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

Abstract

Sentences containing subjective predicates – e.g., “The movie was awesome” – are
intuitively anchored to a particular perspective; this makes them different from sentences describing
objective facts – e.g., “The movie was set in 1995”. While authors have long debated
on 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 assertions
is reflected at the illocutionary level. Relying on evidence from two experiments, we show that
assertions containing subjective predicates display different discourse behavior from objective
assertions. We take these findings to support the idea that SAs should be assigned a special
illocutionary profile, unveiling a genuine empirical difference between subjective and factual
speech.
Keywords: subjectivity, discourse, assertion, Common Ground.