Social Meaning

In this review, I describe two research programs in the study of social meaning, both of which feature prominently in current-day sociolinguistics. The first one—social meaning as reasoning—seeks to understand the reasoning processes involved in the use and interpretation of sociolinguistic variants. The second one—social meaning as link between language and power — seeks to understand the ways in which language is related to power and the reproduction of social structure. I argue that these research programs are intimately linked: A proper understanding of the social relations at play in interactions is required for a satisfactory model of social meaning as a cognitive reasoning phenomenon, and, conversely, a proper understanding of how people use and understand language is crucial to understanding its role in the creation and reproduction of social inequalities. I sketch out a model that combines these two perspectives, inspired by work in game-theoretic pragmatics.