engleski

Focus and the interpretation of quantifiers in face-threatening contexts

Politeness theory defines face as a sense of positive identity or desired public image that people are motivated to maintain during social interaction. Many actions or utterances are possible threats to the face, so speakers often use linguistic politeness strategies that mitigate these threats. One of politeness strategies is hedging, or weakening a statement that a speaker knows to be true and which could present a threat to the face of the hearer. Bonnefon, Feeney, & Villejoubert (2009) showed that in face-threatening contexts expression some X-ed may be interpreted as all X-ed. The study aimed to investigate the interpretation of quantifiers some, few, and a few in face- threatening contexts. We expected that interpretation of few would differ from interpretations of some and a few due to the property of focus. One hundred and seventy-one participants read three scenarios and judged the appropriateness of quantifier use in different contexts. We replicated the results reported by Bonnefon et al. (2009): participants were more likely to endorse the inference from some X-ed to all X-ed in a face-threatening context than in a face-boost context. Similarly, few X-ed was more likely to be interpreted as no one X-ed in a face-threatening context. For a few there were no differences between the two contexts.

quantifiers ; focus ; politeness ; face-threatening contexts

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