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Andrea Beltrama, U Konstanz - From being intense to being precise: The social meaning of semantic properties

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March 31, 2017
All Day
Ramseyer 100

Linguistic forms typically convey two types of meaning: a semantic meaning, which allows us to describe facts about the world; and a social meaning, which conveys information about language users — e.g., their demographics, personal qualities, and ideological orientation. In this talk, I investigate how these two types of content interact with one another to determine what linguistic expressions communicate. First, I explore how semantic properties contribute to determining a form’s suitability to convey social meanings. Focusing on intensifiers "totally" in American English and "-issimo" in Italian, I show that both forms are perceived as especially salient carriers of social meaning in contexts where they modify a scale that is not provided by the lexical material. This result highlights grammatical markedness as a crucial principle underlying the aptness of an expression to carry social meanings, similarly to what has been observed in the domain of phonological and morphosyntactic variation (Bender 2000, Campbell-Kibler 2005, Podesva 2011). Second, I ask whether semantic properties can also yield insights on the specific type of social meaning conveyed by a linguistic form. Drawing on preliminary social perception data, I show that speakers making pragmatically precise statements (e.g., "John called at 3.02") are associated with social qualities that bear a qualitative resemblance to the linguistic properties of the form (e.g., "detail-oriented", "reliable", "punctual", "nerdy"). Such findings point to an iconic link between pragmatic precision and personal features, in a similar way to what have been observed for the perception of hyperarticulated variants in phonological variation (Eckert 2008, Podesva et al. 2015). Taken together, these results further our understanding of how social meaning, besides being informed by socio-cultural factors, is crucially affected by the grammatical properties of linguistic forms, laying the grounds for a more integrative treatment of the notion of meaning across semantics and sociolinguistics. 

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