A semanticist tries to get smart with language data
A non-ideal theory of meaning is one that drops idealizing assumptions standardly made in philosophy of language and formal semantic theory, or that is developed to account for messy real world data that is difficult to analyze under common idealizations about human language and behavior. In a previous OSU Linguistics talk I gave two years ago, "Realsemantik: finding meaning in a non-ideal world”, I used examples from the political sphere, as well as standard cognitive and social psychology, to motivate a non-ideal theory of meaning. As we approach a critical juncture in the nation’s history, political rhetoric still, unfortunately, provides an abundance of examples of non-ideal language. Nonetheless, in this talk I will (mostly) focus on data from other domains, drawing on a diverse set of experimental and corpus based research drawn from traditional linguistic areas and beyond.
In linguistics, topics will include presupposition, prosody, and non-canonical word order, while further afield I will focus on language style as a predictor of academic success, and only briefly consider how similar style variables may be applied to other social and political issues. In each of the domains to be discussed, we will see that standard idealizations are either unhelpful, or inapplicable. For example, as regards the linguistic topics, a standard idealization that underlying linguistic representations fall into neat categories is neither warranted nor predictive. For the study of academic potential, we focus on distributional variables that are quite different from those normally considered in semantic theory. If you want to get how smart someone is, or has the potential to become, you don’t want to look at how smart they say they are, but at the way their language reflects how they think. But the way your language reflects how you think in turn depends on who you are, on your identity and culture. Thus we are looking at data where it is neither safe to make the idealization that people have conscious control over the style variables in question, nor the idealization that the population is linguistically homogeneous. Dropping such idealizations is, of course, standard in many areas of linguistic study, be it socio-phonetics, historical linguistics, or computational linguistics. What is unclear, however, is what a theory of meaning that lacks such assumptions would look like. I will end the talk with some cautious suggestions.
If you need an accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation, please contact campbell-kibler.1@osu.edu.