Pragmatic violations affect social inferences about the speaker

Listeners systematically extract two types of information from linguistic utterances: about the world, and speaker – i.e., their social background personality. While both varieties content have been widely investigated across different approaches to study language, research in pragmatics has mostly focused on former kind. Here we ask how listeners reason a speaker’s conversational choices form an impression In three experiments, show that adherence to, or violation of, pragmatic principles Relevance Informativeness, as well reasons underlying these violations, affect evaluation personality along core dimensions Warmth Competence. These findings highlight value enriching work with insights sociolinguistics psychology people human speech draw inferences identity interlocutors.