Celebrity gossip headlines and reliability in a Common Ground-based framework.

The paper is concerned with gossip communicated by headlines in a German celebrity magazine. It takes its starting point in a philosophical controversy on the question whether gossip is essentially epistemically (un-)reliable. As a theoretical framework, Farkas & Bruce's Common Ground-based Table model is adopted which distinguishes between different ways of introducing propositions into the Common Ground. Relating the model to the reliability status of propositions, it is argued that depending on the way in which a proposition is added to the Common Ground, it will be assigned varying epistemic status. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 87 sentential gossip headlines from the German celebrity magazine BUNTE, it is shown that gossip is communicated both via assertion, presupposition, and conversational implicature, and that each of these ways of communication entails a different certainty status of the proposition added to the Common Ground. This means that gossip is neither essentially unreliable nor essentially reliable. Rather, the resulting 'gossip Common Ground' is best described as a set of epistemically heterogeneous propositions. • Media gossip is communicated via assertion, presupposition and conversational implicature. • Media gossip consists of a set of epistemically heterogeneous propositions. • Biased polar questions in gossip convey affirmative implicatures. • Newsworthy presuppositions as a strategy to communicate epistemically dubious propositions. • Analysis based on annotated corpus of celebrity gossip headlines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]