Analyzing Social Meaning: How Words Matter in Social Contexts (Based on German Communicative Practice)

Abstract

The paper discusses the notion of social meaning that has become a central one in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, metapragmatics. The study was informed by these research directions and the main outcomes. The term social meaning pinpoints what linguistic forms convey about the social identity of the users, about their personality, social features and ideologically, value-based orientations. We presume that this is a category of meaning that a linguistic unit (an utterance) obtains as a result of its usage in a certain context. Social meanings are fixed by social practice. It acts as an index to the context in which the linguistic unit is expected to be used and relevant. Indexical relations are open for re-evaluations that are mediated by speakers ideological views. The study is based on German socio-cultural practice and reveals how indexical relations arise between a linguistic unit and the socio-cultural environment, the social occasion of its usage. The analysis is conducted as corpus-assisted discourse analysis, based on the «Digital dictionary of the German language» / «Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache»