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Bringing Semantics to Sociophonetics: Social Variables and Secondary Entailments

One of the questions being addressed in the ‘social information in the lexicon’ sub-theme of LabPhon 2008 is whether phonetic information in the lexicon is accompanied by social information. The lexicon is generally thought of as the nexus for stored information about the form and meaning of linguistic elements. Traditionally, studies examining social information and the lexicon have focused on whether individuals can infer social-group membership from distinctive patterns of phonetic variation, and whether social expectations affect phonetic labeling. The results of numerous studies show that both are indeed the case (Purnell et al., 1999; Hay et al., 2006; inter alia). However, we argue that a different line of research is needed to fully address whether social information is represented in the lexicon in a manner analogous to how “regular” linguistic meaning is represented. Specifically, we argue that if social information is in fact a type of linguistic meaning, it should be treated in the same way as other kinds of meaning. In this paper, we describe two primary distinctions that formal semanticists use to categorize meaning (first, conventionality, and second, whether it responds to the question under discussion) and illustrate how at least one social variable that is instantiated in the phonology can be described in this framework as one of these traditional semantic categories. The social variable we use to illustrate our approach is the low-back/central production of /ae/ as [ae] in Minnesota that is associated with judgments of gay-soundingness in speech (Munson et al., 2006), and we compare this variable to a secondary entailment (such as a Conventional Implicature, cf. Potts, 2005). Here, we describe the semantic tools used to determine secondary entailments and show how they can be extended to social variables. The first division that semanticists generally make is between conventional and conversational types of meaning. Conventional types of meaning are robust to different conversational contexts, and must be part of the stored grammatical knowledge of language users. For example, compare know with discover. Both are said to carry “factive presuppositions,” meaning that the truth of their sentential complement is required (as in (1) and (2)). However, the factive presupposition of know is conventional, while discover’s is conversational (Abusch, 2002). We verify this difference by showing that in a certain context (such as the antecedent of a conditional in (3) and (4)), discover's presupposition does not go through, while know's does.