[HPSG-L] Call: Social Meaning Berlin 2023

Mon Aug 7 12:44:55 UTC 2023

Dear all,

here is a call for papers that could be of interest to some of you.

Please, feel free to distribute it among your students and colleagues.

Best - Antonio

*Full Title: **Social Meaning Berlin 2023*

Date: 14-Nov-2023 - 15-Nov-2023 Location: Leibniz-Centre General 
Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany Contact Person: Stephanie Solt 
Meeting Email: socialmeaning2023 at leibniz-zas.de

*Call Deadline: 27-Aug-2023*

*Meeting Description:*

The Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) and the 
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin are pleased to announce the workshop 
Social Meaning 2023, which will take place in Berlin, Germany on 
November 14-15, 2023. The workshop is an event of Collaborative Research 
Center 1412 ‘Register’.

The social meaning of a linguistic form is the set of socially relevant 
properties, identities, ideologies, attitudes and stances that it 
communicates about the speaker, the hearer or the utterance situation 
itself. Social meaning has long been a prominent topic of study in 
sociolinguistics, which has as one of its central goals the exploration 
of how social structures are reflected, constructed, and transmitted 
through language use, and how interpretations and social meanings come 
about through ideological dispositions of language users. Foundational 
work in the third wave of variation research (Eckert 1989, 2008, 2012) 
laid the groundwork for the study of social meaning and individual 
stylistic variation. Within this tradition, indexical meanings 
associated with phonological variation have been studied especially 
intensively (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2007, Levon 2014, Podesva et al. 2015, 
Zhang 2005); but social meaning has been found to attach to variation at 
all linguistic levels, including syntax (Levon & Buchstaller 2015, Moore 
2021, Robinson 2022), semantics/pragmatics (Beltrama & Casasanto 2017), 
language choice (Blom & Gumperz 1972, Kheir 2023) as well as nonverbal 
communication (Hess 2023).

Recently, there has been an upsurge in interest in social meaning also 
among scholars working in other subdisciplines of linguistics beyond 
sociolinguistics and sociophonetics. Within semantics and pragmatics in 
particular, it has been increasingly recognized that social meaning is 
not entirely separate from the sorts of meaning traditionally studied in 
those disciplines, but rather overlaps with and interacts with such 
content (see e.g. Acton 2019 on the definite determiner; Beltrama 2018 
on intensification; Beltrama, Solt & Burnett 2022 on imprecision; Glass 
2015 on necessity modals; Liu, Schwab & Hess 2023 on emotive markers and 
facial expressions; McCready 2014 on honorification). Furthermore, 
social meanings can be analyzed using the same formal tools applied to 
other semantic/pragmatic phenomena, an example being the Social Meaning 
Games framework of Burnett (2017, 2019). From the point of view of 
morphosyntax, an open question is the role social meanings play in 
variation, given the abstract nature of syntactic and morphological 
features. A widely held view is that variation in such features is 
qualitatively different from lexical, phonetic and phonological 
variation in that it is less subject to social evaluation (Labov 2001, 
i.a.) and more easily explainable in terms of grammar-internal dynamics 
(Adger 2006). However, other work suggests that abstract morphosyntactic 
variables do carry social meanings in a way that is similar to other 
kinds of variation, with implications for the way morphosyntactic 
patterns are represented in grammar (Paolillo 2000, Bender 2007).

The objective of the present workshop is to bring together researchers 
from these very diverse disciplines to discuss our common interests 
around the topic of social meaning. What can we learn from one another? 
What questions do we have in common? And where do our interests, 
assumptions and goals diverge?

We are very pleased to announce the following invited speakers at the 
workshop:

- Eric Acton (Eastern Michigan University) - David Adger (Queen Mary 
University of London) - Ursula Hess (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) - 
Norma Mendoza-Denton (UCLA) - Emma Moore (University of Sheffield) - 
Melanie Weirich (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

*Organizers:* Stefanie Jannedy (ZAS), Mingya Liu (HU), Antonio Machicao 
y Priemer (HU), Stephanie Rotter (HU), Stephanie Solt (ZAS), Giuseppe 
Varaschin (HU)

*Call for Papers:*

We invite abstract submissions for talks and poster presentations on 
topics relating to social meaning from any theoretical perspective and 
methodological approach, including (but not limited to) formal, 
experimental, phonetic, sociolinguistic, psychological, morphosyntactic, 
semantic and/or pragmatic. Abstracts should be a maximum of one (1) A4 
page in length (12-point type, 1-inch margins), with examples, data, 
figures and/or references on a second page, and must be anonymous. 
Early-stage work and research in progress is welcome.

Abstracts are to be submitted to the workshop e-mail address: 
socialmeaning2023 at leibniz-zas.de.

*Key Dates:*

Abstract submissions due: August 27, 2023 Notification of acceptance: 
September 17, 2023 Workshop: November 14-15, 2023

-- 
Dr. Antonio Machicao y Priemer
Phone (office): +49/30/2093-9702
Homepage:https://hu.berlin/aMyP
Address (office): Dorotheenstr. 24 (Room: 3.305), D-10117 Berlin
Address (post): Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik) Unter den Linden 6, D-10099 Berlin