Being highly social, humans form alliances based on things such as kinship, ethnic markers, clothing, or beliefs. It is possible that beliefs stated for coalitional purposes contain different linguistic forms than beliefs stated as objective observations. A potential example of this, noted by Price (1965), is the option in English to express propositions by saying that you believe in X or that you believe that X.

 

Building on Price (1965) and McCain & Kampourakis (2016), we postulate that believe in generally functions to signal stance (on stance, see Ochs 1996, Goodwin & Alim 2010), in particular group loyalty or support (as in “you can do it; I believe in you,” “I believe in the power of the gospel,” or “I believe in democracy”), while believe that is more frequently used for more factual beliefs. We further postulate that this link is non-arbitrary and based on the linguistic elements of each construction. The preposition in is associated with maximum spatial proximity (one thing is subsumed within another), and thus suitable for conveying stance via metaphorical mapping of the spatial domain onto the emotional. Because it can express containment, in is also used when objects are perceptually inaccessible (Lakoff & Johnson 1980); loyalty and support, properties of others’ minds, are not directly accessible. In contrast to in, the deictic expression that is associated with a targeting function (Talmy 2018) that directs perceptual experience to a viewable object, and thus is suitable for expressing more impersonal, objectively held views about the world.

 

We are in the process of addressing these hypotheses using a corpus analysis of spoken English in which we compare the relative frequency of the coalitional function of believe in/that constructions, as well as considering semantic features (such as agency and abstractness) of elements of those constructions.

 

 

REFERENCES

Ochs, E. 1996. Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. J. Gumperz & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 407–437). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff G., & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Talmy, L. 2018. The Targeting System of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McCain, K., & Kampourakis, K. 2016. Which question do polls about evolution and belief really ask, and why does it matter? Public Understanding of Stance, 27(1), 2–10.

Price, H. H. 1965. Belief “in” and belief “that.” Religious Studies, 1(1), 5–27.

Goodwin, M. H., & Alim, H. S. 2010. “Whatever (neck roll, eye roll, teeth suck)”: The situated coproduction of social categories and identities through stancetaking and transmodal stylization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(1), 179–194.

Jing-Schmidt, Z. 2007. Negativity bias in language: A cognitive affective model of emotive intensifiers. Cognitive Linguistics, 18(3), 417–443.