Pragmatic inference, levels of meaning and speaker accountability
Hall Alison & Diana Mazzarella
| Résumé |
Are speakers held more accountable for what they explicitly
communicate than for what they implicate? Speakers typically
communicate more than they linguistically encode, thus leaving to
addressees the task of inferring what they intend to communicate.
As a result, the linguistically decoded meaning is pragmatically
enriched to arrive at what the speaker says (or directly
communicates) - the ‘explicated content’ of the utterance - which
can serve as a premise for the derivation of further implicit
meanings - ‘implicatures’. This paper experimentally explores the
relationship between speaker accountability and levels of meaning.
Our findings demonstrate that speakers are held more accountable,
and thus suffer greater reputational costs, when they explicitly
communicate a piece of false information than when they do it
implicitly, independently of whether or not there is pragmatic
enrichment involved at the level of the ‘explicated content’ (Study
1). Furthermore, our findings show that, in deceptive contexts, the
kind of pragmatic enrichment at issue does affect speaker
accountability: when the deceptive content is inferred via
completion, speakers are held more accountable for what they
explicitly communicate than when it is inferred via expansion
(Study 2). These results provide the first empirical evidence in
favour of the relevance of the distinction between completion and
expansion to liability judgements in cases of dishonest
communication. |
| Mots-clés |
|
| Citation | Alison , H. ., & Mazzarella, D. (2023). Pragmatic inference, levels of meaning and speaker accountability. Journal of Pragmatics, 205, 92-110. |
| Type | Article de périodique (Anglais) |
| Date de publication | 18-1-2023 |
| Nom du périodique | Journal of Pragmatics |
| Volume | 205 |
| Pages | 92-110 |
| URL | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.12.007 |