Social meaning in reverse: Expectations of English role noun use based on speaker identity

Abstract

Insights from pragmatics and sociolinguistics have informed theories of social meaning, inferences about a speaker's identity that a hearer draws based on utterance properties such as lexical choices. One example is the use of a gender-neutral role noun (salesperson) rather than a gender-marked form (saleswoman/salesman); choosing this form can serve as an index of a speaker's progressiveness (Papineau et al., 2022). This study investigates social meaning in reverse, exploring to what extent hearers expect speakers to use these role noun forms based on their beliefs about the speaker's beliefs. In two experiments, participants meet fictitious characters, introduced as having either a conservative or progressive ideology. Experiment 1 finds that participants predict gender-neutral forms at a significantly higher rate for progressive speakers than for conservative speakers, taken as evidence that a hearer's beliefs about a speaker motivate expectations related to markers of social meaning. Experiment 2 finds no significant reading time effects regarding the form of the noun and the ideology of the speaker, suggesting the pattern from Experiment 1 does not manifest in real-time language processing. Experiment 2 does find a significant hearer-speaker ideological alignment effect whereby participants who were ideologically aligned with the character read significantly faster than those who were not.