“How's the wife?”: Pragmatic reasoning in spousal reference

Context, precision, and social perception: A sociopragmatic study

“…The study of the social meaning of variation has increasingly broadened its scope to include pragmatic variables—that is, variables whose different variants come with non-trivially distinct conventional meanings, and which can thus be defined as sharing a common discourse function (Dines 1980) or functional equivalence (Lavandera 1978). A recent line of work, in particular, has highlighted a principled connection between the socio-indexical value and the semantic and pragmatic properties of many linguistic phenomena, including intensifiers (Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2021), determiners and demonstratives (Acton & Potts 2014; Acton 2019; Hunt & Acton 2022), modals (Glass 2015), rising declaratives (Jeong 2021), and exclusive particles (Thomas 2021).…”

(Im)precise personae: The effect of socio-indexical information on semantic interpretation

“…In a paradigmatic study, Acton & Potts (2014) argue that the social meaning of solidarity and reciprocal affiliation conveyed by demonstratives 'this' and 'that' can be derived from the core semantics of these expressions-specifically, the presumption that the addressee can access the referent of the embedded noun phrase by considering the speaker's relation to entities in the discourse context-which distinguish them from competing expressions like 'the' or bare plurals. Similar inferential patterns from the semantic to the social plane have been unveiled for many other phenomena, including regular determiners (Acton 2019;Hunt & Acton 2022), intensifiers (Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2017, modals (Glass 2015), and types of speech acts (Jeong 2021; see Beltrama 2020 for an overview). A crucial contribution of this work has been to show that social meanings, when conveyed by expressions above the sound level, can be grounded in, and shaped by, these expressions' semantic and pragmatic properties.…”

(Im)precise personae: The effect of socio-indexical information on semantic interpretation

“…In a paradigmatic study, Acton & Potts (2014) argue that the social meaning of solidarity and reciprocal affiliation conveyed by demonstratives this and that can be derived from the core semantics of these expressions -specifically, the presumption that the addressee can access the referent of the embedded noun phrase by considering the speaker's relation to entities in the discourse context -which distinguish them from competing expressions like the or bare plurals. Similar inferential patterns from the semantic to the social plane have been unveiled for many other phenomena, including regular determiners (Acton 2019;Hunt & Acton 2022), intensifiers (Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2017); modals (Glass 2015); and types of speech acts (Jeong 2021; see Beltrama 2020 for an overview). A crucial contribution of this work has been to show that social meanings, when conveyed by expressions above the sound level, can be grounded in, and shaped by, these expressions' semantic and pragmatic properties.…”

“…As discussed in §1, scholars of language across different traditions have long submitted to the view that communication simultaneously involves referential and indexical signs, "one working in conjunction with the other" (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz 2007); and that the interpretation of descriptive meaning cannot be conceived of independently of the social context (Silverstein 1985;Ochs 1992;Eckert 2019;Cook-Gumperz 1992). In a similar vein, a recent line of work at the interface of pragmatics and sociolinguistics showed that social meanings are productively and systematically inferred from the semantic properties of speech across a variety of linguistic expressions (Acton & Potts 2014;Acton 2019;Beltrama & Staum Casasanto 2017;Beltrama et al 2022;Glass 2015;Jeong 2021;Hunt & Acton 2022; see §1 for further details), motivating a view in which different dimensions of meaning cannot be seen as independent from one another. Against this background, the persona effects observed in our study make it possible to take a further step towards building a bridge between sociolinguistic and more abstract, reference-oriented approaches to the study of meaning, questioning the exclusion of identity considerations from pragmatic reasoning that has been tacitly advocated in much work in semantics and analytic philosophy.…”