Subjective assertions are weak: exploring the illocutionary profile of perspectivedependent predicates

Abstract

Sentences containing subjective predicates – e.g., “The movie was awesome” – areintuitively anchored to a particular perspective; this makes them different from sentences describingobjective facts – e.g., “The movie was set in 1995”. While authors have long debatedon whether this intuition tracks a lexical distinction between subjective and factual predicates,much remains to be explored on whether, and how, the difference between these two assertionsis reflected at the illocutionary level. Relying on evidence from two experiments, we show thatassertions containing subjective predicates display different discourse behavior from objectiveassertions. We take these findings to support the idea that SAs should be assigned a specialillocutionary profile, unveiling a genuine empirical difference between subjective and factualspeech.Keywords: subjectivity, discourse, assertion, Common Ground.