Abstract
The paper analyzes the concept of social meaning, which has been conceptualized in lexical semantics since the 1980s and has become central in modern sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. It has been used to describe pragmatic increments in the meaning of a language unit, which it receives in context. New explanatory approaches have developed from a sociolinguistic perspective in metapragmatics, where social meaning is seen as a social index that emerges in context. Social index (the index meaning of a sign) refers to typified social situations and social roles of participants of a communicative act. Social meaning is actualized when it can be interpreted in social interaction as being used to express certain connotations. This analytical review presents a contemporary conceptual apparatus and toolkit that enables linguists to describe the social perspective in constructing meaning and interpreting meaning formation in social contexts. The empirical material for the analysis reflects the contemporary sociocultural and discourse practices using the example of linguistic variability in Russian. The analysis of the Russian nouns “paradnaya” and “pod’ezd” shows how a language sign acquires a stable indexical character and is used to express social attribution.
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