We are happy to announce a talk by Lennart Fritzsche (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: June 5, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Modified head nods as a window into gradable commitment
Abstract:
An interlocutor that is committed to a proposition p takes on the liability for the truth of p (Krifka, 2014; Viebahn, 2021). According to commitment-based approaches to assertion (e.g., Peirce, 1903; Krifka, 2014), an interlocutor that asserts p commits themselves to p. In recent philosophical literature, the idea has emerged that commitment is gradable (e.g., Marsili, 2014). For instance, a speaker is intuitively more committed to p when they assert undoubtedly p rather than just p (Wiegmann et al., 2022). In a similar vein, within semantic theory, Greenberg and Wolf (2018) proposed to interpret speech act operators as gradable by equipping Krifka’s (2014) ASSERT operator with a degree argument. Evidence supporting this comes from intensified response elements. For example, Hebrew legamrey! (‘absolutely!’) is argued to indicate maximum speaker commitment (Greenberg and Wolf, 2019), while German voll! (lit. ‘full!’) conveys a high—but not maximum—level of commitment (Gotzner, 2022). However, experimental evidence supporting a gradable analysis of ASSERT is lacking.
In this talk, I present preliminary experimental evidence from visual communication, showing that intensified head nods shift the perceived speaker commitment to the truth of the assertion (in line with claims in descriptive literature, e.g., Wilbur, 2000 for ASL). I analyze such modified head nods in the spirit of Greenberg and Wolf’s (2018) gradable analysis of the ASSERT operator (Krifka, 2014), but with a twist to capture the gradient nature of these modifications. In addition, I consider a pragmatic alternative along the lines of Bergen’s (2016) theory of ‘noise-reduction’, following Schlenker and Lamberton’s (2021) application of this approach to intensification via brow raises in ASL.