Sociophonetics, semantics, and intention

Abstract

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler observes that the role of speaker intention seems to differ in the meanings of primary interest in variationist sociolinguistics on one hand and semantics and pragmatics on the other. Taking this observation as its point of departure, the central goal of the present work is to clarify the nature of intention-attribution in general and, at the same time, the nature of these two types of meaning. I submit general principles by which observers determine whether to attribute a particular intention to an agent – principles grounded in observers’ estimation of the agent’s beliefs, preferences, and assessment of alternative actions. These principles and the attendant discussion clarify the role of alternatives, common ground, and perceptions of naturalness in intention-attribution, illuminate public discourses about agents’ intentions, point to challenges for game-theoretic models of interpretation that assume cooperativity, and elucidate the nature of the types of meaning of interest. Examining the role of intention vis-à-vis findings and insights from variationist research and the formally explicit game-theoretic models just mentioned foregrounds important differences and similarities between the two types of meaning of interest and lays bare the contingent nature of all meaning in practice.

Pragmatic violations affect social inferences about the speaker

“…For example, in a context in which elements of the speaker's personality or social identity are already known, does this information affect the way in which listeners draw pragmatic inferences from what the speaker said? This possibility is supported by recent work showing that social information about the speaker's identity influences how listeners interpret the literal content of an utterance at the pragmatic level (Beltrama & Schwarz, 2021, 2022Fairchild & Papafragou, 2018).…”

“…Recall that inferring that Sue is seeing someone in Cleveland upon hearing the utterance "Sue goes to Cleveland every weekend" requires that the speaker intended for this inference to be drawn. However, listeners are able (and likely) to draw social inferences from a speaker's linguistic behavior regardless of whether the speaker meant to produce a particular impression or not (see Acton, 2022;Beltrama, 2020;Eckert, 2019, for further discussion). Even though pragmatic and social inferences have typically been studied independently of one another, leading scholars in the study of linguistic communication have argued that the two kinds of inferences should jointly be seen as part and parcel of language's ability to convey meaning at different levels (Clark, 1992;Eckert, 2019;Eckert & Labov, 2017;Ochs, 1992;Silverstein, 1985).…”

“…For example, apical realizations of /ing/ as in "I'm goin' fishin'" have been argued to invoke, in a North American setting, speaker properties such as being laidback, unpretentious, lazy and many others that might or might not be simultaneously salient in the same context (see Campbell-Kibler, 2011;Eckert, 2008). Crucially, these social associations appear to emerge regardless of whether the speaker purposefully chose to speak in this way to convey them, or was routinely describing things in whatever variety of their repertoire they thought would be appropriate (see Acton, 2022;Beltrama, 2020;Eckert, 2019); as a result, inferences on this sort have been argued not to require intentionality, but rather legibility -they need to be recognizable by listeners within the social context of a given speech community, regardless of the degree to which the speaker meant for them to be recognized (Eckert, 2019).…”

In a manner of speaking: progress and challenges in the study of the elusive manner implicature

“…Either way, theories of manner both need to specify which approach to semantic similarity is adopted, and ideally provide a way to formalize or test for this. Promising approaches might be found in variationist sociolinguistics, where variables are traditionally characterised by identity of reference, but more recently as also being co-referential or serving the same communicative or discourse function (e.g., Acton, 2019Acton, , 2022Beltrama, 2020;Romaine, 2017) 2 , or in formal semantic models (e.g. Rett, 2014).…”

“…Recently there has been an increased interest in exploring the relationship between social meaning and semantic and pragmatic meaning (e.g., Acton, 2022;Beltrama, 2020), by both mapping out their similarities and differences, and mutual influences. Furthermore, Acton also argues that the distinction between semantic or pragmatic meaning being intentional, and social meaning being optionally so, is not always clear cut, offering several counterexamples.…”