Dear all,In sociolinguistic theory, the notion of socio-indexical meaning designates ‘the stances, personal characteristics, and personas indexed through the deployment of linguistic forms’ (Podesva 2011). Research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology has highlighted the fluid, contingent nature of social meanings, showing how speakers can creatively recruit and recombine linguistic resources to make social moves and construct identities (Silverstein 2003, Eckert 2008, 2012). On this view, the link between linguistic forms and social meanings is informed by a variety of social, ideological and cultural factors that are central to the life of language users within a particular community (Eckert 1989, 2000; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1995; Zhang 2005; Campbell-Kibler 2007; Podesva 2007, Coates & Cameron 2014, among others).

A growing body of research has recently begun investigating how social meanings are linked to the structural, language-internal properties of the expressions that carry them, and to what extent a social perspective on meaning can shed light on classic topics in semantics and pragmatics such as definiteness (Acton 2014), gradability (Beltrama and Staum Casasanto 2017), alternative-based and game-theoretic reasoning (Acton and Potts 2014, McCready 2015, Burnett 2017), markedness (Bender 2001 Campbell-Kibler 2007, Podesva 2011), modality (Glass 2015), pragmatic precision (Beltrama 2018), slurs and identity terms (McCready 2010, Candea 2016, McConnell-Ginet, 2002, 2006, forthcoming), questions (Cameron et al. 1988, Cameron 1998, Moore & Podesva 2009, Freed & Ehrlich 2010) and prosody (McConnell-Ginet 1978, Arnold & Candea 2015, Levon 2016, Jeong 2018).

Building on this momentum, we believe there is much to gain from encouraging further discussion on how the study of social meanings can be enriched with analytical and methodological tools typically used to investigate the structure and processing of other layers of meaning ; and how, conversely, the study of social meaning can yield a novel perspective on phenomena that have been traditionally seen as pertaining to semantics and pragmatics. In the same vein, we would also like to draw attention to the importance of fostering interaction between scholars that draw on different traditions -- e.g., semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis -- to investigate essentially similar meaning-related phenomena -- e.g., the linguistic communication of emotions; the ascription of epistemic and affective stances to the interlocutor; the negotiation of how discourse should or could continue; slurs and subjective language; deixis and indexicality. To encourage this type of conversations, we thus invite submissions from scholars that are concerned with exploring the emergence and circulation of meaning from a broad range of conceptual and methodological perspectives. We especially encourage submissions that aim to do so by incorporating insights and methods drawn from across different linguistic subfields, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language processing.

We are excited to be joined by the following invited speakers:

Maria Candea (Maîtresse de conférences, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Deborah Cameron (Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford)

Sally McConnell-Ginet (Professor Emerita, Cornell University)

Authors are invited to submit abstracts for talks relevant to the workshop’s topics by January 15th, 2019. The submission link is the following:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mist2019

Abstracts are limited to 500 words (excluding figures, tables, and references). All content must fit on no more than 2 pages.

Organizers
Andrea Beltrama 
Heather Burnett

Contact
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