Evidence type and trustworthiness: The view from social media

This paper provides a first analysis of the relationship between evidentiality and the speaker’s veridical commitment (Giannakidou and Mari 2021c) in social networks. Our corpus study highlights that speakers ground their assertive statements in various types of evidence, including indirect evidence (Willett 1988). Our statistical results indeed indicate a strong correlation between Reported evidence and bare Assertions, suggesting that speakers often rely on reported information while still expressing a strong veridical commitment. We demonstrated that this should not be interpreted as a non-cooperative linguistic behavior, even if indirect evidence is typically considered inadequate for a strong veridical commitment. We argued that this perspective is too restrictive and that evidence type should be decoupled from reliability. We propose that the perceived adequacy of an evidence type stems from a subjective evaluation of trustworthiness of the speaker of both the evidence and the propositional content it conveys. This evaluation is shaped by the speaker’s informational basis, which includes subjective preferences, prior beliefs, background assumptions and biases, as well as external knowledge about the world.