The Semantics of Hidden Meanings

About:

This workshop will take place as part of the fourteenth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation (TbILLC 2023). 

 

Linguistic meanings – whether semantically coded or pragmatically derived – are typically overt, in the sense that they are available to all competent speakers of the language. But this is not always the case.  The topic of this workshop is hidden meanings, by which we mean those meanings that are available to only some speakers, with certain linguistic or social backgrounds, or in some contexts of language use. From the perspective of semantics and pragmatics, the best studied examples of hidden meanings are dogwhistles, expressions such as inner city or law and order that convey one meaning to an outgroup, but a second (generally taboo or inflammatory) to a certain ingroup (Henderson & McCready 2018, 2019, Breitholtz & Cooper 2021). Dogwhistles do not however exhaust the class of hidden meanings (cf. Quaranto 2022), other examples including double entendres and in-jokes, cants and secret languages.


Also relevant to the topic are a range of arguably related phenomena for which the degree to which meanings are hidden may vary. For instance, the effects of slurs, and some social meanings associated with “ordinary” lexical items, have a hidden component, in that they depend on a sociocultural background not shared by all speakers. With the reclamation of slurs in particular, whether the expression is offensive may depend on the context and whether the interlocutors are members of the target group (Burnett 2020). Furthermore, with hints, suggestions and innuendos, as well as the figure of speech of understatement, there is a sense in which a given message is intended to be made clearly available, while allowing the speaker to (sometimes) plausibly deny that that is what they said (e.g., Mazzarella 2021). 

 

The goal of this workshop is to bring together current research on the broad range of hidden meanings. We invite contributions on all aspects of the semantics of hidden meanings, from formal semantic, pragmatic, game-theoretic and computational perspectives, including but not limited to:

 


Invited speaker:  

Elin McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University)

Talk: Veils within Veils

Accepted talks:


Sara Amido (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)  - Confrontation relies on cooperative norms: insights from conversation analysis

Lotte Hogeweg (Radboud University, Centre for Language Studies)  -- Slurs and the role of speaker characteristics – an experimental approach

Christine Howes, Vladislav Maraev & Ellen Brietholtz (University of Gothenburg)  -  Getting beyond a joke: Accommodation and mismatches in humour

Neri Marsili (UNED, Madrid) and Markus Kneer (University of Zurich)  -  Posting and Reposting: Investigating Plausible Deniability in Online Communication

Yasha Sapir (University of Southern California) -  Words, slurs, and background understandings

Lena Schwarz, (HHU Düsseldorf) - Uncooperative Interpreter’s Meaning