[Somean] Fwd: [socioling] A reading group of interest to socio folks

[Kathryn Campbell-Kibler]

This came through on the Stanford socio list, I thought we might be
interested as well. (In the book, not the group, obviously.)

-K


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tyler Schnoebelen <tylerschnoebelen at hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 11:53 AM
Subject: [socioling] A reading group of interest to socio folks
To: "S. Lauer" <sven.lauer at stanford.edu>, socioling at lists.stanford.edu


Sven sent out a note earlier this week about a reading group forming around
Parikh's "Language and Equilibrium" next quarter. It's a
semantics/pragmatics kind of book but I've read the first chapter and I
think there's going to be a fair amount of stuff that's interesting for
sociolinguistically-oriented people (especially people interested in style).
You can read my full notes here:
http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers/notes/semantics/Parikh_2010_notes_Schnoebele
n.pdf.

But I've also pulled out some quotes I hope you'll find tantalizing:

Agency!!!
- "It is astonishing that mainstream linguistics in the twenty-first century
has no theoretically grounded concept of agency" (Parikh 2010: 20).

Context!!!
- "Agents are always in situations of one sort of another, and not just our
utterances, but all our actions as well as their constituents--beliefs,
desires, and intentions--are situated" (Parikh 2010: 21).
- He's trying to deal with the idea that in one situation, smoke may mean
fire, in another, a cigarette smoker.
- "By and large, the addressee remains a ghost in mainstream semantics, at
most a passive recipient of the speaker's actions" (Parikh 2010: 27).

Probability!!
- "The principle insight here is that linguistic communication and
information flow can be probabilistic.all aspects of content may be
probabilistic and indeterminate, and an addressee may not infer just
propositions from an utterance, but also the probabilities with which they
are being conveyed" (Parikh 2010: 24-25).

And just for fun: Skepticism about generative accounts!
- Generative accounts start "with a stock of simple objects and combining
them according to formal rules to derive more complex objects" and does a
lot, but maybe tries to do too much. What's needed is equilibrium, which
"allows one to consider the interactions of objects at multiple levels,
something that generativity precludes" (Parikh 2010: 13).



Tyler Schnoebelen
Stanford University
Department of Linguistics
http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers
tylers at stanford.edu