Research

PhilPeople Profile 

Dissertation: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Stylistic Variation

My dissertation focuses on stylistic variation (or style shifting). As socially competent speakers, we use different words (e.g. rabbit/bunny), sounds (e.g. walking/walkin’), and syntactic structures (e.g. there aren’t any bagels/ain’t no bagels) as we move between social contexts. What information do stylistic choices carry, what are speakers doing when they shift styles, and why is this behavior rational? 

I argue that different social groups and social contexts are governed by different social norms (e.g. we expect different behavior at a casual barbecue and a job interview). We should understand speaker’s stylistic choices in terms of their efforts to conform to (or manifestly violate) group-specific and situation-specific expectations for appropriate social and linguistic behavior. Stylistic variation is a mechanism for interlocutors to negotiate over shared expectations for social interaction. My view treats stylistic variation as embedded within a larger system of rational, cooperative conversational behavior, rather than as an independent mechanism for social expression. My approach shows how sociolinguistic phenomena can be integrated into philosophy of language while preserving standard assumptions and explanatory frameworks.

Works in Progress

Speakin' With Style: The Pragmatics of Style Shifting. Our stylistic choices (e.g. working vs. workin') do not influence assertoric content, but they carry social significance. What are speakers doing when they shift styles, and why are these behaviors rational? I focus on two style shifting phenomena: fixed-audience style shifting, where a speaker shifts styles between social contexts while the audience remains constant, and dynamic style shifting, where a speaker shifts styles within a single conversation. I explain how speakers’ stylistic choices are a rational, cooperative conversational behavior, governed by Grice’s Maxim of Manner: speakers typically make efforts to select styles that are appropriate for their interaction. By using the speech styles that are expected for their present social context, speakers lay claim to their typical interactive roles. By shifting to styles that are manifestly unexpected, speakers signal that they are rejecting these typical roles and engaging with the discourse in atypical ways. 

In-Group Communication. Conventionalism is the widely-accepted view that semantic meaning is determined by conventions among a linguistic community. However, there's a new wave of anti-Conventionalism on the rise, inspired by philosophical engagement with empirical research in sociolinguistics. Conventionalism is threatened by cases of what I call ‘legitimate communal linguistic variation’: cases in which different speakers in a linguistic community fail to share knowledge of a common convention, yet neither can be legitimately accused of speaking incorrectly. We can reconcile Conventionalism with legitimate communal linguistic variation by providing principled, social criteria for belonging to a linguistic community and sharing a language. I argue that linguistic communities are 'robust social groups': densely-interacting social groups whose members share a common purpose and a system of social norms.

Social meaning and Semantic Meaning. Some expressions, like slang, jargon, and sociolinguistic variants, carry social meaning and play socially-important functions in discourse. By analogy with honorifics, one might think these expressions conventionally encode use-conditional contents as part of lexical meaning. I agree with others that this hypothesis is false. However, other scholars have misapplied key linguistic diagnostic tests in arguing for this conclusion. I show that these diagnostics are inconclusive, and provide new reasons to reject the semantic hypothesis.