Sociolinguistic, Psycholinguistic and Formal Approaches to Meaning

Lundi 02 Juillet 2018, 09:00 to Mardi 03 Juillet 2018, 18:00
Organisation: 
Heather Burnett (CNRS-Université Paris Diderot) Judith Degen (Stanford University)
Lieu: 

Center in Paris
The University of chicago
6, rue Thomas Mann
75013 Paris

Description

In recent years, the study of linguistic meaning and its role in social interaction has seen rapid advances in three distinct areas: formal semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Expressive meaning (see Potts, 2007 ; Gutzmann, 2015) and its properties in language related to the social phenomena of honorification, perjoration and politeness has come to occupy a prominent place in the field of formal semantics and pragmatics (Van Rooij, 2003; Potts et al., 2009; McCready et al., 2012 ; McCready, 2012, among others). Likewise, psycholinguistic research in experimental semantics and pragmatics is painting an ever more complex picture of the interactions of multiple factors in the computation of speaker meaning, including perspective taking, speaker identity, world knowledge, and speaker-specific idiosyncrasies (Heller et al., 2008; Grodner and Sedivy, 2011; Brown-Schmidt, 2012 ; Kurumada et al., 2012 ; Degen, 2015 ; Pogue et al., 2016; Yildirim et al., 2016; Lev-Ari, 2016, among others). Finally, although sociolinguistics had traditionally studied patterns of language production and variation (see Labov, 1963, 1966), there is a growing movement in the field that focuses on listeners’ interpretation of socially meaningful variants (see, for example, Eckert’s Third Wave approach (Eckert, 2000, 2008, 2012)).

Despite increasing attention devoted to meaning and social interaction in each of these communities, there has been surprisingly little collaboration across all three. Although formal semantics/ pragmatics has become increasingly informed by psycholinguistic research in the past 15 years, it is only extremely recently that classic sociolinguistic topics such as stance and identity construction have begun to be investigated from a formal perspective (Smith et al., 2010; Acton, 2014; Acton and Potts, 2014; Cornips, 2014; Beltrama, 2016; Burnett, 2017). Likewise, although a dominant approach in sociolinguistics (the variationist approach (Labov, 1963, 1966)) has traditionally been quantitative corpus studies, methods adapted from social psychology and psycholinguistics have started to become common in this area as well (Campbell-Kibler, 2007; Podesva, 2007; Lev-Ari, 2016; Levon, 2014; D’Onofrio, 2015; Tamminga, 2017, among others).

We therefore suggest that the timing is right for a substantial integration between the three areas, and we invite submissions for oral presentations from researchers working on meaning and social interaction at the intersection of formal semantics/pragmatics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.

We are excited to be joined by the following invited speakers:

  • Leonie Cornips (Maastricht)
  • Shiri Lev-Ari (Royal Holloway)
  • E McCready (Aoyama Gakuin)
  • Rob Podesva (Stanford)

Call for papers

Authors are invited to submit abstracts for talks relevant to the workshop’s topics by January 15, 2018 . We welcome submissions presenting theoretical, experimental and/or computational research on any aspect of social meaning. Anonymous abstracts, should be submitted via EasyChair. Abstracts are limited to 500 words (excluding figures, tables, and references). All content must fit on no more than 2 pages.

Important dates

  • Jan 15, 2018    Abstract submission deadline
  • Feb 15, 2018    Notification of acceptance
  • Jul 2-3, 2018    Workshop dates

Contact

spfmeaning18@gmail.com

Sponsors

The program "Investissements d’Avenir" overseen by the French National Research Agency, ANR-
10-LABX-0083 (Labex EFL, Axe 2, Opération SA4).