Integrating Approaches to Social Meaning

Social meaning in pragmatics has long been studied by considering general mechanisms of language use to formalize notions such as politeness. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the study of lexical elements whose semantics encode a component that directly bears on social meaning, for example slurs and honorifics. The question of which type of meaning these components belong to (e.g. conventional implicatures or presuppositions) and the way these components enter the compositional meaning of an utterance have also been studied.

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from different fields to open new directions of research in that domain. In particular, we hope to encourage contact between researchers working on social meaning from (formal) linguistic, computational, and philosophical perspectives.