Pragmatics and the third wave: The social meaning of definites
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2021
Department/School
English Language and Literature
Publication Title
Social Meaning and Linguistic Variation: Theorizing the Third Wave
Abstract
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.
Recommended Citation
Acton, E. K. (2021). Pragmatics and the third wave: The social meaning of definites. In L. Hall-Lew, E. Moore, & R. J. Podesva (Eds.), Social meaning and linguistic variation: Theorizing the third wave (pp. 105–126). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108578684.005
Comments
E. K. Acton is a faculty member in EMU's Department of English Language and Literature.