Linguistic Affordances Framework: A Linguistic-Sociological Approach for the Social Study of Language Technology

Abstract

This paper describes a three-part framework to study how language technologies elucidate and shape linguistic relations in society. Reframing a mountain of evidence about language bias in LLMs, we introduce the concept of linguistic affordances to attend to how an object can shape social relations through language. First, we contextualize how language ideologies inform social relations in a particular setting. Next, we examine how language ideologies shape the construction of the linguistic affordances of a language technology. Finally, we examine how the linguistic affordances of language technologies lead to new associations that link language and social worth. We describe how this framework can inform both the study of language technologies and the use of language technologies in social science. We demonstrate the framework with two examples: the use of LLMs in college admissions and the adoption of LLMs in scientific publishing.