Work

Speakers Use Indirect Language to Pursue Their Own Goals While Managing Social Relationships

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: We test three theories of the use and interpretation of indirect language by manipulating speaker interaction styles, focusing on an interpretation asymmetry that has puzzled philosophers and grammarians since Greek antiquity. We observe that negated evaluatively-positive (not happy) and evaluatively-negative (not sad) adjectives are interpreted asymmetrically for a speaker who regularly uses loopholes. Our results provide evidence that speakers use the loophole opened up by the indirectness of negation to plausibly deny an evaluatively-negative meaning. In contrast, the predicted interaction effects of competing politeness and Pollyanna-based theories are not borne out by our experiments. We interpret these results as evidence that loopholes are the key mechanism driving the asymmetric interpretation of negated statements. We also find evidence that hearers take into account that the speaker protects their own self-image rather than just mitigating a potential face-threat posed towards the hearer. Overall, our results suggest that speakers use indirect language to pursue their own goals while managing their social relationships.

Source: Open Mind

DOI: 10.1162/opmi.a.388

Authors: Nicole Gotzner, Gregory Scontras

Institutions: Osnabrück University, University of California, Irvine

Language: English

Topic: Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $950

Funder: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft