Pure expressive adjectives (EAs) (e.g., damn) convey a negative speaker attitude toward a discourse referent and display interpretational flexibility, often targeting elements beyond their syntactic sister. The speech-act hypothesis treats EAs as quasi-independent, non-at-issue speech acts whose target is pragmatically inferred. We propose that 'contextual valence' - the perceived positivity or negativity of discourse referents - is a key factor in EA interpretation. Study 1 (English) shows that EAs are significantly more likely to target negatively valenced referents, though this effect interacts with EA-placement. Study 2 (German) extends this framework to mixed EAs (e.g., shitty), whose descriptive content negativizes the local referent and thereby biases for local readings. However, non-local interpretations become more likely when additional contextual cues support a more negative evaluation of the non-local referent. Taken together, these findings show that valence systematically guides EA interpretation and provide a unified explanation for a range of previous experimental results and theoretical argumentations.
This study investigates the second language processing and interpretation of the Japanese reflexive zibun 'self' by Chinese and Korean learners of Japanese. This is motivated by the pragmatic influence on anaphoric resolution in these three languages, allowing insight into positive pragmatic transfer regarding both the processing and interpretation of zibun. Guided by the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, these pragmatic effects are manipulated to affect the learners' reading of zibun, using a self-paced reading experiment with antecedent judgements and introspective measures. Results show that learners and native speakers alike are influenced by pragmatic factors, but there appears to be different weighing of cues in the learner groups in their real-time processing. Overall, the data supports the view of positive pragmatic transfer of anaphoric strategies into the learners' second language, which in turn supports the idea that pragmatics regulates reflexive pronouns in these three languages.
This article investigates text-based emotional contagion in online customer feedback, focusing on the role of evaluative language in Twitter (now X) complaints and compliments. Specifically, it examines the impact of evaluative language on readers' attribution of positive and negative emotions in these messages, as well as the emotions they themselves experience when reading them. The study focuses on Dutch-language Twitter posts in which customers publicly complain about or praise the Belgian national railway company. We report on a questionnaire experiment with a 2 x 2 design in which the valence (positive or negative) of corpus-based Twitter stimuli and the presence/absence of evaluative language were manipulated. Participants were first asked to report their own emotional states while reading the messages and were then asked to assess positive and negative emotions expressed in the same messages. The results show, first, that complaints containing evaluative language led to higher perceived sadness and lower perceived happiness than complaints without evaluative language. Second, while evaluative language did not affect readers' emotional responses to compliments, self-reported sadness was higher for complaints with evaluative language than for those without. Third, participants reported greater surprise in response to compliments than to complaints overall. Finally, a significant positive correlation was found between the intensity of perceived emotions and that of self-reported emotions. Together, these findings provide novel evidence for emotion attribution and text-based emotional contagion in online customer feedback.
In this paper, we analyze scopally ambiguous Russian sentences containing sentential negation and NPs with the quantifier 'all' following the verb. While prosody has been shown to disambiguate scope in artificial examples lacking pragmatic cues, we aimed to examine its role in real usage, including production and comprehension of natural sentences. For production, we collected examples from the Multimedia Russian Corpus and analyzed their interpretations and prosodic properties. For comprehension, we conducted an experiment with recorded sentences based on corpus phrases, featuring both natural and unnatural prosodic patterns. Participants chose between scopally different interpretations using prosodic and pragmatic cues. Our findings reveal that although prosody can mark scope and affect interpretation, it is not consistently used in naturalistic data. In production, stress often conveys emphasis and contrast rather than scope. In comprehension, interpretation is influenced more by pragmatic feasibility than by information structure expressed through prosody.
