This relevance-based account of commitment borrows from studies on epistemic
vigilance and focuses on the hearer’s perspective. It suggests that commitment
determines the strength of the contextual assumptions derived from
utterance interpretation.
In this contribution, I distinguish four kinds of commitment: speaker
commitment, communicated commitment, attributed commitment and hearer
commitment. The last two kinds of commitment are influenced by three
main factors which will be considered in turn: linguistic markers, the hearer’s
appraisal of the speaker and the salience of the communicated assumption in
his cognitive environment. These claims translate into four experimentally testable
predictions.
This proposal echoes the current debate concerned with epistemic evaluation
of information and aims to account for individuals’ commitment in terms
of the relative strength of stored assumptions in their cognitive environment.
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Marín-Arrese, Juana Isabel. 2011. “Epistemic Legitimizing Strategies, Commitment and Accountability in Discourse.” Discourse Studies 13 (6): 789–797.
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Nølke, Henning. 1994. La Dilution Linguistique des Responsabilités: Essai de Description Polyphonique des Marqueurs Evidentiels il semble que et il paraît que. In Les Sources du Savoir et leurs Marques Linguistiques, ed. by Patrick Dendale and Liliane Tasmowski, 84–94. Montrouge: Larousse.
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Cited by (7)
Cited by seven other publications
Oswald, Steve
2022. Insinuation is committing. Journal of Pragmatics 198 ► pp. 158 ff.
Elder, Chi-Hé
2021. Speaker Meaning, Commitment and Accountability. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 48 ff.
Elder, Chi-Hé
2024. Pragmatic Inference,
Ricci, Claudia & Corinne Rossari
2018. Commitment phenomena through the study of evidential markers in Romance languages. Journal of Pragmatics 128 ► pp. 98 ff.
Macagno, Fabrizio & Douglas Walton
2017. Communicative Intentions and Commitments. In Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 14], ► pp. 35 ff.
Macagno, Fabrizio & Douglas Walton
2017. Establishing Commitments Between Ambiguity and Misquotation. In Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 14], ► pp. 65 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 13 ff.
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