[3Xin4] Poster session 1

[3Xin4-22] Effects of honorific expressions on suppression of conditional inference

a study based on politeness theory

〇Kazunori Matsumoto¹, Nao Ogura¹, Tatsuji Takahashi¹, Hiroko Nakamura^1,2 (1.Tokyo Denki University, 2.Japan Society for the Promotion of Science)

Keywords:conditional inference, politeness theory, honorific expression

Given the conditional premise “If it is a product of company X, it is palatable”, another speaker asserts “If it is a product of company Y, it is palatable”. This may suppress the Modus Ponens inference that “It is made by company X. Therefore it tastes good”. Demeure et al. (2009) investigated how the interpersonal relationship between speakers who utter conditional sentences affects inference suppression based on politeness theory and found that when the relationship is poor, the additional conditional sentence tends to be interpreted as a corrective intention, leading to inference suppression. Ogura (2023) replicated Demeure et al.’s (2009) study and demonstrated that additional conditional sentences also suppress conditional inferences among Japanese speakers when their relationship is poor. In Japanese, honorific expressions are often used when the speakers are not on close terms (Usami, 2002), and ambiguous additional conditional sentences might be more likely to be perceived as corrective statements when such honorific expressions are employed. In this study, we extended Ogura’s (2023) study by manipulating the presence or absence of honorific expressions in conditional sentences and examined how honorific expressions influence the inhibition of conditional inference.