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Intensification, Gradability and Social Perception: The Case of totally

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The Semantics of Gradability, Vagueness, and Scale Structure

Part of the book series: Language, Cognition, and Mind ((LCAM,volume 4))

Abstract

The notion of social meaning has been widely investigated in sociolinguistic research (Eckert, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4):453–76, 2008); yet, it is rarely considered in experimental semantics, mainly due to the assumption that this type of meaning is relatively independent from the semantic properties of its carrier. Following a recent strand of inquiry (Acton and Potts, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(1):3–31, 2014; Glass, Selected papers from NWAV 43, 2015; Jeong and Potts, Proceedings of SALT, 26, 1–22, 2016), this paper contributes to filling this gap by exploring the role of semantic and pragmatic factors in determining the salience of the social meaning of the intensifier totally. Relying on a social perception task, it is shown that listeners perceive the social meaning of this expression—measured in terms of Solidarity and Status attributes—as particularly prominent in situations in which the morpheme combines with a commitment scale provided by the pragmatics, as opposed to when it combines with a scale lexically supplied by the subsequent predicate. This evidence suggests that listeners keep track of semantic information when making social evaluations about speech, pointing to social perception as a novel methodology for research in experimental semantics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this issue to my attention.

  2. 2.

    https://instagram.com/p/zEZEQQqYPY/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=totally.

  4. 4.

    Authors have put forward different proposal to model this meaning—-see Kennedy and McNally (2005) for a degree-based approach and Toledo and Sassoon (2011), Sassoon and Zevakhina (2012) for a non-degree-based one among others. The formalization of the contribution of the modifier in this use is orthogonal to the aims of the current paper, and I will therefore remain agnostic as to whether a degree-based or a non-degree based approach is to be preferred.

  5. 5.

    From this perspective it shows compositional properties similar to other expressions that specify the attitude of the speaker such as expressives (Potts 2005b), certain evidentials (Faller 2002; Murray 2014; Rett and Murray 2013); and other speaker-oriented adverbs, (see Ernst 2009).

  6. 6.

    The OED added a dedicated entry in 2005: “In weakened use as an intensifier: (modifying an adjective) very, extremely; (modifying a verb) definitely, absolutely.”

  7. 7.

    The symbol ? indicates a minor degree of deviance.

  8. 8.

    A possible departure point for an explanation could be rooted in the fact that extreme adjectives themselves pattern somewhat in between relative and absolute ones, as extensively discussed by Morzycki (2012). By referring to properties with an inherently high degree for example they could make it easier for the listener to coerce their open scale into a bounded one as suggested by Paradis (2000).

  9. 9.

    Campbell-Kibler (2007) for example suggests that “it is likely that those variants which depart more strongly or unexpectedly from a listener’s customary experience are more apt to be noticed and assigned meaning than those which differ only slightly”.

  10. 10.

    The example only holds for languages like English, where proper names do not require a determiner. The same social effects are not predicted to hold, instead, for languages that grammatically require the presence of a determiner in this context, such as Greek, even though, to my knowledge the prediction has not been tested scientifically thus far.

  11. 11.

    In a more general sense all cooperative interlocutors are working towards the goal of enriching the amount of mutual knowledge coordinating their moves to maximize the number of propositions that they mutually accept as true (Stalnaker 1978).

  12. 12.

    An obvious disadvantage of this methodology, by contrast, is that it is less ecologically faithful than other techniques for data collection (e.g., ethnography). In particular, it has been suggested by sociolinguists that social meaning is a complex semiotic entity that cannot be separated from the other linguistic and non-linguistic practices through which humans interact and make sense of the world (Eckert 2000). As such, investigating it through the lens of a set of attributes that rate speech samples in isolation obviously comes with a price in terms of empirical simplification.

  13. 13.

    Note that, for building the scales predicted to be negatively affected by the intensifier, I took into consideration both adjectives referring to a high degree of their antonym and adjectives negating the quality itself. For example the decision to adopt “Intelligent” as a dimension negatively impacted by totally was motivated by subjects entering both “unintelligent” and “dumb” as descriptors of the speaker in the pilot.

  14. 14.

    See Appendix for full set of experimental items.

  15. 15.

    Due to the high number questions following each item, no fillers were used so as to avoid overwhelming subjects throughout the study and help them stay focused at all times.

  16. 16.

    Whether it is desirable to generate p values for fixed effect models has been widely discussed recently within the R community. For reporting purposes, the p values were generated with the function summary(aov(model)).

  17. 17.

    At the same time it must be noted that the Solidarity mean ratings of the positive form of extreme adjectives is still near the middle of the scale rather than being skewed towards the top. As such, it would be hasty to explain the lack of Solidarity effects on totally in terms of a ceiling effect of the bare forms. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for directing my attention to this observation.

  18. 18.

    As an anonymous reviewer suggests, a possible way to further explore the factor(s) driving the social perception of totally with absolute adjectives would be to use intonation to disambiguate between the lexical and the speaker-oriented reading, and verify how this impacts the social perception of the intensifier.

  19. 19.

    I thank an anonymous NWAV 44 reviewer for suggesting this explanation.

  20. 20.

    I thank E. Allyn Smith and Tim Leffel for suggesting, separately and (almost) simultaneously, this explanation.

  21. 21.

    A search on the Corpus of Historic American English (COHA, Davies 2010) shows that, while lexical totally has been around since the beginning of the 20th century (and, incidentally, also well before), the intensifier in the other two contexts emerged fairly recently, and almost simultaneously. While the attestation of the first occurrence with extreme adjectives predates the first attestation of speaker-oriented totally by 20 years, the very low number of occurrences of both contexts in the corpus suggests some caution in taking such a 20 year gap as significant.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ivano Caponigro, Annette D’Onofrio, Penny Eckert, Itamar Francez, Susan Gal, Emily Hanink, Anastasia Giannakidou, Julian Grove Sunwoo Jeong, Chris Kennedy, Dan Lassiter, Tim Leffel, Alda Mari, Costas Nakassis, Rob Podesva, Chris Potts, Teresa Pratt, Michael Silverstein, Laura Staum Casasanto, E. Allyn Smith, Ming Xiang and the other linguists at the University of Chicago and Stanford University who provided insightful comments on different parts of this project. I would also like to thank the audience from the ExpGrad Workshop in Madrid, and in particular Elena Castroviejo, Louise McNally and Galit Sassoon for organizing the conference and including my contribution in this volume. All errors and oversights are my own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Konstanz, Egg, Universitaetsstrasse 10, 78464, Konstanz, Germany

    Andrea Beltrama

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  1. Andrea Beltrama
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Correspondence to Andrea Beltrama .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

    Elena Castroviejo

  2. Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Louise McNally

  3. Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Galit Weidman Sassoon

Appendix: Experimental Materials

Appendix: Experimental Materials

  1. 1.

    Someone found a bottle of wine on the street. It was {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {big/gigantic/full}.

  2. 2.

    The drive from New York to Chicago is {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {long/awful/flat}.

  3. 3.

    Compared to Atlanta, Portland is {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {small/astonishing/quiet}.

  4. 4.

    I just met the new boss. He’s {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {tall/awesome/bald}.

  5. 5.

    I met John’s brother. He’s {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {young/gigantic/different from him}.

  6. 6.

    We jump in it and ...the water was {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {cold/freezing/frozen}.

  7. 7.

    Traveling on the 4th July weekend is {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {pricey/great/ unaffordable}.

  8. 8.

    Dad finally found a picture of his wedding, but it’s {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {small/ ridiculous/blurry}.

  9. 9.

    The ice cover on the lake is {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {thin/massive/safe} right now.

  10. 10.

    Take a look at this story. It’s {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {deep/amazing/absurd}.

  11. 11.

    Biking from school to the train station is {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {fast/creepy/safe}.

  12. 12.

    The walk home from here is {totally/really/very/\(\emptyset \)} {short/gorgeous/straight}.

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Beltrama, A. (2018). Intensification, Gradability and Social Perception: The Case of totally. In: Castroviejo, E., McNally, L., Weidman Sassoon, G. (eds) The Semantics of Gradability, Vagueness, and Scale Structure. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77791-7_7

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