The work in SMIC is divided into four phases.
The first phase developed a picture of social meaning and sociolinguistic variation in Paris, a large francophone city in Europe. We studied Parisian listeners' interpretations of a series of sociolinguistic variables: future temporal reference ("Je vais manger" vs "Je mangerai" "I will eat"), subject doubling ("Jean est là" vs "Jean il est là" "Jean is there") and liaison (ex. pronouncing (or not) the "P" in "trop important" "too important"). We also conducted corpus studies investigating Parisian speakers' use of future temporal reference and subject doubling, as well as grammatical gender and inclusive language (eg. "les étudiants" vs "les étudiant.e.s" "the (gender neutral) students"). We found, as a result of these empirical investigations, that the social meanings associated with these variables are highly dependent on the social context of the utterance. This context-sensitivity could not be modeled by previously developed game-theoretic models (such as Burnett 2017, 2019). Therefore, we worked to develop a new one. We developed the "Pragmatic Sociolinguistics" game-theoretic framework through formalizing the sociological framework of Boltanski & Thévenot (1991), applying it to language, and integrating it with Burnett's previous models. The development of this framework constitutes the first main result of the project.
The second phase of SMIC compared the results found in the first phase with the results of similar corpus and experimental studies on speakers in Montréal, a large francophone city in North America. We replicated our liaison matched guise study with speakers in Montréal. We found that the speakers from Québec did not assign the same interpretations as the ones from France. In this way, through our microcomparative methodology, we discovered fine-grained social meaning differences between France and Québec French.
The third phase of SMIC goes deeper into how the social and cultural context affects social meaning through quantitative corpus and experimental studies of feminist activists. We constructed a corpus, called CaFé "Cartographies linguistique des féminismes", which is composed of 102 fully transcribed and annotated sociolinguistic interviews with feminist and queer activists in Paris (42 interviews), Marseille (20 interviews) and Montréal (40 interviews). We did both quantitative and qualitative studies of socially conditioned linguistic variation in CaFé, looking at a wide range of variables including negation, grammatical gender, laughter, person-centered language (les blancs vs les personnes blanches ‘whites vs white people’), “prostitution” vs “sex work”, and “violence against women” vs violences sexistes et sexuelles ‘sexist and sexual violence’. The CaFé corpus has allowed us to get a much clearer picture of how francophone feminists use language (and its social meanings) to position themselves politically and construct their socio-political identities. This better understanding is another major result of the SMIC project.
The fourth phase of SMIC builds the link between identity construction and the strategic interaction. We developed a new experimental paradigm in which participants played a video game about moving to Paris. In this game, they had to talk with non-playable characters (NPCs), whose language varied according to social meanings associated with formality and social class. The participants then had to strategically choose which NPC they thought would be best to help them in their tasks. We found that participants’ strategic choices were significantly conditioned by the social meanings of NPCs’ language, in ways that were more subtle than what we observed using the standard methodology (called "matched guise"). Therefore, the final main result of the SMIC project is that studying social meaning using strategic interaction (in video games) has an advantage over existing methodologies.
The results from all four phases of SMIC were disseminated through around 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and over 30 talks at conferences and workshops in France and internationally.
