Much work has been done to capture the systematic variation in projective behaviors of factive inferences. However, not as much has been said about variation in factivity below the level of projection. This paper presents an experimental study which probes and confirms that Korean showcases patterns of variation in this vein: Factive inferences systematically arise from certain V+CPs, but only under certain prosody, even in unembedded contexts. Characterizing this pattern as 'prosodically-conditioned factive inferences', the paper proposes a pragmatic analysis of it couched in alternative semantics. The analysis motivates and defends a new interpretive principle which governs how alternatives come into contrast with each other, and re-examines the ontological status of factivity.
One of the major open issues in semantics and pragmatics concerns the role of convention in relating sentence types with illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects. For the type-to-illocution connection, some degree of force conventionalism seems to be widely accepted. In contrast, Austin (1962) and many subsequent researchers have assumed that perlocution is not a matter of convention, but rather arises inexorably from illocution, content, and context. In this paper, we challenge this fundamental assumption about perlocution with evidence from a new perception experiment focused on perlocutionary effects relating to the listener's conception of the speaker as a social actor. We find that these effects are predictable from sentence type plus intonation ('type + tune'), that they vary by type + tune, and that they are consistent across a wide range of sentence contents, contexts, and illocutionary inferences. We argue that these conventions are naturally incorporated into existing work on sentence-type conventions.
Previous research demonstrates that listeners make social inferences about people based on how they speak, and that these inferences vary depending on the linguistic and social context. An open question is exactly how contextual enrichment (i.e. information about the speaker and speaking situation) comes to influence sociolinguistic perception. This paper addresses this question by analyzing data from 10 perception experiments investigating three different linguistic phenomena: number agreement in existential there constructions, intonation contours in declarative sentences, and overlapping speech in conversation. We observe an overall trend that increasing contextual enrichment obscures the effects of linguistic forms. In contextually impoverished stimuli, number nonagreement and rising declaratives trigger perceptions that speakers are less educated and more polite, respectively, but show no effect on listener perceptions when embedded in more contextually rich stimuli. By contrast, overlapping speech shows robust effects on perceived interruptiveness, even in contextually rich stimuli. Drawing on theories from social psychology and linguistic anthropology, we argue that if listeners are able to form sufficient impressions of speakers before encountering the target linguistic feature, they will not modify their impressions to incorporate the social meanings conveyed by the target linguistic feature, unless these social meanings are highly enregistered.
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