February 17, 2017: Eric McCready and Grégoire Winterstein

Time:: 4:30pm, February 17, 2017
Place:: Keio University, Mita Campus,
South Annex, 7th floor
Speakers:: Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) and Grégoire Winterstein (The Education University of Hong Kong)
Title:: Linguistic manipulation of epistemic authority
Abstract:: Expressive content is a kind of not-at-issue content introduced by a wide variety of lexical items, including honorifics, slurs and particles. This kind of content often relates to social aspects of meaning. For instance, the use of expressive content such as that conveyed by slurs or gender marking can activate stereotypes which have effects on the attribution of epistemic credibility. This talk reports on experimental results of examining how such stereotypes, while never explicitly invoked, affect judgements about the credibility of source-based arguments, focusing on the case of gender-marked pronouns, and incorporates the result into a formal model of credibility. Finally, it considers from a theoretical perspective similar facts relating to honorification in Japanese.

Semantics Research Group Meeting, February 17, 2017