Precision and speaker qualities. The social meaning of pragmatic detail

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Beltrama
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The World ◽  
Linguistic Cues ◽  
High Degree

AbstractThe present article focuses on two questions: (i) How do listeners infer the social identity of a speaker based on how they choose to describe the world? (ii) Are these inferences informed by similar principles to those motivating the social significance of linguistic phenomena in other domains of the grammar? We address this issue by exploring the social meaning of imprecision (Lasersohn 1999): speakers’ well-attested tendency to apply varying degrees of deviation from the truth when reporting facts (e.g., describing a car as going 70 MPH, instead of 69). Based on results from a social perception study, we found (i) that a high degree of precision is associated with a constellation of both favorable and unfavorable qualities; (ii) that different linguistic cues to signal precision differentially affect the social meaning of the utterance; (iii) and that most such qualities bear a striking resemblance to those associated to variation in other realms – e.g., the hyper/hypo-articulation of sounds. We take this as evidence that semantic variation can be socially meaningful across the specific lexical items in which it manifests itself, and that such social meanings can be linguistically motivated by similar principles across different domains of the grammar.

scholarly journals Social inferences from the use of just as an exclusive particle

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 746
Author(s):  
William C. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Perception ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Discourse Particle ◽  
Social Inferences

Recent work has begun to investigate the interaction between semantics and social meaning. This study contributes to that line of inquiry by investigating how particular social meanings that are popularly believed to arise from the English discourse particle just are related to the conventional semantic meaning of just. In addition to proposing an inferential process by which the social meanings associated with just arise, this paper reports the results of a social perception experiment designed to test whether those social inferences arise when just is used in particular speech acts and whether they depend on the speaker’s gender and level of authority relative to the addressee. The use of just was found to significantly increase the perceived insecurity of men but not of women. This suggests that listeners may more strongly perceive speaker qualities that stereotypes cause them not to expect.

‘Don’t even [θ/f/h]ink aboot it’

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Lexical Effects ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
Using Data

As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in the urban heartlands of Scotland. While attempts have been made to understand and model the influence of lexical effects, media effects and frequency effects, far less understood is the role of social identity. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, this article addresses this gap in the literature by considering how TH-fronting is patterned across three all-male, working-class, adolescent Communities of Practice, and how this innovative variant is integrated within a system of the more established variants [θ] and [h]. Drawing on recent work on linguistic variation and social meaning, the article also explores some of the social meanings of (θ), particularly those variants which previous research has reported as being associated with ‘toughness’, and suggests how these meanings are utilised in speakers’ construction of social identity.

On the social perception of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Chappell
Keyword(s):  
Social Perception ◽  
Costa Rican ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Limited Ability ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Costa Rican Spanish ◽  
Gender Paradox ◽  
Linguistic Innovation ◽  
First Time

AbstractTo decipher for the first time what, if any, social meaning is indexed by nonstandard intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rica, such as [paza] for pasa ‘raisin’, the present study digitally manipulates 12 utterances from six Costa Rican speakers to vary only in intervocalic [s] versus [z]. Based on 106 listeners’ responses to these stimuli, I find that intervocalic [z] indexes a lower social status for all speakers but also yields higher ratings of confidence, niceness, localness, and masculinity for male speakers. Given female speakers’ limited ability to evoke positive social meanings associated with [z], I argue that accessibility to the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) conditions men's and women's differential treatment of variation. Offering a satisfying explanation for the gender paradox (Labov, 2001:261–293), this work concludes that women agentively eschew nonstandard variants that result in no positive social gains but lead linguistic innovation when their access to the indexical field is unobstructed.

Citizen sociolinguists scaling back

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Betsy Rymes ◽  
Gareth Smail
Keyword(s):  
Social Meaning ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multilingual Communication ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Practices ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThis paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists’ use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists. Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or “things Welsh people say.” We ultimately argue that by calling practices “translanguaging” and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of “citizen sociolinguists” as they discuss their own communicative practices in context may have something unique and underexamined to offer us as researchers of communicative diversity.

The Social Characterizations of Price: The Fool, the Faithful, the Frivolous, and the Frugal

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick F. Wherry
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Meaning Systems ◽  
Pricing System ◽  
Meaning Of Money

This article extends both Viviana Zelizer's discussion of the social meaning of money and Charles Smith's proposal that pricing is a definitional practice to the under-theorized realm of the social meanings generated in the pricing system. Individuals are attributed with calculating or not calculating whether an object or service is “worth” its price, but these attributions differ according to the individual's social location as being near to or far from a societal reference point rather than by the inherent qualities of the object or service purchased. Prices offer seemingly objective (quantitative) proof of the individual's “logic of appropriateness”—in other words, people like that pay prices such as those. This article sketches a preliminary but nonexhaustive typology of the social characterizations of individuals within the pricing system; these ideal types—the fool, the faithful, the frugal, and the frivolous—and their components offer a systematic approach to understanding prices as embedded in and constituents of social meaning systems.

scholarly journals Analisis Akun Twitter Berpengaruh terkait Covid-19 menggunakan Social Network Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-704
Author(s):  
Aprillian Kartino ◽  
M. Khairul Anam ◽  
Rahmaddeni ◽  
Junadhi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Social Network Analysis ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Interaction Network ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
High Degree

Covid-19 is a disease of the virus that is shaking the world and has been designated by WHO as a pandemic. This case of Covid-19 can be a place of dissemination of disinformation that can be utilized by some parties. The dissemination of information in this day and age has turned to the internet, namely social media, Twitter is one of the social media that is often used by Indonesians and the data can be analyzed. This study uses the social network analysis method, conducted to be able to find nodes that affect the ongoing interaction in the interaction network of information dissemination related to Covid-19 in Indonesia and see if the node is directly proportional to the value of its popularity. As well as to know in identifying the source of Covid-19 information, whether dominated by competent Twitter accounts in their fields. The data examined 19,939 nodes and 12,304 edges were taken from data provided by the web academic.droneemprit.id on the project "Analisis Opini Persebaran Virus Corona di Media Sosial", using the period of December 2019 to December 2020 on social media Twitter. The results showed that the @do_ra_dong account is an influential actor with the highest degree centrality of 860 and the @detikcom account is the actor with the highest popularity value of follower rank of 0.994741605. Thus actors who have a high degree of centrality value do not necessarily have a high follower rank value anyway. The study ignores if there are buzzer accounts on Twitter.  

scholarly journals Beyond the Words in Print: Identity Construction in Messages of Condolence

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-192
Author(s):  
Rita Akele Twumasi
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Role Identity ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The Social

Death is part of human existence. When a person hears the news of someone’s death, it is very common for that person to express their feelings about it. This feeling is in the form of condolences which express the speaker’s sorrow, and condolences fall into the category of speech act. Semantically, condolences have a social meaning which refers to language use. Identities are created in relationships with others, and condolences are major platforms for the construction of identities, in that, existing relationships are, clearly, manifested in the messages that sympathizers expressed. Using a qualitative approach, the study analyzed twenty condolence messages which were purposely sampled from condolence messages posted in the portals of International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), when one of its members passed away. The analysis of the data revealed two main identity types enacted for the deceased: role identity and Social Identity. The major Role identity enacted, metaphorically, was Father while the least role was Achiever. Second, identity as an International Figure was dominant with the Social roles, but Good Personality was used less frequently. The present study adds to studies in identity construction, in general, and studies in condolence messages, in specific.

scholarly journals In Praise of Irrationality: Self, "East" and "West" in Greek Teachers' Speeches on National Day Commemorations

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucianna Benincasa
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
The West ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Social Creativity ◽  
East And West

In this qualitative study of school discourse on national day commemorations, focus is on the "social creativity strategies" through which group members can improve their social identity. Discourse analysis was carried out on thirty-nine teachers' speeches delivered in Greek schools between 1998 and 2004. The speakers scorn rationality and logic, stereotypically attributed to "the West" (a "West" which is perceived not to include Greece), as cold and not human. The Greeks' successful national struggles are presented instead as the result of irrationality. They claim irrationality to be the most human and thus the most valuable quality, which places Greece first in the world hierarchy. The results are further discussed in terms of their implications for learning and teaching in the classroom, as well as for policy and research.

scholarly journals Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity, and social practice

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 629-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Kirkham
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings

AbstractThis article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the happy vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ε̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the happy vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document