Open AccessSubjective assertions are weak: exploring the illocutionary profile of perspectivedependent predicates
Author(s) -
Andrea Beltrama
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.60.2018.460
Subject(s) - assertion , intuition , subjectivity , perspective (graphical) , linguistics , psychology , set (abstract data type) , computer science , social psychology , cognitive psychology , epistemology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , cognitive science , programming language
Sentences containing subjective predicates – e.g., “The movie was awesome” – areintuitively anchored to a particular perspective; this makes them different from sentences describingobjective facts – e.g., “The movie was set in 1995”. While authors have long debatedon whether this intuition tracks a lexical distinction between subjective and factual predicates,much remains to be explored on whether, and how, the difference between these two assertionsis reflected at the illocutionary level. Relying on evidence from two experiments, we show thatassertions containing subjective predicates display different discourse behavior from objectiveassertions. We take these findings to support the idea that SAs should be assigned a specialillocutionary profile, unveiling a genuine empirical difference between subjective and factualspeech.Keywords: subjectivity, discourse, assertion, Common Ground.