scholarly journals Analyzing Social Meaning: How Words Matter in Social Contexts (Based on German Communicative Practice)

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 1556-1566
Author(s):  
Sergei T. Nefedov ◽  
◽  
Valeria E. Chernyavskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Linguistic Anthropology ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Linguistic Unit ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings

The paper discusses the notion of social meaning that has become a central one in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, metapragmatics. The study was informed by these research directions and the main outcomes. The term social meaning pinpoints what linguistic forms convey about the social identity of the users, about their personality, social features and ideologically, value-based orientations. We presume that this is a category of meaning that a linguistic unit (an utterance) obtains as a result of its usage in a certain context. Social meanings are fixed by social practice. It acts as an index to the context in which the linguistic unit is expected to be used and relevant. Indexical relations are open for re-evaluations that are mediated by speakers ideological views. The study is based on German socio-cultural practice and reveals how indexical relations arise between a linguistic unit and the socio-cultural environment, the social occasion of its usage. The analysis is conducted as corpus-assisted discourse analysis, based on the «Digital dictionary of the German language» / «Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache»

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)*

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 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.

The signifying voice

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Default Mode ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Linguistic Imperialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Semiotic Systems ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
The Common

Abstract Drawing on a social semiotic framework, this paper sets out to examine two different semiotic systems whose default mode of expression is the human voice – language and music. Through comparing how each system differentially employs the human voice, we can identify both their commonalities and differences, and go some way to treating both equally within de Saussure’s envisaged broader field of “semiology”, avoiding the common trap of “linguistic imperialism”, i.e. taking language as the model for all semiotic systems. Starting by conceptualising the key relationship between the text, or unified instance of meaning-making, and the social contexts in which it functions, the paper then examines the material affordances utilised by each system, and the kinds of social meanings they express.

Visual Literacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Serafini
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Visual Literacy ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Design Elements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range

Visual literacy was originally defined as a set of visual competencies or cognitive skills and strategies one needs to make sense of visual images. These visual competencies were seen as universal cognitive abilities that were used for understanding visual images regardless of the contexts of production, reception, and dissemination. More contemporary definitions suggest visual literacy is a contextualized, social practice as much as an individualized, cognitively based set of competencies. Visual literacy is more aptly defined as a process of generating meanings in transaction with multimodal ensembles that include written text, visual images, and design elements from a variety of perspectives to meet the requirements of particular social contexts. Theories of visual literacy and associated research and pedagogy draw from a wide range of disciplines including art history, semiotics, media and cultural studies, communication studies, visual ethnography and anthropology, social semiotics, new literacies studies, cognitive psychology, and critical theory. Understanding the various theories, research methodologies, and pedagogical approaches to visual literacy requires an investigation into how the various paradigm shifts that have occurred in the social sciences have affected this field of study. Cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, multimodal, and postmodern “turns” in the social sciences each bring different theories, perspectives, and approaches to the field of visual literacy. Visual literacy now incorporates sociocultural, semiotic, critical, and multimodal perspectives to understand the meaning potential of the visual and verbal ensembles encountered in social environments.

scholarly journals Social meanings of linguistic variation in BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language)

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-118
Author(s):  
Nick Palfreyman
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Supplementary Material ◽  
Different Levels

Abstract Abstract (International Sign) In contrast to sociolinguistic research on spoken languages, little attention has been paid to how signers employ variation as a resource to fashion social meaning. This study focuses on an extremely understudied social practice, that of sign language usage in Indonesia, and asks where one might look to find socially meaningful variables. Using spontaneous data from a corpus of BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language), it blends methodologies from Labovian variationism and analytic practices from the ‘third wave’ with a discursive approach to investigate how four variable linguistic features are used to express social identities. These features occur at different levels of linguistic organisation, from the phonological to the lexical and the morphosyntactic, and point to identities along regional and ethnic lines, as well as hearing status. In applying third wave practices to sign languages, constructed action and mouthings in particular emerge as potent resources for signers to make social meaning.

The role of context in sociolinguistic perception

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (s1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hilton ◽  
Sunwoo Jeong
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Linguistic Anthropology ◽  
Linguistic Feature ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Social Inferences

AbstractPrevious research demonstrates that listeners make social inferences about people based on how they speak, and that these inferences vary depending on the linguistic and social context. An open question is exactly how contextual enrichment (i.e. information about the speaker and speaking situation) comes to influence sociolinguistic perception. This paper addresses this question by analyzing data from 10 perception experiments investigating three different linguistic phenomena: number agreement in existential there constructions, intonation contours in declarative sentences, and overlapping speech in conversation. We observe an overall trend that increasing contextual enrichment obscures the effects of linguistic forms. In contextually impoverished stimuli, number nonagreement and rising declaratives trigger perceptions that speakers are less educated and more polite, respectively, but show no effect on listener perceptions when embedded in more contextually rich stimuli. By contrast, overlapping speech shows robust effects on perceived interruptiveness, even in contextually rich stimuli. Drawing on theories from social psychology and linguistic anthropology, we argue that if listeners are able to form sufficient impressions of speakers before encountering the target linguistic feature, they will not modify their impressions to incorporate the social meanings conveyed by the target linguistic feature, unless these social meanings are highly enregistered.

The meaning of Greta: a psychosocial exploration of Greta Thunberg

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Simon Western
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Time Magazine ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Social ◽  
Famous Person ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
New Social Movement ◽  
New Social Movement Theory

This article explores the social meaning of Greta Thunberg. Time magazine made her Person of the Year 2019, claiming she has become a social phenomenon, a "global sensation". This article utilises psychosocial theory and new social movement theory to explore the social meaning of "Greta". It asks what "Greta" evokes in our "social imaginary" (Taylor, 2009, p. 146). What conscious and unconscious identifications are projected onto "Greta" that have made her the unlikely famous person she is? These questions are not about exploring her individual psychological, leadership, or character traits, but focus on Greta (now eighteen years old) as a social object (Latour, 2005) with a vast social network following her, including over 4.2 million Twitter followers, a new documentary film about her, and mainstream media coverage across the globe. Part one of this article outlines the context and libidinal economies that Greta operates within, and the theoretical influences the article draws upon. Part two outlines five core messages that Greta transmits, and the meanings that emerge from observing social reactions to her. The article ends with a conclusion summarising the social meanings of Greta.

Space, Materials, and the ‘Social’: In the Aftermath of a Disaster

10.1068/d213t ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Harada
Keyword(s):  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Great Earthquake ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Small Scales ◽  
Sudden Collapse

How do spaces and materials relate and create the ‘social’ contexts? How are material ‘order’ or the ‘social’ meaning such as collectivity and individuality interrelated? In this essay I explore the relations of spaces, materials, and the ‘social’ using several episodes in a public shelter after the great earthquake happened in Japan in January 1995. Sudden collapse of continuous interrelations of the materials and spaces in a metropolitan area reveals the process of the (re)creation of both collectibility and individuality through the delegation through the delegation of the spaces and materials at large and small scales.

Making Public Shame Bearable and Entertaining: Ritualised Shaming in Reality Television

2020 ◽  
pp. 174997552094660
Author(s):  
Martin Hájek ◽  
Daniel Frantál ◽  
Kateřina Simbartlová
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Reality Television ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Classical Concept ◽  
Liberal Society ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status

In modern liberal society, a person is considered a ‘sacred’ entity and any violation of their dignity should produce embarrassment not only on the side of the ashamed individual but in those co-present as well. In our research, we studied public shaming in reality television (RTV), a recent popular culture product, in order to understand the mechanism that transforms otherwise degrading shaming into popular entertainment. The analysis drew on the classical concept of the ‘degradation ceremony’ (H. Garfinkel) and it covered three RTV programmes originating in different cultural contexts. We discovered that it is strong situational ritualisation of shaming which substantially attenuates the harmful consequences of being shamed for participants’ selves and thus protects viewers from uncomfortable feelings. In RTV, the shaming takes the form of a purposively unaccomplished degradation ceremony, which consists of the creation of an extraordinary situation, typification of participants, emphasis on the shared values in whose name the shaming is done, and participants’ reflexive performance in the show. The results suggest that in RTV, the social practice of the status degradation ceremony is transformed into a cultural practice of systematic shaming without real identity degradation, which makes it possible for shaming to become global mediatised entertainment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document