BURNETT TALKIN’ ‘BOUT STYLE TODAY AT 11:30

Heather Burnett (CNRS/Paris 7) will be talking in S-Circle TODAY at 11:30 in the CAVE (special date, time, and location!). An abbreviated abstract of her talk, “Signaling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style”, is below:

In this presentation, I introduce social meaning games (SMGs), which are developed for the analysis of the strategic aspect of sociolinguistic variation (in the sense of Labov 1963, Labov 1966, et seq.), such as the use of the English (ING) suffix. SMGs unify the Third Wave approach to the meaning of sociolinguistic variation (see Eckert 2000, 2008, 2012) with signalling games (Lewis 1969) and a Bayesian approach to speaker/listener reasoning (see Oaksford & Chater 2007 for a review). I define the games and then show the predictions of this framework for both linguistic production and interpretation, as exemplified by the modeling of six empirical studies.