Sociolinguistic Variation and Change in Game-Theoretic Pragmatics

Course Description

Since the late 1990s, the development of mathematical and computational models of language variation and change has yielded enormous advances in our understanding of the cognitive processes that underly these phenomena. However, although many (if not most) linguistic changes are socially conditioned, formal models have been almost exclusively focused on the grammatical and/or psychological aspects of change, neglecting its social aspects. On the other hand, many non-mathematically oriented approaches in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have stressed the role that social meaning and identity construction play in language use, and they have developed articulated theories of how meaning and identity mediate the relation between social change and language change. This course explores how we can develop formal models of the social aspects of variation and change by building on recent advances in computational game-theoretic pragmatics. We will see how game-theoretic models can be used to formalize aspects of influential theories of the use of socially meaningful expressions. We will also see how tools from formal lexical semantics can be used to formalize aspects of speaker/listener ideologies (beliefs, stereotypes etc.), and how ideological structure can be integrated into the models to analyze patterns of sociolinguistic perception/ interpretation.

Area Tags: Sociolinguistics, Variation, Pragmatics, Semantics, Cognitive Science, Linguistic Frameworks

Instructor: Heather Burnett