Abstract
In recent decades, semanticists moving beyond truth conditional meaning and sociolinguists moving beyond correlations with social structural categories have developed a shared interest in what is commonly called social meaning. This raises the possibility of a comprehensive theory of meaning, moving away from the exclusively propositional model of grammar, and treating language not just as structure but as practice. The paper briefly traces the emergence of social meaning in sociolinguistics, and discusses some issues involved in a broader theory, such as what counts as social meaning, the notions of context and intention, and the need to adopt the Peircian sign.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The empirical turn and its consequences for theoretical syntax
- Linguistic typology in action: how to know more
- Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics
- On the goals of theoretical linguistics
- Social meaning
- Large Language Models and theoretical linguistics
- It’s time for a complete theory of partial predictability in language
- Theoretical Linguistics and the philosophy of linguistics
- Speech and sign: the whole human language
- Cross-linguistic insights in the theory of semantics and its interface with syntax
- Reflections on the grammatical view of scalar implicatures
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The empirical turn and its consequences for theoretical syntax
- Linguistic typology in action: how to know more
- Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics
- On the goals of theoretical linguistics
- Social meaning
- Large Language Models and theoretical linguistics
- It’s time for a complete theory of partial predictability in language
- Theoretical Linguistics and the philosophy of linguistics
- Speech and sign: the whole human language
- Cross-linguistic insights in the theory of semantics and its interface with syntax
- Reflections on the grammatical view of scalar implicatures