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Like, Hedging and Mirativity. a Unified Account

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Like, Hedging and Mirativity. a Unified Account Like, hedging and mirativity. A unified account. Abstract (4) Never thought I would say this, but Lil’ Wayne, is like. smart. We draw a connection between ‘hedging’ (5) My friend I used to hang out with is like use of the discourse particle like in Amer- . rich now. ican English and its use as a mirative marker of surprise. We propose that both (6) Whoa! I like . totally won again! uses of like widen the size of a pragmati- cally restricted set – a pragmatic halo vs. a In (4), the speaker is signaling that they did not doxastic state. We thus derive hedging and expect to discover that Lil Wayne is smart; in (5) surprise effects in a unified way, outlining the speaker is surprised to learn that their former an underlying link between the semantics friend is now rich; and in (6) the speaker is sur- of like and the one of other mirative mark- prised by the fact that they won again. ers cross-linguistically. After presenting several diagnostics that point to a genuine empirical difference between these 1 Introduction uses, we argue that they do in fact share a core grammatical function: both trigger the expansion Mirative expressions, which mark surprising in- of a pragmatically restricted set: the pragmatic formation (DeLancey 1997), are often expressed halo of an expression for the hedging variant; and through linguistic markers that are also used to en- the doxastic state of the speaker for the mirative code other, seemingly unrelated meanings – e.g., use. We derive hedging and mirativity as effects evidential markers that mark lack of direct evi- of the particular type of object to which like ap- dence (Turkish: Slobin and Aksu 1982; Peterson plies. 2010; Cheyenne: Rett and Murray 2013; Cuzco Quechua: Faller 2002; Ostyak: Nikolaeva 1999 2 The empirical picture a.o.) In this paper, we observe that the English dis- 2.1 Similarities course particle like, among its varied functions, From a compositional standpoint, mirative and features a similar polysemy. On its widely docu- hedging like are encoded at the level of non-at- mented hedging use, it has been widely shown that issue content. First, they both fail to interact like signals a “nonequivalence of what is said and with logical operators, e.g. negation (in (7)-(8)). what is meant” (Schourup 1985; see also Siegel Second, they cannot be directed agreed or dis- 2002; Sharifian and Malcom 2003; D’Arcy 2005). agreed with by the interlocutor with responses that (1) The shoes were like 20 dollars. deny/confirm the truth of proposition ((9)). In- stead, they can only be objected to via construc- (2) There’s a foreign boy in my group and he’s tions that call into question more general felicity like European or something. conditions, such as the Hey, wait a minute! re- (3) One of them was called like Prophecy. sponse (in (10), Shanon 1976; von Fintel 2004). However, we show that like also has a previ- (7) Mary’s shoes don’t cost like $20. ously undocumented mirative use, in which the Intended: # It is not the case that the presence of this marker signals that the embedded speaker is hedging the claim that M’s shoes proposition is surprising or unexpected. cost $20. (8) My friend isn’t like . rich now. ferently. The hedging use can have an effect on the Intended: # It is not the case that the truth conditions, at least indirectly (Siegel 2002). speaker is surprised that their friend is rich. In (17), A is objecting to B’s denial by saying that, (9) B (in resp. to (7)) : #No, that’s false!. Why by virtue of using like as a hedge, the first utter- do you sound so tentative? ance should count as true. The same move is not B (in resp. to (8)): #No, that’s false!. Why possible for mirative uses (18), where the use of do you sound so surprised? like cannot be used as evidence for contesting the truth-value judgment of the hearer. (10) B (in resp. to (7)): XHey, wait a minute. Why do you sound so tentative? (17) A: Mary’s shoes only cost like 20$. B (in resp. to (8)): XHey, wait a minute. B: No, they cost 14 dollars. Why do you sound so surprised? A: XWell, I said like. 2.2 Differences (18) My friend is . like rich now! B: No! He’s working class! While both are non-at-issue, the two uses can be A: # Well, I said like. teased apart through several diagnostics. First, hedging like can be either prosodically integrated Fifth, mirative like, contrary to its hedging coun- with the rest of the utterance, or be pronounced terpart, interacts with the illocutionary mood of as a parenthetical (represented e.g. with commas). the utterance: it is restricted to assertions, and By contrast, mirative like is necessarily followed appears to be infelicitous in non-assertive moves, by a longer prosodic pause (represented hence- e.g. constituent questions or imperatives (20). forth with ellipses). As such, while a hedging Hedging like presents no such restrictions (19). interpretation is normally available when like is prosodically integrated, a mirative is unavailable (19) XBring me like 20 dollars! (= the re- if there is no pause following like, as in (12). quested amount can be approximate) XHow like much did the shoes cost? (= (11) XMary’s shoes only cost like $20. the speaker would be satisfied with a (12) # My friend is like rich now. rough estimate) Second, mirative like is compatible with markers (20) # Be like. smart now! (= I am surprised that indicate full commitment to the proposition by the fact that you can be smart now) on the part of the speaker, such as totally (in its # Who is like. smart now? (= I am sur- speaker-oriented uses, see Irwin 2014; Beltrama prised by the fact that you are smart now) 2017) or definitely, e.g. (13). Hedging like cannot Finally, mirative and hedging like engender differ- be followed by such modifiers, e.g. (14). ent types of unacceptability when their content is (13) # M’s shoes only cost, like, totally $20. overtly denied. While denying hedging like has a contradiction-like effect (21), denying mirative (14) Whoa! I like . totally won again! X like gives rise instead to Moore’s Paradox (22), Third, in the scope of reportive verbs, the contri- where the infelicity is due to conflicting belief bution of hedging like can be ascribed either to the states of the speaker, rather than contradiction per speaker or the matrix subject (15); with mirative se (see Rett and Murray 2013 for a similar obser- uses, the surprise effect contributed by like can be vation on indirect vs. mirative evidentials). exclusively ascribed to the speaker (16). (21) #The shoes are like $20, and by that I mean (15) John said that M’s shoes cost like twenty they exactly $20. Contradiction dollars. XJohn; XSpeaker (22) #Lil Wayne is like. smart, and I totally (16) John said that his friend is like . rich expected that! Moore’s paradox now. # John; XSpeaker In sum, the two types of like have distinct gram- Fourth, while both constitute part of the non-at- matical properties. This suggests that the mirative issue content, mirative and hedging like interact contribution represents a genuinely distinct use of with the propositional content of the utterance dif- like, not just a special instance of the hedging use. 3 Proposal sion β to be be part of the halo of α to a lower value (d’, below) than the one imposed by the con- 3.1 Hedging like: widening halos text (i.e. d). This expands the set of admissible in- We propose that hedging like operates on the prag- terpretations that the target expression can receive matic halo of an expression, lowering the degree in the communicative context in which like is used. of deviation from the form’s literal meaning that d;C d0 can be tolerated in a particular communicative sit- (25) LikeH =λ αx .9d’:βx≈ αx^d’<d J K J K uation.1 We build on Morzycki (2011) to recast If applied to C1 above, for example, using like halos as a set of alternative expressions that bear a amounts to expressing that there exists a degree to contextually determined degree of resemblance to which an alternative number word counts as sim- the linguistic forms they apply to. Resemblance is ilar enough to $20, and that this degree is lower modeled as a cross-categorial “approximateness” than the one imposed by the context (i.e., 0.7). relation ≈, which holds between two objects if they are similar to at least degree d in context C, (26) like ( $20 0:7;C ) = 9d0:Number 0 where d is a number with a value between 0 and 1. WordJ K≈Jd ;C K20 ^d’<0.7 d;C (23) α =fβ: β ≈d;C αg Note that the distribution of hedging like is not J K (24) β ≈d;C α iff, given the ordering imposed necessarily tied to orderings rooted in cardinali- by the context C , β resembles α to d and ties or amounts; rather, the particle applies to a α and β are of the same type. much wider domain of expressions, as shown by (2)-(3) above. The proposed account is flexible Crucially, different contexts impose different stan- enough to handle such cases. In particular, the dards of required similarity. The higher the mini- cross-categorial nature of the ≈ relationship, cor- mum degree of resemblance, the smaller the halo; rectly predicts that, as long as alternatives can be vice versa, the lower the degree, the larger the ranked according to similarity relationship to the halo.
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