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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (4 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Volume 41 (2015)
    Cover page: Intensification and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Corpus Study
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Glossa Psycholinguistics, Volume 2, Issue 1 (2023)

    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.

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    Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 43 (2021)
    In two studies we show that a speaker’s choice to obey or violate the pragmatic maxims of Relevance and Informativeness – as well as the reasons behind these choices (Inability vs. Unwillingness) – affect how the speaker is socially perceived, revealing a connection between pragmatic reasoning and social evaluation. Our findings further suggest that core dimensions of social evaluation (Competence vs. Warmth) are differentially informed by different aspects of a speaker’s conversational behavior. We conclude that, even after a brief exposure to someone’s conversational behavior, people draw social inferences about the speaker by reasoning along the same principles that inform pragmatic inferences. Our results highlight how pragmatic reasoning, social evaluation and person perception jointly underlie the meaning conveyed by linguistic utterances in communication.
      Cover page: We Are What We Say: Pragmatic Violations Have Social CostsCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 44 (2022)
      We explore the impact of speaker identity on the interpretation of number words in a T(ruth)-V(alue) J(udgment) task – a paradigm in which respondents assess whether a given description appropriately represents a given body of facts. 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, and especially so when participants do not identify with the speaker’s properties. This shows that TVJ assessments are impacted by respondents’ social perception of the speaker; but that they are affected by social considerations in a different way from other experimental tasks similarly tapping into meaning interpretation, suggesting a nuanced interplay between social information and pragmatic reasoning
        Cover page: From social identity to meaning interpretation: when looser speakers are treated more strictlyCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
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