Intensification, Gradability and Social Perception: The Case of totally

Abstract

The notion of social meaning has been widely investigated in sociolinguistic research (Eckert, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4):453–76, 2008); yet, it is rarely considered in experimental semantics, mainly due to the assumption that this type of meaning is relatively independent from the semantic properties of its carrier. Following a recent strand of inquiry (Acton and Potts, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(1):3–31, 2014; Glass, Selected papers from NWAV 43, 2015; Jeong and Potts, Proceedings of SALT, 26, 1–22, 2016), this paper contributes to filling this gap by exploring the role of semantic and pragmatic factors in determining the salience of the social meaning of the intensifier totally. Relying on a social perception task, it is shown that listeners perceive the social meaning of this expression—measured in terms of Solidarity and Status attributes—as particularly prominent in situations in which the morpheme combines with a commitment scale provided by the pragmatics, as opposed to when it combines with a scale lexically supplied by the subsequent predicate. This evidence suggests that listeners keep track of semantic information when making social evaluations about speech, pointing to social perception as a novel methodology for research in experimental semantics.