Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment

Commitment plays a crucial role in the stabilization of communication. While commitment increases the acceptance of the message communicated, it comes with a price: the greater the commitment, the greater the cost (direct or reputational) the speakers incur if the message is found unreliable (Vullioud et al., 2017). This opens up the question of which linguistic cues hearers deploy in order to infer speaker commitment in communication. We present a series of empirical studies to test the hypothesis that distinct meaning-relations - saying, presupposing and implicating - act as pragmatic cues of speaker commitment. Our results demonstrate that, after a message p is found to be false, speakers incur different reputational costs as a function of whether p had been explicitly stated, presupposed, or implicated. All else being equal, participants are significantly more likely to selectively trust the speaker who implicated p than the speaker who asserted or presupposed p. These results provide the first empirical evidence that commitment is modulated by different meaning-relations, and shed a new light on the strategic advantages of implicit communication. Speakers can decrease the reputational damages they incur by conveying unreliable messages when these are implicitly communicated.