On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference.

Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., not happy to mean sad) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses. Here, we synthesize existing proposals via adjective subjectivity, which operationalizes the notion of loopholes for plausible deniability. We present experimental evidence that the degree of subjectivity of an adjective predicts the degree to which participants strengthen the negated adjective's meaning, but only if the adjective under consideration has an evaluatively-positive meaning. This finding indicates that speakers may intentionally use negation to leave themselves the option to retract the implicated face-threatening meaning if openly challenged.

Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender.

Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as 'negative strengthening.' For example, a sentence like 'John is not kind' may give rise to the inference that John is rather mean. Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives ('not kind' to mean rather mean) than negative adjectives ('not mean' to mean rather kind). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives (Horn, 1989; Brown and Levinson, 1987). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.

Scalar Diversity, Negative Strengthening, and Adjectival Semantics.

Previous research has demonstrated great variability in the rates of scalar inferences across different triggers (Doran et al., 2009; van Tiel et al., 2016). In the current study, we show that variation is more systematic than previously thought. In particular, we present experimental evidence suggesting that endorsements of scalar implicatures (i) are anti-correlated with the degree of negative strengthening of the stronger scale-mate (e.g., whether John is not stunning is interpreted as conveying that John is rather ugly) and (ii) are affected by the scale structure and the underlying scalar semantics of gradable adjectives (in particular boundedness, polarity, and adjectival extremeness). Overall, our research suggests that scale structure should be taken into account in theories of implicature.

Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences.

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding and demonstrates that the facilitation is caused by early derivation of the implicature in the L+H* condition. We attribute the effect to a link between L+H* and pragmatic considerations, such as speaker knowledge effects, or the saliency of alternatives relevant to the computation of implicatures. More generally our findings illustrate how intonation interacts at a cognitive level with pragmatic inference.

Familial sinistrals avoid exact numbers.

We report data from an internet questionnaire of sixty number trivia. Participants were asked for the number of cups in their house, the number of cities they know and 58 other quantities. We compare the answers of familial sinistrals--individuals who are left-handed themselves or have a left-handed close blood-relative--with those of pure familial dextrals--right-handed individuals who reported only having right-handed close blood-relatives. We show that familial sinistrals use rounder numbers than pure familial dextrals in the survey responses. Round numbers in the decimal system are those that are multiples of powers of 10 or of half or a quarter of a power of 10. Roundness is a gradient concept, e.g. 100 is rounder than 50 or 200. We show that very round number like 100 and 1000 are used with 25% greater likelihood by familial sinistrals than by pure familial dextrals, while pure familial dextrals are more likely to use less round numbers such as 25, 60, and 200. We then use Sigurd's (1988, Language in Society) index of the roundness of a number and report that familial sinistrals' responses are significantly rounder on average than those of pure familial dextrals. To explain the difference, we propose that the cognitive effort of using exact numbers is greater for the familial sinistral group because their language and number systems tend to be more distributed over both hemispheres of the brain. Our data support the view that exact and approximate quantities are processed by two separate cognitive systems. Specifically, our behavioral data corroborates the view that the evolutionarily older, approximate number system is present in both hemispheres of the brain, while the exact number system tends to be localized in only one hemisphere.