FOS: Fwd: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium - Eric Acton (November 16th)

[Suzanne Evans Wagner]

Friends of Sociolinguistics and Socio Lab members,

Don't miss this upcoming Linguistics colloquium talk that brings together
semantics/pragmatics and Third Wave sociolinguistics.

Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: smit2297 <smit2297 at msu.edu>
Date: Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 2:22 PM
Subject: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium -
Eric Acton (November 16th)
To: lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu <lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu>
Cc: Nelson, Scott James <nelso672 at msu.edu>


Good afternoon,


This is a reminder from the MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee that our
next colloquium is this Thursday, November 16th at 4:30pm, in B342 Wells
Hall. Our speaker is Professor Eric Acton (Eastern Michigan University),
whose talk is titled "A socio-pragmatic framework for non-entailed meaning"
(abstract below). The rest of the colloquium series schedule can be found
on our website. Please do not hesitate to contact us if there are any
questions or concerns. We hope to see you on Thursday!


Sincerely,

Kaylin Smith and Scott Nelson

MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee Co-Chairs

smit2297 at msu.edu, nelso672 at msu.edu


-----------------------

*A socio-pragmatic framework for non-entailed meaning*

Eric Acton (Eastern Michigan University)


Both pragmatics and the third-wave (Eckert 2012) variationist
sociolinguistics have long recognized that the significance of utterances
stretches far beyond their entailments (e.g. Grice 1975, Labov 1963). But
despite their kindred interests—How, in all its indeterminacy, is meaning
made in situated use, and what are the underlying dynamics?—the two
traditions have proceeded largely in silos. In this talk, I develop a
socio-pragmatic framework for non-literal meaning that builds on the
insights of these traditions, while bridging and expanding their empirical
reach.

Pragmatics (e.g. Grice 1975) offers the foundational insight that the full
significance of an utterance depends not only upon its semantics, but also
upon considering the utterance’s apparent costs and benefits vis-à-vis
those of relevant alternatives. But with the exception of research on
politeness (e.g. Brown & Levinson 1987), the great bulk of pragmatics
research: (i) concerns inferences that involve directly enriching an
utterance’s descriptive content; and (ii) operationalizes costs and
benefits as morphosyntactic complexity and semantic informativity,
respectively. At the same time, third-wave sociolinguistics has
demonstrated that a great deal of meaning is not tied to descriptive,
semantic content at all, and comes from varied sources—from the phonetic
realization of a phoneme (e.g. Benor 2001 on /t/) to voice quality (e.g.
Podesva 2007 on falsetto). Moreover, sociolinguistics foregrounds the wide
range of social considerations that condition language use and
interpretation, extending well beyond formal complexity and semantic
informativity.

Marrying the insights from both traditions, I develop a framework that
accounts for not only classic cases of non-entailed meaning like scalar
implicature, but a wide and diverse range of phenomena besides; among them,
the effect whereby using a the-plural (e.g. the Americans) to talk about a
group of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith distant from
the speaker (cf. the bare plural Americans).  The picture I develop here
leads us to expect to find complex and varied interactions across and
within multiple dimensions of meaning—social and or not, conversational or
conventional, entailed or associative, and so on—and makes clear the deep
interconnections between semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

_______________________________________________
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-- 
Suzanne Evans Wagner
Associate Professor of Linguistics
B-401 Wells Hall
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824

Tel: +1 (517) 355-9739
http://www.msu.edu/~wagnersu
sociolinguistics.linglang.msu.edu

Office hours: http://swagner.youcanbook.me

Associate editor, Linguistics Vanguard
<http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lingvan>
Co-editor, *Routledge Studies in Language Change
<http://www.routledge.com/books/series/RSLC/>*
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