TY - JOUR

T1 - Textual factualization

T2 - the phenomenology of assertive reformulation and presupposition during a speech event

AU - Tantucci, Vittorio

N1 - This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Pragmatics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Pragmatics, 101, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2016.06.007

PY - 2016/8/1

Y1 - 2016/8/1

N2 - This work provides an operational framework to study the unfolding of new factual propositions out of originally suspended-factual (Narrog 2009, Tantucci 2015b) statements during a speech event. In particular, this model is centered on the dynamic relationship between cognitive control (i.e. Kan et al. 2013) and epistemic certainty. A speaker/writer’s epistemic inclination towards the factuality of a proposition P occurs throughout a text, either in the form of the assertive reformulation of an originally suspended-factual proposition P, or in the form of a presupposition trigger also turning P into a new factual statement. I refer to this phenomenon as textual factualization (TF) and I provide corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) to demonstrate it to be a frequent mechanism where an originally suspended-factual proposition [apparently P] is subsequently factualized both in written and spoken texts. I argue that TF instantiates as a form of interference/misinformation effect (cf. Ecker et al. 2015) as it triggers the qualitative alteration of an event memory by partially overwriting an original memory trace: from [apparently P] to [P]

AB - This work provides an operational framework to study the unfolding of new factual propositions out of originally suspended-factual (Narrog 2009, Tantucci 2015b) statements during a speech event. In particular, this model is centered on the dynamic relationship between cognitive control (i.e. Kan et al. 2013) and epistemic certainty. A speaker/writer’s epistemic inclination towards the factuality of a proposition P occurs throughout a text, either in the form of the assertive reformulation of an originally suspended-factual proposition P, or in the form of a presupposition trigger also turning P into a new factual statement. I refer to this phenomenon as textual factualization (TF) and I provide corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) to demonstrate it to be a frequent mechanism where an originally suspended-factual proposition [apparently P] is subsequently factualized both in written and spoken texts. I argue that TF instantiates as a form of interference/misinformation effect (cf. Ecker et al. 2015) as it triggers the qualitative alteration of an event memory by partially overwriting an original memory trace: from [apparently P] to [P]

KW - assertion

KW - presupposition

KW - evidentiality

KW - factualization

KW - cognitive control

KW - misinformation effect

U2 - 10.1016/j.pragma.2016.06.007

DO - 10.1016/j.pragma.2016.06.007

M3 - Journal article

VL - 101

SP - 155

EP - 171

JO - Journal of Pragmatics

JF - Journal of Pragmatics

SN - 0378-2166

ER -