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5 - Pragmatics and the Third Wave: The Social Meaning of Definites

from Part I - Where Is (Social) Meaning?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2021

By
Eric K. Acton
Edited by
Lauren Hall-Lew ,
Emma Moore  and
Robert J. Podesva
Lauren Hall-Lew
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Emma Moore
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Robert J. Podesva
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

Propelled by the third wave of variationist sociolinguistics, the present work argues that pragmatic and variationist inquiry are mutually enriching and fundamentally united. Relying on both traditions, I develop a general principle of language use and interpretation – briefly: utterances are evaluated according to not only their own semiotic character but also what sets them apart from that of alternative utterances that appear to offer a favorable mix of costs and benefits in context. I demonstrate that these principles underlie a wide range of phenomena observed in third-wave and pragmatics literature, with particular focus on two cases of social meaning rooted in semantically based inferences: (i) John McCain’s reference to Barack Obama as ‘that one’ in a 2008 US presidential debate; and (ii) the tendency for phrases of the form the Xs (e.g. the Democrats) to depict the referents as a bloc separate from the speaker in a way that bare plurals (e.g Democrats) do not (Acton 2019). As I will show, the perspective developed in this work makes principled predictions and leads us to expect to find complex and varied interactions across and within multiple dimensions of meaning.

Keywords

social meaningthird wavevariationpragmaticssociopragmaticsdefinitesindexicalityrationalitylanguage and politics
Type
Chapter
Information
Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation
Theorizing the Third Wave
 , pp. 105 - 126
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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