Social meaning in semantics and pragmatics

The term social meaning identifies the constellation of traits that linguistic forms convey about the social identity of their users—for example, their demographics, personality and ideological orientation. A central topic of research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, this category of meaning has traditionally escaped the scope of semantics and pragmatics; only in recent years have scholars begun to combine formal, experimental and computational methods to incorporate the investigation of this type of content into the study of meaning in linguistics. This article reviews recent work within this area, focusing on two domain of investigation: endeavors aimed at investigating how semantic and social meanings mutually inform one another; and endeavors directed at capturing both the communication and inference of social meanings with the tools of formal semantics and pragmatics.