In contrast, Yuan & Lyu (2022) stated that in pragmatics, there is an implicature which is an action but can imply something. Sheikh, S., & Saleem (2021) explain implicature is an utterance that can be interpreted differently from what is said in a speech event.…”

Section: Pragmatic Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mamanda’s Oral Literature in Indonesia: Review of the Form and Function of Humor Through a Pragmatic Perspective

Harpriyanti,

Sudikan,

Ahmadi

2023

Heranca

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This research was conducted for eight months on the island of South Kalimantan, Indonesia. This study examines Mamanda. Mamanda is a traditional South Kalimantan theater that still survives in the global era. Mamanda is liked because it is rich in humor that can entertain the entire audience and relieve fatigue because it can invite laughter. However, if it is interpreted more deeply, humor has a pragmatic function that it wants to convey to its listeners. Therefore, this study examines more deeply the function of humor in Mamanda. This study aims to describe the form and function of humor in Mamanda. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method. The data in this study, in the form of a recording of Mamanda's performance, played at the Mamanda Parade, a series of events to commemorate the anniversary of Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan. The informants in this study consisted of twenty people with different backgrounds, all of whom were players who played an active role in the show. The research method used is descriptive qualitative to describe the results in detail using a series of clear sentences. The results showed that there were four types of humor in mamanda, namely, language humor, behavioral humor, gossiping humor, and pornographic humor. The functions of humor are as a function of advising, a function of criticism, a function of satire, and a function of tolerance.

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Speech act matters: Commitment to what's said or what's implicated differs in the case of assertion and promise

Cited by 17 publications

References 22 publications

Ambivalence by Design: A Computational Account of Loopholes

Ambivalence by Design: A Computational Account of Loopholes

Skirting the Sacred: Moral Contexts Increase the Cost of Intentional Misunderstandings

Mamanda’s Oral Literature in Indonesia: Review of the Form and Function of Humor Through a Pragmatic Perspective

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