Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Semantics, Pragmatics, and Social Meaning of Additive Expressions

Discourse particles are words that facilitate the smooth flow of information in conversation by clarifying how pieces of information relate to each other and to shared discourse goals. This doctoral dissertation project investigates the meaning of a particular class of discourse particles known as additives, which include English 'too', 'either', 'also', and 'as well'.

An additive signals that the sentence it occurs in augments another piece of information. For example, a speaker who utters, 'I like pizza. I like spaghetti too,' conveys that the sentences 'I like pizza' and 'I like spaghetti' both contribute to the discourse goal of determining what foods the speaker likes.

This project uses data from corpora of naturally-occurring English texts and large-scale web-based experiments to understand how English additives link pieces of information in discourse. By consulting with native speakers of four additional languages, the project also aims to identify ways in which additives perform similar functions across languages as well as ways in which they vary across languages.

In addition to facilitating the exchange of information to achieve shared discourse goals, additives also convey social meaning — that is, information about a speaker’s social identity. A particularly salient social effect arises when the additive particle 'too' is used to express disagreement. For example, if a parent says, 'You didn’t do your homework' to a child, the child might respond, 'I did too!' This use of 'too', which has been called the 'refutational use', is only appropriate in informal contexts and tends to make the speaker sound childish.

This project seeks to characterize the social meanings that various additives convey and understand how their social meanings might be related to their semantics. Results of this project are shared with the public through an outreach activity at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), a local science museum in Columbus, Ohio. This outreach introduces members of the public of all ages to key concepts in semantics and sociolinguistics, contributing to science education and raising the visibility of linguistics as a field.

Using the tools of formal semantics and pragmatics, this doctoral dissertation project analyzes the meaning of additive expressions in terms of how they shape the structure of discourse. This involves precisely specifying what relationship must hold between an additive’s host sentence and the previously salient piece of information that it augments (called its 'antecedent').

In other words, in what way must two pieces of information be related in order for a speaker to signal that one is offered 'in addition to' the other? The analysis also explains how the meaning of some additive particles could have been extended over time to give rise to the refutational use, whose meaning has not been rigorously studied in previous research.

To better understand their meaning, a large-scale web-based experiment is conducted to investigate the precise range of contexts for the refutational uses. To determine the extent to which the analysis of English additives can be extended to other languages and to identify dimensions along which additives vary between languages, native speakers of four additional languages are consulted.

One product of this cross-linguistic investigation is a questionnaire that other researchers can use with consultants in the field to study the additive inventories of other languages beyond those studied in this project. To study the social meaning of both the refutational and the additive uses of additive expressions, two large-scale experiments are also conducted measuring the social inferences that listeners draw from the use of such expressions in various contexts.

Using those data, the project investigates how differences between the social meanings of the additive and refutational uses might be rooted in semantic differences. This advances interdisciplinarity by bringing the formal rigor of semantics together with insights from anthropology and sociology that are foundational to sociolinguistics. In sum, this dissertation undertakes a holistic investigation of the meaning of additive particles, encompassing semantic, pragmatic, and social dimensions of meaning and employing both formal and experimental methods.

The results of this investigation sheds light on how speakers regulate the flow of information in discourse and on the interplay between semantics and social meaning.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.