Colloquium

Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California) – “Perspective-taking and subjective attitudes: On the importance of linguistic and extra-linguistic context”

Colloquium talk by Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)

Abstract:

In the context of daily life, we are faced with both objective facts about the world and people’s subjective opinions. This distinction is also reflected in language: Words expressing opinions (e.g. fun, delicious) differ from those conveying more objective facts (e.g. plastic, Finnish): Subjective adjectives are perspective-sensitive and reveal someone’s opinion/attitude, while objective adjectives convey factual information. Indeed, when two people disagree about a matter of taste, both of them can still be ‘in the right’: there is nothing contradictory when someone says “That sandwich was tasty!” and another person responds “No, it was not tasty” (faultless disagreement) — in contrast to disagreements about objective facts. How (and whether) to capture these kinds of phenomena using truth-conditional semantics is a core question that has attracted a lot of attention in formal semantics and philosophy, but has received less attention from an experimental perspective. I will present a series of psycholinguistic experiments from my lab that use a variety of methods – including webcam-based eye-tracking — to explore three related questions concerning subjectivity: First, how good are we at noticing subjective information – in other words, at recognizing something as a subjective opinion? Second, how accurately and how automatically do we keep track of whose opinion is being conveyed? Third, when faced with opposing opinions, do we really regard the disagreement as ‘faultless,’ with neither person being wrong? To what extent does this depend on social relations between people, as well as individual differences? Based on a series of studies, I show that the processing of subjective adjectives is constrained in semantically and syntactically principled ways, but also guided by contextual and social considerations that go far beyond the adjective itself. As whole, these results call for a richly context-based approach to subjective information that integrates not only lexical factors, but also sentence-level, interlocutor-level and social factors.