Speakers Use Indirect Language to Pursue Their Own Goals While Managing Social Relationships

We test three theories of the use and interpretation of indirect language by manipulating speaker interaction styles, focusing on an interpretation asymmetry that has puzzled philosophers and grammarians since Greek antiquity. We observe that negated evaluatively-positive (not happy) and evaluatively-negative (not sad) adjectives are interpreted asymmetrically for a speaker who regularly uses loopholes. Our results provide evidence that speakers use the loophole opened up by the indirectness of negation to plausibly deny an evaluatively-negative meaning. In contrast, the predicted interaction effects of competing politeness and Pollyanna-based theories are not borne out by our experiments. We interpret these results as evidence that loopholes are the key mechanism driving the asymmetric interpretation of negated statements. We also find evidence that hearers take into account that the speaker protects their own self-image rather than just mitigating a potential face-threat posed towards the hearer. Overall, our results suggest that speakers use indirect language to pursue their own goals while managing their social relationships.