Periodic Reporting for period 4 - SMIC (Formal Models of Social Meaning and Identity Construction through Language)
Reporting period: 2024-08-01 to 2025-07-31
The main objective of the SMIC project is to construct an empirically well-founded, mathematically explicit, and computationally implemented theory of social meaning and the role that socially meaningful linguistic expressions play in the construction of personal identities. The term "social meaning" refers to the information about the properties of the speaker that are communicated to the listener through the speaker's use of a particular pronunciation, word or syntactic structure drawn from a set of linguistic alternatives (called "sociolinguistic variables" in the literature). In other words, "social meaning" corresponds to the subtle informational differences that exist between, for example, pronouncing an English word like working as `work[ın]' (-in’) versus `work[ıŋ]' (-ing), using or omitting the negative particle "ne" in a French sentence like "Je ne l’aime pas" vs "Je l’aime pas" ‘I don’t like it’, or using the French pronoun "tu" vs "vous" when addressing a colleague.
Identity and social meaning play a key role in our understanding of linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena studied in many academic domains, and are widely employed outside academia, for example in education, management and even social justice. Given how important these notions are, it is crucial that our understanding of them them be as detailed, as explicit and as well-founded as possible. The SMIC project proposes that formalization can be a powerful tool for carefully distinguishing different aspects of theoretical proposals in this area and for identifying empirical predictions made by competing analyses.
SMIC proposes that "game-theoretic pragmatics" provides a promising framework for formalizing current sociolinguistic theories and integrating them into cognitive science. In our project, we combined novel empirical studies of social meaning, sociolinguistic variation and identity construction through language with formal game-theoretic modeling of the data observed in these studies. Through this work, we discovered new empirical facts about the French language and novel methodologies for studying social meaning. We used these empirical and methodological discoveries to develop new game-theoretic models that provide a much better understanding of how speakers use socially meaningful linguistic expressions to communicate information about themselves and, in doing so, establish and reinforce their place in their communities.
Identity and social meaning play a key role in our understanding of linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena studied in many academic domains, and are widely employed outside academia, for example in education, management and even social justice. Given how important these notions are, it is crucial that our understanding of them them be as detailed, as explicit and as well-founded as possible. The SMIC project proposes that formalization can be a powerful tool for carefully distinguishing different aspects of theoretical proposals in this area and for identifying empirical predictions made by competing analyses.
SMIC proposes that "game-theoretic pragmatics" provides a promising framework for formalizing current sociolinguistic theories and integrating them into cognitive science. In our project, we combined novel empirical studies of social meaning, sociolinguistic variation and identity construction through language with formal game-theoretic modeling of the data observed in these studies. Through this work, we discovered new empirical facts about the French language and novel methodologies for studying social meaning. We used these empirical and methodological discoveries to develop new game-theoretic models that provide a much better understanding of how speakers use socially meaningful linguistic expressions to communicate information about themselves and, in doing so, establish and reinforce their place in their communities.
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.
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.
The SMIC project progressed beyond the state of the art in a number of ways:
1. We have observed new ways in which social meaning is sensitive to the social context experimentally, and we have developed a new game-theoretic framework (Pragmatic Sociolinguistics) that can capture these results.
2. We have developed a new method for inferring ideological structure from both experimental and corpus data. We used this method to obtain a better understanding francophone feminists' political identity construction through language.
3. We developed a new method (video game) for studying how social meaning affects strategic interaction. We used this method to obtain results on social meaning related to formality and class in Paris that were more detailed than what we obtained using the state of the art methods.
1. We have observed new ways in which social meaning is sensitive to the social context experimentally, and we have developed a new game-theoretic framework (Pragmatic Sociolinguistics) that can capture these results.
2. We have developed a new method for inferring ideological structure from both experimental and corpus data. We used this method to obtain a better understanding francophone feminists' political identity construction through language.
3. We developed a new method (video game) for studying how social meaning affects strategic interaction. We used this method to obtain results on social meaning related to formality and class in Paris that were more detailed than what we obtained using the state of the art methods.