Jisu Park (UCL) - 2024-25 Students
jisu.park.24@ucl.ac.uk

Factivity and Politeness in Knowledge Reports: a Crosslinguistic and Experimental Study on Their Semantics and Pragmatics

One important function of language is to share one’s thoughts or feelings. Linguistic expressions related to this function have been actively discussed as “attitude reports”. Linguistics research on knowledge reports, one type of attitude report that delivers speakers’ knowledge, has focused on the idea of ‘factivity’, i.e., whether the information being reported is true or not.

For instance, the factive verb ‘know’ is used to report knowledge about facts (e.g., you cannot say “John knows that Charles left.” unless Charles actually left.) whereas the non-factive verb ‘believe’ rather expresses strong beliefs that something is true, which might turn out to be false (e.g., “John believes that Charles left.” does not necessarily mean that Charles left.). This kind of information on factivity, which is covert in English, is even more clearly and explicitly marked in Korean by the dedicated particles.

However, I claim that such an epistemic certainty regarding factivity from the semantic meaning is not the only attitude conveyed in knowledge reports: social/pragmatic meaning, such as politeness, is often also encoded in these linguistic expressions. That is, speakers tend to mitigate their epistemic stance as a politeness strategy in various languages including Korean. Oftentimes, direct and strong assertions are perceived as rude. I am particularly interested in this possible trade-off or conflict between epistemic certainty and politeness. Such a social/pragmatic aspect in knowledge reports has been rarely explored previously. To address this gap, my project aims to explore both semantic and social/pragmatic dimensions of knowledge reports through cutting-edge empirical methodologies from experimental pragmatics and original fieldwork on an understudied language on top of theoretical analysis.

Considering that knowledge reports have been studied predominantly in theoretical semantics, my investigation of their socio-pragmatic dimension will contribute to the literature. The implication of this project will be applicable beyond linguistics or academia as knowledge reports are often used between individuals in everyday communications. This project will enable us to better understand how speakers can delicately adjust the level of certainty while satisfying the social manner when they share their knowledge. Moreover, knowledge reports are also frequently used by authorities and media. Based on this project, following-up studies can further investigate how the way public messaging by the government, for instance, is expressed linguistically in terms of the degree of epistemic certainty can influence how such messaging is perceived by the general public and how much they trust the information delivered.

Principal Supervisor: Professor Yasutada Sudo