Hyperbolic readings in embedded environments - Forced choice task
Creators: name: Spector, Benjamin
name: Sossidi, Eirini
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Linguistics
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: Semantics and Pragmatics
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: Background, motivation and hypotheses

A number of works within the RSA model and related frameworks have focused on non-literal readings such as hyperbolic readings, as illustrated in (1) (see, e.g., Kao et al. 2014).

(1) This shirt costs one thousand euros =&gt; This shirt is extremely expensive

The gist of the proposals on the market consists in assuming that the interpretation of a sentence can be relativized to a salient (though sometimes implicit) question under discussion (QUD).

If the speaker is understood to answer the question ‘Is the shirt too expensive?’, then the sentence in (1), though literally false (if the shirt did in fact cost 126 euros), can be used when it entails a true answer to the question that the speaker believes (e.g. that the shirt costs more than the speaker can afford).

We take inspiration from this kind of analysis and aim to empirically explore what happens when the relevant expressions appear in more complex structures. Our goal will be to have a clear view of how hyperbolic sentences behave and what readings they licence when embedded in complex environments. Our starting point is an observation that the following two sentences do not lend themselves equally to a hyperbolic reading. (first observed by Diego Fienmann) 

(2) a. If the coffee costs a million pounds, I won’t get one.
 [Potential hyperbolic reading less accessible (‘If the coffee is extremely expensive, I won’t get one’)]
 b. If the coffee doesn't cost a million pounds, I will get one. 
[Potential hyperbolic reading more accessible (‘If the coffee is not extremely expensive, I won’t get one’)]

At the theoretical level, we can start from two different plausible hypotheses :

One plausible hypothesis is that hyperbolic readings arise only when the literal reading expresses a proposition that is highly unlikely to be the speaker’s intended meaning. A proposition can be unlikely to be the speaker’s intended meaning if it describes an unlikely event, where more specifically the speaker is unlikely to believe it, as in (2b) under its literal meaning (which entails for instance that I might buy a coffee that costs 999 euros), or if it describes a very likely event, so that it is not very informative and a rational speaker would not bother to express it, given the tradeoff between informativity and cost, as in (2a) under its literal meaning (where it’s somewhat obvious that I would not buy a coffee that expensive). 

This hypothesis predicts that hyperbolic readings should arise equally, depending solely on whether the literal meaning is unlikely to be the speaker’s intended meaning. On this reading, hyperbolic readings should arise in both (2a) and (2b).

Our scientific hypothesis is that hyperbolic readings should be more accessible when the literal reading expresses a proposition that describes a highly unlikely event. In some specific implementations of the RSA model proposed by Kao et al., we find that the hyperbolic, non-literal reading arises at lower recursion levels in the case of sentences whose literal meaning expresses near-impossible events than for those whose literal meaning expresses an obvious truth. This would predict that the hyperbolic meaning should not be as accessible when the triggering expression occurs in the immediate scope of an operator that reverses informativity strength such as if, since in this case, the literal reading becomes an obvious truth.

This hypothesis predicts the contrast reported in the minimal pair, since under the
literal meaning, the prior probability of (2a) but not (2b) is very high (if conditionals are viewed as material or strict conditionals).

Our goal is therefore to investigate in detail the fine-grained phenomenology of hyperbolic readings, and how they behave in embedded environments. In order to pursue this question, we create an experimental design whose first goal is to test the first hypothesis and disprove it. To do so, we are going to look at whether participants prefer sentences of type A, where the trigger phrase ‘a million pounds’ is in an ‘if’ environment without negation or type B where the trigger phrase is in an ‘if not’ environment. The context where the trigger phrases appear is of the sort where their potential hyperbolic meanings are contextually relevant (while their literal meanings are either obvious falsehoods or obvious truths). In other words, we will be conducting a study to examine whether our fine-grained intuition found in (2) is also shared by participants. In order to control for the possibility that whatever effect we will find is not due to a difference in relevance between the two readings, or an independent influence of sentence structure (including the presence or absence of negation) on participants’ choices, we create two groups of participants, one of which is exposed to the potential hyperbolic sentences, while the other is exposed to paraphrases of these hyperbolic meanings which have the same syntactic structure and are presented in the same contexts.