Social meaning as Hearer's Meaning: Integrating social meaning into a general theory of meaning in communication

Abstract

This paper addresses P. Eckert's call to incorporate social meaning into a more general theory of meaning. The notion of social meaning can be defined in both a narrow and a somewhat broader sense, the latter of which forms the basis for the paper. I review recent research showing how social meaning may impact on pragmatically central aspects of utterance interpretation, including lexical access, ambiguity resolution, reference assignment, presupposition projection, implicature derivation, and truth value assessment, as well as the hearer's expectations regarding future interaction with the speaker. Conversely, pragmatic features of linguistic expressions may facilitate the use of those same expressions to convey social meanings. I argue that, being fundamentally speaker-centered and reliant on intention-recognition, mainstream theories of meaning in communication are poorly equipped to integrate social meaning, due to the latter's often unintentional, indexical and/or multimodal nature. I suggest instead that Hansen & Terkourafi's recent model of Hearer's Meaning is intrinsically well-suited to the task, and I present that model in more detail, focusing however on those aspects of it that are of most direct relevance to integrating social meaning, viz. its conceptual anchoring in Peircean semiotics, and its explicit incorporation of hearers' assumptions about the identities of speakers, as well as about their social relationship with the speaker.