SFB  1412 'Register' Fall School (September 1st - 4th, 2020)

Instructor: Heather Burnett (Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS)

Email: heather.susan.burnett@gmail.com 

Textbook

Burnett, H. (in prep). Meaning, Identity and Interaction: Sociolinguistic Variation and Change in Game-Theoretic Pragmatics. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. ​ PDF

This is an incomplete draft of my manuscript for CUP. You are welcome to read it (and give comments! :) ), but please don't cite it.

Course overview

Since the late 1990s, the development of mathematical and computational models of language variation and change has yielded enormous advances in our understanding of the cognitive processes that underly these phenomena. However, although many (if not most) linguistic changes are socially conditioned, formal models have been almost exclusively focused on the grammatical and/or psychological aspects of change, neglecting its social aspects. On the other hand, many nonmathematically oriented approaches in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have stressed the role that social meaning and identity construction play in language use, and they have developed articulated theories of how meaning and identity mediate the relation between social change and language change. This course explores how we can develop formal models of the social aspects of variation and change by building on recent advances in computational game-theoretic pragmatics. We will see how game-theoretic models, originally developed for the use and interpretation of expressions with truth-conditional meaning, can be used to formalize aspects of influential theories of the use of socially meaningful expressions, such as Eckert’s Third Wave approach to variation. We will also see how tools from formal lexical semantics, such as Gärdenfors’ Conceptual Spaces framework, can be used to formalize aspects of speaker/listener ideologies (beliefs, stereotypes etc.), and how ideological structure can be integrated into the models to analyze patterns of sociolinguistic perception/interpretation.

Slides

Day 1: Introduction to social meaning, language change and decision theory

Day 2: Identity construction through language in game-theoretic pragmatics

Day 3: A materialist semantics for sociophonetic variation and slurs

Day 4: Linking language change and social change with game-theoretic pragmatics