Mazzarella Diana, Trouche Emmanuel, Mercier Hugo, Noveck Ira
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin, Germany.
Cognition and Development Lab, Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jun 13;9:908. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00908. eCollection 2018.
The experimental pragmatics literature has extensively investigated the ways in which distinct contextual factors affect the computation of scalar inferences, whose most studied example is the one that allows "Some -ed" to mean . Recent studies from Bonnefon et al. (2009, 2011) investigate the effect of politeness on the interpretation of scalar utterances. They argue that when the scalar utterance is face-threatening ("Some people hated your speech") (i) the scalar inference is less likely to be derived, and (ii) the semantic interpretation of "some" () is arrived at slowly and effortfully. This paper re-evaluates the role of politeness in the computation of scalar inferences by drawing on the distinction between "comprehension" and "epistemic assessment" of communicated information. In two experiments, we test the hypothesis that, in these face-threatening contexts, scalar inferences are largely but are less likely to be . In line with our predictions, we find that slowdowns in the face-threatening condition are attributable to longer reaction times at the (latter) epistemic assessment stage, but not at the comprehension stage.
实验语用学文献广泛研究了不同语境因素影响等级含义推导的方式，其中研究最多的例子是使“Some -ed”表示……的情况。博内丰等人（2009年、2011年）最近的研究探讨了礼貌对等级话语解释的影响。他们认为，当等级话语具有面子威胁性时（“有些人讨厌你的演讲”），（i）等级含义不太可能被推导出来，并且（ii）“some”（……）的语义解释来得缓慢且费力。本文通过借鉴对所传达信息的“理解”和“认知评估”之间的区别，重新评估礼貌在等级含义推导中的作用。在两个实验中，我们检验了这样一个假设，即在这些具有面子威胁性的语境中，等级含义在很大程度上是……但不太可能被……。与我们的预测一致，我们发现，在具有面子威胁性的条件下反应速度变慢归因于（后者）认知评估阶段较长的反应时间，而不是理解阶段。
