ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
This article is part of the Research TopicTrust in Science Communication: A Feedback-Based Multi-Disciplinary PerspectiveView all articles
Managing reputation of trustworthiness in face-to-face communication
Provisionally accepted
- Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
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One prominent account of the speech act of assertion assumes that with asserting a proposition, the speaker commits to the proposition, that is, vouches for its truth. This predicts negative social effects on the reputation of the speaker, in particular, the trustworthiness, or credibility, if the proposition turns out to be false (and conversely, positive effects if it is true). In this paper I will show that there are modifications of assertive commitments that modulate these social effects, such as evidential or epistemic modifications of the asserted propositions, and strengtheners and weakeners of the commitment itself. I will present results of such modifications on the trustworthiness of speakers from a rating experiment in German. The article is relevant for the special issue on trustworthiness in science communication as it argues that markers that relate to trust are relevant for ordinary conversation as well.
Keywords: assertion, commitment, credibility, exclamation, Epistemics, Evidentials, reputation, Trust
Received: 20 Aug 2025; Accepted: 23 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Krifka. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Manfred Krifka, krifka@rz.hu-berlin.de
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