Totally tall sounds totally younger. From meaningcomposition to social perception.

Andrea BeltramaUniversity of Chicago

Final version to appear in Proceedings of Amsterdam Colloquium 20

November 15, 2015

1 Introduction

Linguistic expressions carry two distinct kinds of content. On the one hand, theyconvey a semantic meaning, with which they are conventionally associated in thegrammar of a language. On the other hand, they convey a social meaning (e.g.,Eckert (2008a)), that is, a package of typified socio-psychological qualities about theidentity of language users. These varieties of content, despite the common label, areseen as, at best, contingently related, and ultimately pertaining to independent do-mains.1 This divide is motivated by two empirical observations. First, semantic andsocial meaning have a different semiotic status. While the former is conventionallyassociated with linguistic forms, and hence relatively fixed within a speech commu-nity, the latter is indirectly indexed by their carrier (Silverstein (2003)), emergingas more fluid and less stable. Second, the two types of meaning do not attach tothe same units: sounds, for example, are devoid of semantic meaning, and yet of-ten carry a rich cloud of social meanings (e.g., non rhotic [r] = “Boston”, “workingclass”, “toughness”). Recognizing the different status of these two layers of content,however, by no means entails that the two are inherently and necessarily disjointed.In particular, social meaning, despite its contingent nature, has been shown to behighly systematic and readilly available to listeners’ cognition (e.g., Smith et al.

1While semantic meaning draws the interest of philosophers and linguists who approach languageas an independent, self-contained system, social meaning is typically investigated by scholars − e.g.,sociolinguists and anthropologists − who aim to illuminate how language shapes and is shaped bythe broader social landscape.

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(2010), D’Onofrio (2015)). As such, a question remains open: do these two types ofmeaning, despite their empirical differences, eventually interact with one another todetermine what an expression “says” when used in communication?

To address this question, it becomes crucial to focus on cases in which socialmeaning attaches to expressions that do have non-trivial semantic and pragmaticcontent, and as such provide an angle that is not available to studies concerned withphonological or morphosyntactic variables. Ochs (1992), in particular, argues that,for non-phonological kinds of variation, the relationship between linguistic forms andsocial meaning is crucially mediated by the pragmatic effects of the expression. Forexample, she claims that the association of command imperatives with male genderin American English is grounded in the activity of ordering pragmatically indexedby the form, which in turn becomes associated with a typical affective dispositionof men. More recently, Acton and Potts (2014) build on Lakoff (1974)’s observationthat demonstratives like this and that index a sense of “emotional closeness betweenspeaker and hearer” (p. 351), anchoring these social effects to the presuppositionthat the addressee must be able to consider the speaker’s relation to the NP referentin the discourse context. It is this semantic component that explains why demon-stratives are much better tools to construct a shared emotional background thansimple determiners like your or the. In a separate study, Glass (2015) observes thatthe deontic modal need to, in comparison to have to/got to, indexes an additionalcomponent of care or presumptuousness. She argues that this effect is grounded in afine-grained semantic property that distinguishes need from have to, and specificallyin the implication that the obligation conveyed by the former is directed the hearer’swell being.

Taken together, these results provide evidence that social and semantic contentare connected in a principled fashion. Yet, at the investigation of this area has justbegun, a number of avenues remain open to further research. The present paper aimsto cast light on the following issue: do the effects of semantic properties on socialmeaning extend to attributes that transcend the here-and-now of the interactionalcontext? Both Acton and Potts (2014) and Glass (2015) analyzed variables carryinga relatively basic social meaning, where the social contribution reduces to a clusterof fleeting, discourse-immanent traits (e.g. solidarity and shared-perspective; beingconsiderate/presumptuous). Yet, sociolinguistic work has shown that linguisitc formscan be associated with social attributes that range from demographic categories (e.g.female, young, Californian), to more specific social types/personae (Agha (2005),Eckert (2008b), Podesva (2007)) (e.g., “Jocks”, “Burnouts”, “Yuppies”). In lightof this fact, the question emerges as to whether such dimensions of social meaningare also sensitive to the semantic properties of the expression that conveys them.

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I address this issue by exploring the behavior of totally in contemporary AmericanEnglish.

2 Totally : a promising case study

The intensifier totally features considerable empirical richness in terms of both itssemantic and social content, thus emerging as a ripe testbed to answer the questionabove. In this section, I provide an overview of its features with respect to each typeof content.

2.1 Totally: social meaning

Intensifiers such as really, very, extremely, so, completely have received considerableattention in the sociolinguistic literature, with authors exploring the correlation be-tween their frequency and the demographic profile of the speakers (Bolinger (1972),Tagliamonte (2008), Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005), Paradis (2000), Labov (2001),Tagliamonte and D’Arcy (2009), Ito and Tagliamonte (2003), Kwon (2012)). Yet,relatively little has been said about the social meanings associated with these ex-pressions. This lack of attention on the topic is rather surprising, given intensifiers’amenability to serve as carriers of stylistic and stereotypical features concerning thespeakers and the social context in which they are used. Totally, a commonly usedintensifier in contemporary American English, provides a telling example. Let usconsider the following image, accompanied by the caption in (1).

(1) I totally had this hat as a child . . . The bill totally quacks when you squeezeit.2

2https://instagram.com/p/zEZEQQqYPY/

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Intuitively, the use of totally conveys a flavor of marked informality, signalingthe speaker eagerness to shorten the social distance from the hearer. This effect isfurther specified by native speakers in different ways, for instance by claiming thatthe use of totally suggests that the interlocutors are close to one another, share a setof norms or values or easily agree on the content of the conversation.

Besides these effects, the intensifier additionally carries a set of typified higher-level social attributes about the identity of the speaker. Let us consider the followingentries collected from the popular website Urban Dictionary3, a fruitful source to takea glimpse at the packages of social content that attach to particular expressions.

1. It’s a word used by ditzy young girls that means definitely or for sure.

2. Valley Girl Speak that means ”Of course!”

3. A word used by girly girls, poppers, and rich spoiled little brats. They use itin sentences, it doesn’t really mean anything, its just their way of speaking.

4. A word used for emphasis. Makes you sound kinda cheerleaderish when youuse it.

The intensifier appears to index a constellation of different social types and identitytraits, which track macro-social categories - e.g., young and female - as well as morespecific personae and social types - e.g., “Valley Girl”, “Cheerleader”. In sum, thesocial meaning associated with totally emerges as internally articulated, showing thatthe intensifier’s social content includes both conversation-based features and higherlevel identity categories.

2.2 Totally: semantic/pragmatic meaning

Besides carrying a rich social baggage, totally is embedded in a highly varied semanticand pragmatic landscape. On a general level, the intensifier combines with a boundedscale and requires that the scalar maximum on such a scale be reached.4 It is preciselyin the way in which this scale is supplied that variation enters the picture. In standardcases, the scale is provided by the following predicate, as in (2): both full and agreecome with a bounded ordering hardwired in their lexical meaning, providing totallywith an argument to operate on. Evidence for this comes from the fact that the very

3Source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=totally4Authors have put forward different proposal to model this meaning. See Kennedy and McNally

(2005) for a degree-based approach and Sassoon and Zevakhina (2012) for a non degree based one,among others.

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same predicates can be modified by similarly endpoint-oriented modifiers like almostand partially. I shall refer to these as instantiations of lexical totally.

(2) a. The bus is totally full. Lexical

b. She totally agrees with me. Lexical

(3) a. The bus is {partially/almost} full.

b. She {partially/almost} agrees with me.

In othe cases (in (4)), though, totally appears to combine with predicates thatdo not supply a scale. In such cases, the intensifier can recruit the bounded scalefrom the broader pragmatic context, and in particular from the commitment that thespeaker has towards the proposition (McCready and Kaufmann (2013), Irwin (2014),Beltrama (2015a)), with a contribution that resembles the one of epistemic adverbslike definitely or really. I shall refer to these cases as speaker-oriented totally.5

(4) a. You should totally click on that link! It’s awesome.6 Speaker-oriented

b. Man in “I have drugs” shirt totally had drugs.7 Speaker-oriented

Despite sharing reference to maximality, the speaker-oriented usage of totally isempirically distinct from the lexical one. First, because it does not combine with alexical scale, it cannot be replaced by modifiers like partially and almost (in (5a)).Second, it contributes its meaning at the non at-issue level: it cannot be embeddedunder negation, it cannot be used in questions and it cannot be challenged indepen-dently from the rest of the propositional content, showing compositional propertiessimilar to other expressions that specify the attitude of the speaker (in (6)).8

(5) a. # You should partially/almost click on that link! It’s awesome.

b. # Man in “I have no drugs” shirt partially/almost had drugs.

(6) a. *You shouldn’t totally click on that link.

b. *Should he totally click on that link?

5The OED added a dedicated entry to this flavor of totally in 2005: “In weakened use, as anintensifier: (modifying an adjective) very, extremely; (modifying a verb) definitely, absolutely.”

6https://www.facebook.com/TheBiscuitGames/posts/488916347870627 accessed on June 5th2015

7http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/wtf-florida-man-in-i-have-drugs-shirt-totally-had-drugs-6542858

8These include expressive meaning, see Kaplan (1999), Potts (2005), Amaral et al. (2007); certainevidentials, see Faller (2002), Murray (2014), Rett and Murray (2013); other speaker-orientedadverbs, see Ernst (2009), Nilsen (2004))

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c. She should totally click on that link!B: # No! She should partially click on that link!B: # No! She should click on that link, but you’re not committed tosaying that!

As far as the exact nature of the contribution of totally, the intensifier oper-ates as a conversational operator, emphasizing the speaker’s intention to make theproposition become shared knowledge for all the interlocutors, thus enriching theCommon Ground of the conversation (see Beltrama (2015b) for a full formal analy-sis). As a result, the intensifier, while representing the speaker’s perspective, carriesimplications for the hearer’s position as well. This makes it crucially different fromseemingly similar operators like definitely and certainly, which are instead groundedin private, individual certainty of the speaker towards the truth of the proposition.While subtle, this difference is confirmed by the observation that the distributionof totally diverges from the one of allegedly similar expressions. In the followingexchange, for example, while expressing individual certainty sounds somewhat de-viant − people are trivially certain about their proper name −totally can be used todispel the doubt that the interlocutor expressed, serving as a means to inviting herto accept the content of the proposition and move on in the conversation.

(7) Mark: I can’t remember if your name is Emily.

a. XEmily: Oh, yes, it’s totally Emily!

b. Emily: #Oh, yes. It’s definitely/certainly Emily.

That the commitment intensified by totally crucially bears on the hearer, asopposed to just expressing the speaker’s private confidence, emerges even more clearlyin contexts in which the intensifier is used out of the blue. Let us consider (4b) again,together with another example.

(8) a. Man in “I have drugs” shirt totally had drugs.

b. Iowa Senator totally thinks you should be drug tested for those childsupport payments.9

On the one hand, the presence of totally, by maximizing the speaker’s commit-ment to add the proposition to the Common Ground, signals the shareworthiness ofthe event described (e.g., it is particularly outlandish or outrageous). On the otherhand, without a previous discourse move introducing a doubt about the proposition,

9http://www.mommyish.com/2012/04/13/iowa-senator-totally-thinks-you-should-be-drug-tested-for-those-child-support-payments-960/

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pure epistemic operators like certainly and definitely sound remarkably bizarre, con-firming the different status of the commitment targeted by the intensifier and theone expressed by epistemic markers.

(9) a. # Man in “I have drugs” shirt definitely/certainly had drugs.

b. # Iowa Senator definitely/certainly thinks you should be drug tested forthose child support payments.

Finally, while for most contexts it is possible to determine whether a boundedscale is provided by the lexicon or needs to be recruited from a speaker-orienteddimension, a few cases appear to pattern in between the two. An example is providedby so called extreme adjectives (Morzycki (2012)), such as awesome or amazing.While these predicates do not lexicalize a bounded scale− there is no upper boundaryto awesomess in the way there is one for baldness − they refer to properties with aninherently high degree, making it easier to coerce their open scale into a boundedone (Paradis (2000)). Accordingly, when totally modifies these adjectives it featuresa somewhat intermediate behavior with respect to the diagnostics and the lexical vsspeaker-oriented distinction illustrated above. While not as felicitous as clear casesof lexical totally, it is considerably less deviant than pure speaker-oriented totally.The symbol ?# indicates a minor degree of deviance in comparison to cases markedwith #.

(10) Bob is totally awesome

a. ?# Bob is not totally awesome.

b. ?# Bob is almost totally awesome.

c. ?# Bob is completely/entirely awesome.

3 From semantic to social meaning: hypotheses

The empirical complexity of totally ’s content on both the social and semantic/pragmaticfront raises the question as to whether the social meaning indexed by totally is af-fected by the semantic/pragmatic differences between its various uses. In this sectionI formulate two hypotheses about the structure of this mapping, which I will thenproceed to test via a social perception experiment.

3.1 Hypothesis 1: from pragmatic engagement to solidarity

As discussed above, one of the most prominent social effects of totally is that it sig-nals solidarity between the interlocutors. Previous work on the relationship between

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semantic and social meaning (e.g., Acton and Potts (2014), Glass (2015)) arguedthat similar social effects of the observed phenomena (e.g., demonstratives) couldbe traced back to the type of interpersonal relationship between interlocutors pre-supposed at the semantic/pragmatic level. The question therefore emerges as towhether, in a parallel fashion, a similar hypothesis can be put forward on the basisof the semantic/pragmatic profile of totally.

On the one hand, the lexical variant hardly features any cue of this sort: bymaximizing the degree to which a property applies, it serves a bare informationalfunction, where nothing hinges on the positioning of the interlocutors, or on what theconversational participant are doing as they engage in the exchange. On the otherhand, the pragmatic move associated with speaker-oriented totally carries importantinteractional implications. By intensifying the speaker’s commitment to enrich theCommon Ground, the intensifier targets a shared space in the exchange. As such, itcontributes to highlight the conversation as a joint activity, underscoring the engage-ment of the speaker with enriching the mutual informational gain of the conversation.In addition, when used to strengthen commitment to propositions uttered out of theblue (see (8) above), totally also presupposes a shared evaluative stance between theinterlocutors, as it requires that both the speaker and the hearer converge on thereason that makes the proposition shareworthy (e.g., the absurdity of a man in “Ihave drugs” shirt having drugs, or the outrageousness of the proposal of a senator).

Based on these properties, I hypothesize a connection between the social inclusioneffects that are part of the social meaning of the intensifier and the high degree ofpragmatic sharedness fostered by the semantic meaning of speaker-oriented totally.Specifically, I suggest that the commitment to involve the interlocutor in the con-struction of the Common Ground percolates up to the social dimension, projectinga kind of person that is likewise committed to foster inclusion with the interlocutorat the social and affective level. This, by contrast, should not be the case for lexicaltotally, which has a purely descriptive function and does not hinge on the position-ing of the interlocutors in the conversation. As a result, I formulate the followingprediction:

(11) Hypothesis 1: Users of speaker-oriented totally should be more likely thanusers of lexical totally to be associated with social meaning features thathighlight solidarity in its different forms (e.g., informality, reduced socialdistance, affective proximity)

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3.2 Hypothesis 2: other identity attributes

We have also seen that the social meaning of totally does not boil down to a set ofsolidarity-based attributes. It also makes reference to demographic categories (e.g.,age, gender), typified social groups (e.g., “Valley Girl”) and other social character-istics (e.g., “ditziness”) that go beyond the intuitive sense of social proximity andsolidarity indexed by the intensifier. In light of this observation, the question emergesas to whether such components of totally ’s social meaning are interpreted by listenersas part of the same “package” of the solidarity attributes, or if instead they are seenas independent. To test the hypothesis, I formulate the following prediction.

(12) Hypothesis 2: If non-solidarity-based identity traits of totally ’s social mean-ing are evaluated in association with the solidarity-based ones, they shouldbe conveyed by speaker-oriented totally, but not by lexical totally (providedthat Hypothesis 1 is confirmed).

3.3 Hypothesis 3: the gradience of social meaning salience

Finally, we have seen that the distinction between lexical and speaker-oriented totallyis continuous, rather than binary. In particular, environments like extreme adjectivesappear to pattern in between the two flavors of totally. First, even though they do notencode an upper-bounded scale, they make one easily available by virtue of denotingproperties at an extreme degree. Second, they are less resistant than clear casesof speaker-oriented totally to the interaction with operators in the at issue-content.Assuming that the social meaning of totally is more likely to be conveyed with thespeaker-oriented uses, the intermediate flavor of totally in combination with extremeadjectives raises the question as to whether the salience of the social meaning oftotally reflects the gradience of the distinction between the two semantic variants oftotally. If this is the case, I formulate the following prediction.

(13) Hypothesis 3: If the salience of totally ’s social meaning tracks the contin-uum of the lexical vs speaker-oriented distinction, the social meaning shouldbe most salient for clear cases of speaker-oriented totally ; least salient forclear cases of lexical totally ; and intermediate for intermediate cases (e.g.,extreme adjectives).

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4 The experiment

4.1 Methods

I test these hypotheses via a social perception experiment. This methodology, whichhas long been used to investigate language attitudes (Lambert et al. (1960); seeCampbell-Kibler (2010) for a thorough literature review), has recently gained mo-mentum in sociolinguistics, following the assumpion that social evaluation is a proxyinto the social meaning of the variable, as it allows us to have access to “what socialinformation listeners can extract from the speech of particular speakers, and whichlinguistic cues they rely on to do so.” (Campbell-Kibler (2010)). For our purposes,this method has two advantages. First, it provides to construct a series of controlledconditions in which the possibility of manipulating the type of scale targeted bytotally in different sentences while leaving the rest of the proposition unchanged, al-lowing us to isolate scale type as the only changing factors across conditions. Second,by providing a way to measure the intensity of social meaning in terms of a seriesof evaluative scales, it allows us to detect at a fine-grained level how the perceptionof the social meaning changes as a function of the semantic/pragmatic features oftotally.

4.1.1 Building test scales

As the first step, I conducted a preliminary study to construct the evaluation scalesto be used to measure social meaning in the actual experiment. The study wasdesigned with the software Qualtrics and subsequently circulated on Amazon Me-chanical Turk. 60 subjects, who self-declared to be native speakers of AmericanEnglish and between 18 and 35 years old, were recruited and paid $ 0.50 for partic-ipating. First, each subject saw in written a sentence containing either an instanceof lexical totally or speaker-oriented totally. The subject was asked to provide aseries of adjectives to describe the imagined speaker of the sentence. The questionsprompted the participants to provide adjectives both about the demographics andmore local identity categories. Responses were left open-ended. Based on the mostrecurring adjectives in the responses, a total of eight evaluation dimensions were se-lected as particularly salient in connection to the use of the intensifier. Four of thesedimensions, which I shall label Solidarity attributes, express a relationship of socialproximity between the speaker and the listener. Based on the participants answers,I predict them to be positively affected by the presence of totally. The other fourdimensions, which I label Status attributes, express other salient identity categoriesevoked by totally. By contrast, these dimensions should be negatively affected by

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the presence of the intensifier.

• Solidarity: Friendliness, Coolness, Outgoingness, Excitability

• Status: Articulateness, Maturity, Intelligence, Seriousness

4.1.2 Stimuli

2 factors were crossed in a 3x4 design. The first factor manipulates the semanticvariant of totally along the lexical vs speaker-oriented axis of variation. To cuelexical totally, the intensifier was used next to absolute adjectives (Kennedy andMcNally (2005), which lexicalize a bounded scale as part of their lexical meaning (e.g.,“bald”). To cue the speaker-oriented reading, instead, open-scale relative adjectives(e.g., “tall”), which offer a commitment scale as the only possible target for theintensifier. In addition, extreme adjectives (e.g., awesome, amazing) were used as anintermediate case between the two other categories. Following the three hypothesesoutlined below, I predict that totally affects the social perception of the speaker ofthe sentence in the following way.

(14)

Adjectivetype

Example Semantictype

H1: Impacton solidarity

H2: Impacton other at-tributes

Bounded Bald Lexical Low LowExtreme Awesome Intermediate Medium MediumUnbounded Tall Sp-oriented High High

In the other factor, the type of modifier accompanying the adjective came in fourdifferent conditions:

• totally, the target intensifier• the positive, non-intensified form• completely, the first control intensifier• really, the second control intensifier

On the one hand, completely, contrary to totally, is exclusively able to target lexicalscales. As such, it cannot modify speaker-oriented scales, resulting in ungrammat-icality when used with a open-scale adjective. On the other hand, really has a lessselective semantics than totally. It does not require the availability of an upper-bounded scale, but, as discussed in the semantics literature, can modify any typeof scale (McNabb (2012), Constantinescu (2011)). Since all the adjectives used in

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the experiment are indeed scalar, the intensifier should always operate at the lexicallevel, showing no semantic difference across the adjective types. In light of theseproperties, I predict that, if an effect of the semantic type of totally is observedon the social meaning, the same effect should not be observed on the two controlintensifiers. Finally, the positive form serves as a baseline condition to isolate thesocial meaning of the intensifier from the one contributed by the other elements inthe sentence. I implement this in the analysis by subtracting the social meaning ofthe sentence with the positive form from the social meaning of the sentence withthe intensified form, so as to assess the exact contribution of the intensifier on theperception of the item. 12 items, each with a different set of adjectives, were crossedin a Latin Square Design. The table below provides a full paradigm for an itemacross all conditions.

(15)

Adj type Mod type SentenceBounded Totally I just met the new boss. He’s totally baldExtreme Totally I just met the new boss. He’s totally awesomeUnbounded Totally I just met the new boss. He’s totally tallBounded ∅ I just met the new boss. He’s baldExtreme ∅ I just met the new boss. He’s awesomeUnbounded ∅ I just met the new boss. He’s tallBounded Completely I just met the new boss. He’s completely baldExtreme Completely I just met the new boss. He’s completely awesomeUnbounded Completely I just met the new boss. He’s completely tallBounded Really I just met the new boss. He’s really baldBounded Really I just met the new boss. He’s really awesomeBounded Really I just met the new boss. He’s really tall

4.1.3 Procedure

Every subject saw a total of 12 written sentences, one sentence for each condition.Each sentence was followed by ten questions. The first two questions are targetedat the demographic characteristics of the speakers and provide fixed alternativesas possible responses. The other eight questions are aimed at assessing solidarity-based and non-solidairyt-based traits of social meaning. They were presented inthe form of a 1-6 Likert scale, where 1 indicated the minimum value and 6 themaximum value. To ensure the highest precision possible in the responses, subjectswere instructed to answer the questions following their instincts and to be very honestand straightforward, even if they felt compelled to provide a particularly negativejudgments of the speaker. A full list of the questions, together with the possible

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answers, is reported below.

(16) Sentence: I just met the new boss. He’s totally bald.

1. What age do you the think the speaker is? Tick all the options thatapply.Kid / Teenager / Adult / Elderly

2. What do you think the speaker’s gender is? Tick all the options thatapply.Male / Could be Either / Female

3. How articulate does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 64. How mature does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 65. How intelligent does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 66. How serious does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 67. How friendly does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 68. How outgoing does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 69. How cool does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 6

10. How excitable does the speaker sound? 1 . . . . . . 6

The study was created with Qualtrics and carried out online. 36 self-declared nativespeakers of American English, age 18-35, were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turkand compensated $2 for their participation.

4.2 Results

To conduct the analysis, the value obtained by the condition with the positive formwas subtracted from the value obtained by sentences with either totally, completely orreally for each adjective so as to filter out the effects on the social meaning indepen-dently introduced by the adjective and to focus on those induced by the intensifier.On the resulting differences, statistical analysis was conducted on the following di-mensions: Age, Gender, Solidarity attributes and Status attributes, obtaining fourseparate metrics for assessing the social meaning contributed by each intensifier. Foreach dimension, a two-way ANOVA was carried out to verify the effect of the twofactors (Scale type and Intensifier type). In case a higher-level effect was present,planned paired t-test were carried out to verify the effect of Scale on each intensifier.

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Age

Age was first converted from a categorial to a numerical variable.10 A two-wayANOVA carried out on the differences between the intensified and the positive formrevealed a main effect of Adjective type (by-subject F1(2,70)=18.1, p<0.0001; by-item F2(2,22)=8.4, p<0.001) and Intensifier type (by-subject F1(2,70)=14.5, p<0.0001;by-item F2(2,22)=9.4, p<0.001) and an interaction effect between Adjective and In-tensifier (by-subject F1(2,70)=10.4, p<0.001; by-item F2(2,22)=11.3, p<0.001). Theresults are plotted in the graph below.

Figure 1: Age perception. The Y-axis indicates the value of the subtraction of the scoreof each intensifier from the positive, non intensified form. The X-Axis groups the differentintensifiers. The blue bar stands for Unbounded adjectives (e.g. tall). The red bar standsfor Extreme adjectives (e.g. awesome). The green bar stands for Bounded adjectives (e.g.bald). Error bars indicate standard errors.

Concerning totally, for all Adjective types the intensifier caused a lowering of the

10Every life stage provided in the multiple choice response was assigned a numerical score withincreasing value, where Kid=1, Teenager=2, Adult=3 and Elderly=4. This ensures that the higherthe Age score, the higher the perceived age of the speaker. In case multiple life stages were chosen,the average was calculated. For instance, if a subject selected “Kid” and “Teenager”, the resultingscore would be (2+1)/2=1.5, which returns an intermediate vaue between the two categories.

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perceived Age of the speaker. However, the effect is is significantly stronger effectwith Unbounded Adjectives than with Extreme Adjectives (t(35) = 6.2, p < .0001)or Bounded Adjectives (t(35) = 4.1, p < .001). No significant difference was foundbetween Bounded and Extreme adjectives. Concerning completely, the perceived ageincreases with Bounded Adjectives and decreases it with Extreme and Unboundedones. No effect was found across adjective type for really.

Gender

As with Age, Gender was converted into a numerical dependent variable, with “Male”=1, “Could be either” = 2 and “Female” = 3. Hence, the higher the resulting score,the higher the likelihood that the person was perceived to be female. An interac-tion effect was found between Adjective and Intensifier (by-subject F1(2,70)=8.2,p<0.001; by-item F2(2,22)=7.3, p<0.001). The results are plotted below.

Figure 2: Gender perception. The Y-axis indicates the value of the subtraction of eachintensifier from the positive, non intensified form. The X-Axis groups the different inten-sifiers. The blue bar stands for Unbounded adjectives (e.g. tall). The red bar stands forExtreme adjectives (e.g. awesome). The green bar stands for Bounded adjectives (e.g.bald). Error bars indicate standard errors.

All intensifiers increased the likelihood with which the speaker was perceived to befemale. The effect of totally with Unbounded adjectives was significantly stronger

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than with Extreme Adjectives (t(35) = 7.2, p < .0001) and Bounded Adjectives(t(35) = 5.1, p < .001). No significant difference was found between Bounded andExtreme adjectives. Concerning the other intensifier, no difference was found acrossAdjective types.

Solidarity

Since their effects were highly similar, Solidarity attributes were analyzed together.Main effects of Adjective type (by-subject F1(2,70)=11.1, p<0.001; by-item F2(2,22)=6.7,p<0.001), Intensifier type (by-subject F1(2,70)=11.8, p<0.0001; by-item F2(2,22)=7.5,p<0.001) and an interaction effect between Adjective and Intensifier (by-subjectF1(2,70)=8.6, p<0.001; by-item F2(2,22)=10.3, p<0.001) were found. The resultsare plotted below.

Figure 3: Solidarity perception. The Y-axis indicates the value of the subtraction ofeach intensifier from the positive, non intensified form. The X-Axis groups the differentintensifiers. The blue bar stands for Unbounded adjectives (e.g. tall). The red bar standsfor Extreme adjectives (e.g. awesome). The green bar stands for Bounded adjectives (e.g.bald). Error bars indicate standard errors.

Totally increased the perception of solidarity across the board. Yet, again, the effectwas significantly stronger with Unbounded than Bounded Adjectives (t(35) = 7.5, p< .0001). No effect of totally on Extreme Adjectives was found. Concerning com-

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pletely, Unbounded adjectives significantly differ from Bounded ones (t(35) = 7.9, p< .0001). Concerning really, Extreme adjectives recording a lower Solidarity valuethan Bounded and Unbounded ones (t(35) = 7.4 and t(35) = 6.5 respectively, ps <.0001).

Status

The four Status attributes (Mature, Articulate, Intelligent and Serious) also pat-terned similarly, and were thus analyzed together. A main effect of Adjective type(by-subject F1(2,70)=12.1, p<0.001; by-item F2(2,22)=6.9, p<0.001) was found,along with a main effect of and Intensifier type (by-subject F1(2,70)=12.3, p<0.0001;by-item F2(2,22)=8.6, p<0.001) and an interaction effect between Adjective and In-tensifier (by-subject F1(2,70)=9.5, p<0.001; by-item F2(2,22)=11.3, p<0.001). Theresults are plotted below.

Figure 4: Status perception. The Y-axis indicates the value of the subtraction of eachintensifier from the positive, non intensified form. The X-Axis groups the different inten-sifiers. The blue bar stands for Unbounded adjectives (e.g. tall). The red bar stands forExtreme adjectives (e.g. awesome). The green bar stands for Bounded adjectives (e.g.bald). Error bars indicate standard errors.

As predicted, totally lowered the Status perception across Adjective types. Yet, justlike we observed for the previous dimensions, the effect was significantly stronger

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with Unbounded than Bounded Adjectives (t(35) = 8.1, p < .0001). Concerningcompletely, the intensifier with Bounded adjectives raises the Status perception, whileit lowers it with Unbounded adjectives (t(35) = 7.7, p < .0001). Concerning really,Extreme adjectives record a lower Status value than Bounded and Unbounded ones(t(35) = 7.4 and t(35)=6.5 respectively, ps < .0001).

5 Discussion

The current study was aimed at investigating how the social perception of totally isaffected by variations in the semantic properties of the intensifier across different lin-guistic contexts. Two hypotheses were tested. First, I predicted that, by inviting thehearer to converge on the Common Ground of the conversation and on the evaluationof the anchor proposition, users of speaker-oriented totally would be more likely thanusers of lexical totally to be perceived as higher in solidarity. The prediction is con-firmed for all four solidarity-based attributes used in the experiment: when totallyoccurred next to a unbounded adjective, an environment in which only a speaker-oriented reading is licensed, the speaker was perceived as significantly more Friendly,Cool, Outgoing and Excitable than when totally occurred next to a bounded ad-jective and could therefore receive a lexical interpretation. The second hypothesiswas aimed at verifying whether non-solidarity based attributes of the social mean-ing of totally would also show the same sensitivity to the semantic flavor in whichthe intensifier comes. This prediction was also borne out: users of speaker-orientedtotally turned out to be perceived as lower in Status − i.e., less Articulate, Mature,Intelligent and Serious− younger and more likely to be female than users of lexicaltotally. The study also tested whether the salience of the indexed social meaningreflects the continuum between lexical and speaker-oriented uses, predicting that thesocial meaning should have intermediate intensity with Extreme Adjectives. Thisprediction, however, is not borne out, as we observe that for none of the tested di-mensions a continuum along these lines emerges. More specifically, the behavior oftotally with Extreme Adjectives diverges quite substantially across the dimensions,with apparently no consistent pattern unifying them.

Finally, no systematic pattern emerge for the control intensifiers. As predicted,really has a minor impact on all the evaluation scales, and most importantly presentsno significant difference across the tested adjective types. Concerning completely, wedo observe a robust effect of the adjective type for Age, Solidarity and Status. Yet, wenote that, with the exception of Age, the effect on totally with speaker-oriented scalesis considerably stronger than the one of completely in the same semantic context,

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suggesting that the two patterns are most likely not driven by the same source. Morespecifically, I speculate that the effects of scale type on completely are grounded inthe ungrammaticality of the combination, rather than to the particular semanticproperties of the expression.11

While these results support the idea that totally ’s social meaning is constrainedby its semantic/pragmatic feature, one issue remains in need for clarification. Whilethe experiment relies on a principled explanation of how solidarity attributes aregrounded in the pramatic profile of speaker-oriented totally, the connection is muchless evident for the other components of the social meaning that have been tested aspart of the second hypothesis. In other words, what is the relationship between themove of intensifying commitment and, for instance, the perception of lower age andstatus? One possibility is that the mapping between these traits and speaker-orientedtotally is only indirect, and crucially mediated by the solidarity-based qualities. Inother words, once friendliness and outgoingness become socially recognized as asso-ciated with specific social types (e.g., “Valley Girl”), then the very same version oftotally that indexes solidarity also comes to index other properties of these socialgroups (e.g., lack of seriousness and maturity). Further investigation is required tocast light on this issue.

6 Broader implications and conclusion

On a broad level, these results provide further evidence that semantic and socialmeaning are not disjointed domains. Rather, they do interact with one another todetermine the eventual package of content conveyed by an expression, supportinganalogous claims from recent investigations on the topic. More specifically, the find-ings of the perception experiment suggest that, when making social evaluations aboutthe users of a particular expression, hearers keep track of the semantic and pragmaticproperties of the form, such as the type of scale that the intensifier targets in a given

11Saying “completely tall”, in other words, amounts to saying something that is located outsideof the grammatical knowledge of the speakers, and, as far as we know, it is not embedded in anyreal world pattern of semantic variation. As such, the fact that this expression has an effect onthe social meaning, when compared to fully grammatical combinations like “completely bald”, isnot particularly surprising. It can be reasonably predicted to being associated with whatever socialfeatures are associated with a “default other” who does not fully master the grammar of English,e.g. a particularly young speaker, or one with a low Status. While more research is needed toinvestigate the effect of ungrammatical expressions on social meaning, this line of thought suggestsa picture in which what seems to be an effect of scale type on the social perception of completelyis actually an effect of the broader notion of ungrammaticality. I thank an anonymous NWAV 44reviewer for suggesting this explanation.

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context. This observation reveals a parallel with well-established findings in work onphonological variation, where authors have convincingly shown that the perceptionof social meaning can be cued by fine-grained acoustic or articulatory properties ofthe variant (see Campbell-Kibler (2010) for an overview). While merely representinga preliminary step, the current study opens up a novel area of research on the studyof meaning, highlighting the interface between social and semantic content as a ripe,and largely uncharted, domain of investigation. This line of research, if adequatelydeveloped, carries two important implications. On the theoretical level, it can leadus to adopt a more comprehensive view of linguistic meaning, in which social mean-ing is seen as a bona fine type of content to be investigated side by side with thelogical and pragmatic properties of expressions. On a methodological level, it pointsto social perception studies as a promising technique to explore the behavioral corre-lates of semantic and pragmatic features, expanding the toolbox for the experimentalinvestigation of meaning.

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