Trotzke Andreas, Balla Attila, Grobauer Hannah, Wittenberg Eva
Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
PLoS One. 2025 Jun 5;20(6):e0325598. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0325598. eCollection 2025.
This paper explores the interface between linguistic form and social meaning by focusing on correlations between sentence type and the social distance between interlocutors-a central aspect of the social meaning component of politeness. We present a forced-choice experiment with four different groups of speakers (L1 British English speakers, L1 American English speakers, L2 English/German speakers, and L1 German speakers). In this experiment, we manipulated the linguistic form of asking for help along the syntactic dimension of sentence type (declaratives, interrogatives, or imperatives) and recorded the addressee our participants picked for each form (brother, coworker, or stranger). We broaden the empirical picture by going beyond highly conventionalized forms (e.g., Can you VP?) and therefore also varying the modal auxiliary verbs (e.g., Will you VP?). Based on this comprehensive picture of ways of asking for help, we identify clusters of linguistic forms depending on their felicity in different social scenarios. Our descriptive cluster analysis as well as the statistical comparisons between sentence types indicate that there are systematic correspondences between linguistic form and social meaning across different groups of speakers and languages, and we propose that our empirical data provide a potential starting point for rethinking speech act grammar in terms of 'social grammar'.
本文通过关注句子类型与对话者之间社会距离的相关性，探讨语言形式与社会意义之间的接口——礼貌社会意义成分的核心方面。我们对四组不同的说话者（以英语为母语的英国英语使用者、以英语为母语的美国英语使用者、英语/德语双语使用者以及以德语为母语的使用者）进行了一项强制选择实验。在该实验中，我们沿着句子类型的句法维度（陈述句、疑问句或祈使句）操纵寻求帮助的语言形式，并记录我们的参与者为每种形式选择的收件人（兄弟、同事或陌生人）。我们超越了高度常规化的形式（例如“Can you VP?”），从而也改变了情态助动词（例如“Will you VP?”），以此拓宽实证研究的范围。基于这种对寻求帮助方式的全面描述，我们根据语言形式在不同社会场景中的合适性识别出语言形式的聚类。我们的描述性聚类分析以及句子类型之间的统计比较表明，不同的说话者群体和语言在语言形式与社会意义之间存在系统的对应关系，并且我们提出，我们的实证数据为从“社会语法”角度重新思考言语行为语法提供了一个潜在的起点。
