Social Meaning in Language

ABSTRACT

Human speech is socially meaningful: Linguistic expressions and forms carry information about the social properties of the speaker and/or the discourse situation, independent of their at‐issue, truth‐conditional, compositionally determined contents. Further, speakers leverage these social meanings to perform conversational moves. In this article, we synthesize recent work that incorporates social meaning into the philosophy of language. We showcase similarities and differences among classes of socially meaningful speech and review some of the main theoretical challenges such speech raises. In particular, we contrast indexical, intentional, and neo‐inferentialist approaches to social meaning; ask whether and when socially meaningful speech should be treated as representing or as altering the world; and explore what semantic classifications and pragmatic functions to assign social meaning. We conclude by proposing some promising avenues for future research.