LingLunch : Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos

Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos (University of Oslo)
Anticipating the f***ig referent: How comprehenders rapidly retrieve the speaker’s attitude when processing negative expressive adjectives

 Theoretical work on negative expressive adjectives such as “fucking” has argued that these convey a speaker-oriented attitude, which constitutes a separate dimension of meaning (Potts, 2005, Harris & Potts, 2009, Gutzmann, 2019, i.a.).  However, it’s unclear what it means for an expressive to be speaker-oriented during language processing: Can comprehenders automatically and rapidly retrieve a speaker’s perspective via the expressive, or is this a delayed and effortful inferential process? And what role does the expressive’s syntactic flexibility play? The current study seeks to answer these questions by using an eye-tracking, Visual World Paradigm. Our results suggest that comprehenders can automatically and locally use expressives to anticipate an upcoming referent if they have knowledge of the speaker’s perspective. They can do this regardless of the expressive's syntactic position, offering support for theoretical accounts and establishing linking hypotheses to online sentence processing.