General information.
Instructor: Heather Burnett (LLF, CNRS-Université Paris Diderot)
Email: heather.susan.burnett@gmail.com (please email me if you would like to meet!)
Class time: Monday-Friday, 9:00-10:50am.
Email: heather.susan.burnett@gmail.com (please email me if you would like to meet!)
Class time: Monday-Friday, 9:00-10:50am.
Course Description.
This course gives an introduction to the study and the formal modelling of social meaning, sociolinguistic variation and identity construction through language. More specifically, we explore how models commonly used in game-theoretic/probabilistic pragmatics (Benz et al. 2005, Franke & Jäger 2016) can be usefully applied to phenomena studied in variationist sociolinguistics (Labov 1963, 1966 et seq.). We argue that, by virtue of its interactive and probabilistic nature, this framework has the potential to yield explicit formalized theories of the cognitive and social processes underlying the construction of linguistic meaning and personal identity (Eckert 2012). We show how game theoretic models have been used to analyze pragmatic phenomena of interest to sociolinguists (politeness, slurs, discourse particles), and explore how current theories in this branch of formal pragmatics can be extended to model quantitative patterns of socially conditioned variation and change.
Monday: Introduction to social meaning.
This class gives an introduction to the phenomenon of social meaning, how it is studied in sociolinguistics, and its role mediating between language and social change. As a case study, we look in detail at K. Woolard’s longitudinal studies of social change (globalization), social meaning and increased use of Catalan in late 20th century Barcelona, and we show how decision theory can be used to make the link between these three phenomena explicit.
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 1
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 1
Tuesday: Style shifting in game-theoretic pragmatics.
This class introduces an influential sociolinguistic framework for analyzing the role that social meaning plays in quantitative patterns of language variation and change: P. Eckert’s Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation. We see how game-theoretic models commonly used in formal pragmatics to study phenomena such as scalar implicatures can be extended to give a 'formal semantics' for sociophonetic variation, and we explore how these models can help in the analysis of patterns of style shifting (intra-speaker variation).
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 2
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 2
Wednesday: Social stratification in game-theoretic pragmatics.
This class discusses the open debate concerning the role that speaker agency plays in sociolinguistic variation, and discuss the implications of this debate for theories of social stratification (inter-speaker variation). We explore how game-theoretic models introduced in Class 2 can be used to give social-meaning-based analyses of stratificational patterns, with special focus on syntactic variation in Montréal French.
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 3
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 3
Thursday: Linking social change and language change.
This class introduces the actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968) for linguistic change and presents arguments that social changes can be responsable for the actuation of many linguistic changes. We explore how game-theoretic models can be enriched with ideological structure and how these models can be useful for understanding how sociolinguistic variants propagate through communities, with special focus on variation and change in grammatical gender in varieties of French.
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 4
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 4
Friday: Linking truth conditional and social meaning.
This class gives an introduction to the study of a class of linguistic expressions that have been studied in both sociolinguistics and in formal semantics and pragmatics: slurs. We give an overview of common styles of analysis for the meaning of slurs in formal semantics and philosophy of language, and argue that insights from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology can help solve outstanding puzzles associated with the use and interpretation of slurs in these areas.
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 5
SLIDES FOR LECTURE 5
Selected bibliography for the course.
The following bibliography is extensive because it provides references to both the empirical content covered in the class and also ressources for learning the formal background. If you are unable to obtain a particular article online, please write to me and I can send it to you.
Acton, E. K. (2014). Pragmatics and the social meaning of determiners. PhD thesis, Stanford University.
Acton, E. K. and Potts, C. (2014). That straight talk: Sarah Palin and the sociolinguistics of demonstratives. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(1):3–31.
Anderson, L. (2018). Calling, addressing, and appropriation. Bad Words. to appear.
Anderson, L. and Lepore, E. (2013a). Slurring words. Noûs, 47(1):25–48.
Anderson, L. and Lepore, E. (2013b). What did you call me? slurs as prohibited words. Analytic Philosophy, 54(3):350–363.
Beltrama, A. (2016). Bridging the gap. Intensifiers between semantic and social meaning. PhD thesis, University of Chicago.
Benz, A., Jäger, G., and Van Rooij, R. (2005). Game theory and pragmatics. Springer.
Bianchi, C. (2014). Slurs and appropriation: An echoic account. Journal of Pragmatics, 66:35–44.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social science information, 16(6):645–668.
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse studies, 7(4-5):585–614.
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2008). All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4):401–431.
Burnett, H. (2017). Sociolinguistic interaction and identity construction: The view from game-theoretic pragmatics. Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 22:238–271.
Burnett, H. (2018). Signalling games, sociolinguistic variation and the construction of style. accepted in Linguistics & Philosophy.
Burnett, H. and Bonami, O. (2018). Linguistic prescription, ideological structure and the actuation of linguistic changes: Grammatical gender in french parliamentary debates. in revision for Language in Society.
Camp, E. (2013). Slurring perspectives. Analytic Philosophy, 54(3):330–349.
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2007). Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American speech, 82(1):32–64.
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2008). I’ll be the judge of that: Diversity in social perceptions of (ing). Language in Society, 37(05):637–659.
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2009). The nature of sociolinguistic perception. Language Variation and Change, 21(1):135–156.
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., West, R., Jurafsky, D., Leskovec, J., and Potts, C. (2013). No country for old members: User lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, pages 307–318. ACM.
Dror, M., Granot, D., and Yaeger-Dror, M. (2013). Speech variation, utility, and game theory. Language and Linguistics Compass, 7(11):561–579.
Eckert, P. (2000). Language variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of identity in Belten High. Wiley-Blackwell.
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of sociolinguistics, 12(4):453–476.
Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual review of Anthropology, 41:87–100.
Frank, M. C. and Goodman, N. D. (2012). Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games. Science, 336(6084):998–998.
Franke, M. (2009). Signal to act: Game theory in pragmatics. PhD thesis, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation.
Franke, M. and Jäger, G. (2016). Probabilistic pragmatics, or why Bayes’ rule is probably important for pragmatics. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 35:3–44.
Gärdenfors, P. (2004). Conceptual spaces: The geometry of thought. MIT press.
Gärdenfors, P. (2014). The geometry of meaning: Semantics based on conceptual spaces. MIT Press.
Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction. Bobbs-Merrill.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face interaction. Aldine.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982a). Discourse strategies, volume 1. Cambridge University Press.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982b). Language and social identity, volume 2. Cambridge University Press.
Hom, C. (2008). The semantics of racial epithets. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(8):416–440.
Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodi cation of language and identity. Journal of sociolinguistics, 7(4):473–492.
Henderson, R. and McCready, E. (2017). Dogwhistles and the at-issue/non-at-issue distinction. Published on Semantics Archive.
Irvine, J. T. and Gal, S. (2009). Language ideology and linguistic di erentiation. Linguistic anthropology: A reader, pages 402–434.
Jäger, G. (2011). Game-theoretical pragmatics. In van Benthem, J. and ter Meulen, A., editors, Handbook of Logic and Language, pages 467–491. Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Jeshion, R. (2013). Expressivism and the offensiveness of slurs. Philosophical Perspectives, 27(1):231–259.
Labov, W. (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word, 19(3):273–309.
Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, W. (2012). Dialect diversity in America: The politics of language change. University of Virginia Press.
Lambert, W. E., Hodgson, R. C., Gardner, R. C., and Fillenbaum, S. (1960). Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(1):44.
Levon, E. (2014). Categories, stereotypes, and the linguistic perception of sexuality. Language in Society, 43(05):539–566.
Lewis, D. (1969). Convention. Harvard UP, Cambridge.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2011). Gender, Sexuality and Meaning: Linguistic Practice and Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2002). Queering semantics: Definitional struggles. Language and sexuality: Contesting meaning in theory and practice, pages 137–60.
McCready, E. S. (2010). Varieties of conventional implicature. Semantics and Pragmatics, 3:8–1.
Merin, A. (1999). Information, relevance, and social decision making: Some principles and results of decision-theoretic semantics. Journal of Logic, Language, and computation, 2:179–221.
Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 11:335.
Osborne, M. J. and Rubinstein, A. (1994). A course in game theory. MIT press.
Perea, A. (2012). Epistemic game theory: reasoning and choice. Cambridge University Press.
Pharao, N., Maegaard, M., Møller, J. S., and Kristiansen, T. (2014). Indexical meanings of [s+] among copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in di erent prosodic contexts. Language in Society, 43(1):1–31.
Podesva, R. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of sociolinguistics, 11(4):478–504.
Podesva, R. J., Reynolds, J., Callier, P., and Baptiste, J. (2015). Constraints on the social meaning of released/t: A production and perception study of us politicians. Language Variation and Change, 27(01):59–87.
Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and levels, pages 193–247.
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3):193–229.
Smith, E., Hall, K. C., and Munson, B. (2010). Bringing semantics to sociophonetics: Social variables and secondary entailments. Laboratory Phonology, 1(1):121–155.
Tagliamonte, S. A. and D’Arcy, A. (2009). Peaks beyond phonology: Adolescence, incrementation, and language change. Language, 85(1):58–108.
Weinreich, U., Labov, W., and Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Lehmann, W. P., editor, Directions for historical linguistics: A symposium, pages 95–195. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Woolard, K. A. (2009). Linguistic consciousness among adolescents in Catalonia: A case study from the Barcelona urban area in longitudinal perspective. Zeitschrift für Katalanistik, 22.
Woolard, K. A. and Gahng, T.-J. (1990). Changing language policies and attitudes in autonomous Catalonia. Language in Society, 19(3):311–330.
Zhang, Q. (2008). Rhotacization and the ‘beijing smooth operator’: the social meaning of a linguistic variable. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(2):201–222.
Acton, E. K. (2014). Pragmatics and the social meaning of determiners. PhD thesis, Stanford University.
Acton, E. K. and Potts, C. (2014). That straight talk: Sarah Palin and the sociolinguistics of demonstratives. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18(1):3–31.
Anderson, L. (2018). Calling, addressing, and appropriation. Bad Words. to appear.
Anderson, L. and Lepore, E. (2013a). Slurring words. Noûs, 47(1):25–48.
Anderson, L. and Lepore, E. (2013b). What did you call me? slurs as prohibited words. Analytic Philosophy, 54(3):350–363.
Beltrama, A. (2016). Bridging the gap. Intensifiers between semantic and social meaning. PhD thesis, University of Chicago.
Benz, A., Jäger, G., and Van Rooij, R. (2005). Game theory and pragmatics. Springer.
Bianchi, C. (2014). Slurs and appropriation: An echoic account. Journal of Pragmatics, 66:35–44.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social science information, 16(6):645–668.
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse studies, 7(4-5):585–614.
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2008). All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4):401–431.
Burnett, H. (2017). Sociolinguistic interaction and identity construction: The view from game-theoretic pragmatics. Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 22:238–271.
Burnett, H. (2018). Signalling games, sociolinguistic variation and the construction of style. accepted in Linguistics & Philosophy.
Burnett, H. and Bonami, O. (2018). Linguistic prescription, ideological structure and the actuation of linguistic changes: Grammatical gender in french parliamentary debates. in revision for Language in Society.
Camp, E. (2013). Slurring perspectives. Analytic Philosophy, 54(3):330–349.
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2007). Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American speech, 82(1):32–64.
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2008). I’ll be the judge of that: Diversity in social perceptions of (ing). Language in Society, 37(05):637–659.
Campbell-Kibler, K. (2009). The nature of sociolinguistic perception. Language Variation and Change, 21(1):135–156.
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., West, R., Jurafsky, D., Leskovec, J., and Potts, C. (2013). No country for old members: User lifecycle and linguistic change in online communities. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, pages 307–318. ACM.
Dror, M., Granot, D., and Yaeger-Dror, M. (2013). Speech variation, utility, and game theory. Language and Linguistics Compass, 7(11):561–579.
Eckert, P. (2000). Language variation as social practice: The linguistic construction of identity in Belten High. Wiley-Blackwell.
Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of sociolinguistics, 12(4):453–476.
Eckert, P. (2012). Three waves of variation study: The emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation. Annual review of Anthropology, 41:87–100.
Frank, M. C. and Goodman, N. D. (2012). Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games. Science, 336(6084):998–998.
Franke, M. (2009). Signal to act: Game theory in pragmatics. PhD thesis, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation.
Franke, M. and Jäger, G. (2016). Probabilistic pragmatics, or why Bayes’ rule is probably important for pragmatics. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 35:3–44.
Gärdenfors, P. (2004). Conceptual spaces: The geometry of thought. MIT press.
Gärdenfors, P. (2014). The geometry of meaning: Semantics based on conceptual spaces. MIT Press.
Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction. Bobbs-Merrill.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face interaction. Aldine.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982a). Discourse strategies, volume 1. Cambridge University Press.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982b). Language and social identity, volume 2. Cambridge University Press.
Hom, C. (2008). The semantics of racial epithets. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(8):416–440.
Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodi cation of language and identity. Journal of sociolinguistics, 7(4):473–492.
Henderson, R. and McCready, E. (2017). Dogwhistles and the at-issue/non-at-issue distinction. Published on Semantics Archive.
Irvine, J. T. and Gal, S. (2009). Language ideology and linguistic di erentiation. Linguistic anthropology: A reader, pages 402–434.
Jäger, G. (2011). Game-theoretical pragmatics. In van Benthem, J. and ter Meulen, A., editors, Handbook of Logic and Language, pages 467–491. Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Jeshion, R. (2013). Expressivism and the offensiveness of slurs. Philosophical Perspectives, 27(1):231–259.
Labov, W. (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word, 19(3):273–309.
Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, W. (2012). Dialect diversity in America: The politics of language change. University of Virginia Press.
Lambert, W. E., Hodgson, R. C., Gardner, R. C., and Fillenbaum, S. (1960). Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(1):44.
Levon, E. (2014). Categories, stereotypes, and the linguistic perception of sexuality. Language in Society, 43(05):539–566.
Lewis, D. (1969). Convention. Harvard UP, Cambridge.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2011). Gender, Sexuality and Meaning: Linguistic Practice and Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2002). Queering semantics: Definitional struggles. Language and sexuality: Contesting meaning in theory and practice, pages 137–60.
McCready, E. S. (2010). Varieties of conventional implicature. Semantics and Pragmatics, 3:8–1.
Merin, A. (1999). Information, relevance, and social decision making: Some principles and results of decision-theoretic semantics. Journal of Logic, Language, and computation, 2:179–221.
Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 11:335.
Osborne, M. J. and Rubinstein, A. (1994). A course in game theory. MIT press.
Perea, A. (2012). Epistemic game theory: reasoning and choice. Cambridge University Press.
Pharao, N., Maegaard, M., Møller, J. S., and Kristiansen, T. (2014). Indexical meanings of [s+] among copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in di erent prosodic contexts. Language in Society, 43(1):1–31.
Podesva, R. (2007). Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of sociolinguistics, 11(4):478–504.
Podesva, R. J., Reynolds, J., Callier, P., and Baptiste, J. (2015). Constraints on the social meaning of released/t: A production and perception study of us politicians. Language Variation and Change, 27(01):59–87.
Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and levels, pages 193–247.
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3):193–229.
Smith, E., Hall, K. C., and Munson, B. (2010). Bringing semantics to sociophonetics: Social variables and secondary entailments. Laboratory Phonology, 1(1):121–155.
Tagliamonte, S. A. and D’Arcy, A. (2009). Peaks beyond phonology: Adolescence, incrementation, and language change. Language, 85(1):58–108.
Weinreich, U., Labov, W., and Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Lehmann, W. P., editor, Directions for historical linguistics: A symposium, pages 95–195. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Woolard, K. A. (2009). Linguistic consciousness among adolescents in Catalonia: A case study from the Barcelona urban area in longitudinal perspective. Zeitschrift für Katalanistik, 22.
Woolard, K. A. and Gahng, T.-J. (1990). Changing language policies and attitudes in autonomous Catalonia. Language in Society, 19(3):311–330.
Zhang, Q. (2008). Rhotacization and the ‘beijing smooth operator’: the social meaning of a linguistic variable. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(2):201–222.