Professor Kate Ritchie (UC Irvine) will be presenting work co-authored with Dr Jessica Keiser (Leeds) titled “Social Structures in Context”. The talk will take place online; to receive details of how to join, please email arche-fem-soc [at] st-andrews.ac.uk.

Social Structures in Context 

Language is situated. That is, the social location of language users both shapes and sets limits on speech. This relation also holds in the reverse direction: speech both shapes and sets limits on one’s social location. It is striking, then, that formal pragmatic theory tends to abstract away from the social locations of language users. In this paper we claim not only that social location should be incorporated into any viable pragmatic theory, but that it should play a particular theoretical role: as part of the context. Second, we argue that the standard Common Ground framework is not up to this task; a pragmatic theory needs to be at once more individualistic and more external in order to represent and explain linguistic phenomena related to social location. We then develop a proposal for a novel pragmatic framework that meets these conditions.