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 .∃d’:βx≈ αx∧d’predicate. Here, sponse to a customer inquiry, where maximal pre- the ordering on which like operates seems to be cision is expected (d set at 1, the maximum). The paraphrasable as phonetic resemblance, where al- resulting interpretation halos are as follows. ternatives are ranked on the basis of how closely C1: $20 0.7,C = {$17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23} their phonological form approximates the one of C2: J$20K0.9,C = {$19, 20, 21} the target. Adding like then amounts to slackening C3: J$20K1,C = {$20} the demands on phonological similarity, including AgainstJ thisK background, like widens the size of alternative pronunciations that would normally be the halo of a linguistic expression, signaling that deemed as too dissimilar from the original one to a less stringent standard of precision ought to be be considered as a viable alternative. adopted in interpreting that expression in the con- (27) [Prophecy]0.9,C = {pôAf@si, text. This contribution amounts to fixing the de- pôA:f@si,prAf@si} gree of similarity required for a same-type expres- (28) like ([Prophecy]0.9,C ) = {pôAf@si, 1 The analysis is similar in spirit to the one modeled by pJôA:fK@si, prAf@si, bôAf@si, pôAv@si} Siegel 2002; the crucial difference is that we assume that the pragmatic halo of the expression is not introduced by like, but is always available for modification. This assumption is inde- 3.2 Mirative like: widening belief states pendently motivated by the observation that imprecision is a general pragmatic phenomenon underlying the interpretation We argue that, from a semantic standpoint, mi- of language, even in the absence of specialized modifiers. rative like performs an analogous type of oper- ation to its hedging counterpart. Specifically, We propose that mirative like signals that a speaker we propose that mirative like relaxes the thresh- uttering an assertion is relaxing the plausibility old of stereotypicality required for a world to be threshold of their doxastic state, signaling that part of the the doxastic state of a speaker, admit- their set of candidate worlds now include worlds ting worlds that were previously pragmatically ex- that, due to their low plausibility, were previously cluded by virtue of being outlandish; surprise en- excluded. To see how this work, let us consider sues as a result. As a first step of the analysis, the anchor proposition of (5) again. we suggest that doxastic states are pragmatically restricted: they exclude outlandish worlds, that (31) p = My friend is rich now. is, worlds that, while compatible with our beliefs, First, let us imagine that there are four possible are so distant from the actual one that they can worlds: two in which p is true, w11 and w22; and be ignored for pragmatic purposes. Evidence for two in which p is false, w33 and w44. Further- this assumption comes from the observation that more, let us assume that in the actual world w1 the modals typically quantify over modal bases that possibility of the person in question being rich is include only worlds that are reasonably similar to so remote that we can safely rule it out as implau- the actual one, as opposed to every possible world sible. As such, all worlds in which the person is (see Klecha 2014 for evidence and discussion). rich have very low stereotypicality value. Hence, We suggest that such plausibility-based restric- for θ set at 0.1, the doxastic state of a speaker for tions apply to doxastic states: the set of worlds evaluation world w1 contains only ¬p worlds. that we consider to be possible candidates for the actual world on the basis of what we know and (32) ST(w1)(w11)=0.05; ST(w1)(w22)=0.02; believe. We thus enrich the notion of a doxastic ST(w1)(w33)=0.7; ST(w1)(w44)=0.8 state by suggesting that, for an individual anchor (33) Dox0.1 = {w33, w44} x, Dox includes worlds that are not only compati- x,w1 ble with what the speaker knows/believes, but that Finally, let us now imagine that in w1 the friend are also reasonable. We build on Klecha (2014) wins the lottery, making p true. What happens in modeling non-outlandishness in terms of ST, an if the speaker above learns that p and intends to operator that applies a world v and an evaluation assert it? As their doxastic state stands, p would world w, and returns the degree of plausibility of v not be assertable. Because the doxastic state only given what we know in w. Whether a world counts contains ¬p-worlds, the speaker could never be in as sufficiently plausible is determined by a param- the position of believing that p, let alone assert it eter θ, which represents the minimum threshold of (in (34)). To make this possible, the pragmatic re- plausibility that a world must meet. On a par with strictions in place on the doxastic state need to be pragmatic halos, the standard of plausibility is im- relaxed, lowering the threshold of stereotypicality posed by the context. to the minimum value that allows us to admit the p worlds into Dox, eliminate the ¬p ones, and, even- θ (29) ST(v)(w) =1 iff ST(v)(w) ≥θ in C tually, assert the proposition. The target doxastic space is represented in (35). Accordingly, a doxastic state Dox contains those worlds that must satisfy two characteristics: 0.1 (34) After learn(x)(p): Doxx,w1 = {w11,w22} (i) they are compatible with what the speaker ∩ {w33, w44} = {∅} knows/believes, per the original definition (Hin- (35) After learn(x)(p): Dox0.02 = {w11,w22} tikka 1962; Pearson 2017), (ii) they are greater or x,w1 ∩ {w11, w22, w33, w44} = {w11,w22} equal in plausibility to the threshold θ. Finally, we assume that Dox itself is parameterized not just to We suggest that mirative like precisely marks such an individual and a world of evaluation, as in Hin- a downward shift in the speaker’s threshold of tikka’s original account, but also to a threshold. stereotypicality, operating at the level of an asser- tion’s sincerity conditions. Specifically, an asser- (30) Doxθ ={w0: x,w tion with mirative like has the following sincer- 1.it s compatible with what x believes ity conditions: (i) that the speaker’s belief that p 0 in w for w to be w ; (Searle 1969), as is standard for all assertions; (ii) 2.ST(w’)(w) ≥ θ in C} that the doxastic state is relativized to a lower stan- dard of plausibility θ’ than the standard θ that ap- los, a larger set of admissible alternatives dilutes plied before learning that p. the strength of the assertion: because more pos- sibilities remain open, the assertion will allow us (36) “My friend is like . . . rich now.” ass. in w. to learn less about the state of the world than the θ0 (i) ∀w’: w’ ∈ Doxx,w, p(w’) = 1 its like-free counterpart. In the case of doxastic 0 (ii) θ < θ : ST(w’)(w) ≥ θ before learn(x)(p) states, considering non-stereotypical worlds is a On this view, the surprise effect conveyed by pre-condition for making an assertion that leads us like originates in association with the operation of to learn a lot about the world. The use of like, thus, revising the plausibility standard for the worlds indirectly leads us to narrow down the options for in the doxastic state. If outlandish worlds must the current world. Even though the particle does be allowed in order to assert p, it follows that signal that more worlds are being considered, its the content of p itself deviates from our expec- presence is followed by an assertion that has very tations/assumptions about the world, engendering high informative value, explaining the strengthen- the mirative flavor of this use of the particle like. ing effect of the mirative variant.

4 Mirativity vs hedging 5 The cross-linguistic picture In the proposed analysis, both the hedging and the mirative effects of like are underlied by the same core operator, whereby the particle relaxes The question arises as to how like relates to simi- a context-sensitive pragmatic restriction that de- lar polysemous manifestations of mirativity cross- termines the cutoff point for what elements are linguistically. We observe that hedging like and part of, respectively, a pragmatic halo and a dox- indirect evidentials, while obviously distinct, fea- astic state. It is important to note that the prag- ture one similarity. Just like widening a halo sig- matic restrictions enacted by like respond to very nals weakened commitment to the utterance, a similar pragmatic demands in both the hedging sentence marked with an indirect evidential sug- and mirative uses. Assuming a certain amount gests that the speaker isn’t as committed to p as if of deviation from the truth conditions of an ex- they would be if direct evidence was present (Pe- pression and its actual interpretation allows us to terson 2002). As such, both hedging and indirect describe the world in a perspicuous way, spar- evidentiality make ¬p worlds salient in compari- ing us the burden of providing unnecessarily fine- son to their non-hedged/direct counterparts. No- grained details; similarly, ruling out outlandish tably, it has been argued that the underlying pres- worlds allows us to work with fewer candidates in ence of ¬p option, for instance modeled in terms our quest for achieving a representation of the ac- of a prior ¬p expectation/belief (Backer 1970), tual world, sparing us “the cognitive difficulty of is also a defining component of the expression processing unexpected/non-stereotypical proposi- of surprise, as shown by the fact that predicates tions” (Klecha 2014: 144). expressing surprise, on a par with negation, can What changes is the route through which such also license NPIs (Linebarger 1987; Giannaki- pragmatic benefits are attained: in the case of dou 1999). Accordingly, the connection between halos, being imprecise amounts to accepting ele- weakened commitment and mirativity appears to ments – i.e., alternative same-type expressions – emerge in variety of phenomena besides eviden- that strictly speaking shouldn’t be there; in the tiality, including subjunctive selection under emo- case of doxastic states, being imprecise means rul- tive factives in Romance (Giannakidou and Mari ing out elements – i.e., candidate worlds – that 2015,Giannakidou and Mari 2016), and the use strictly speaking should be there. This difference, of modifiers like some in English (Stevens and in turn, helps us understand why only hedging like Solt 2017). Together with evidentials, such cases seems to have a weakening effect on the assertion, point to a principled connection between nega- while mirative one doesn’t. 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