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On 11 April, 2022 at 15:00 Paris time, Quentin Dénigot will defend his PhD entitled “Blowing the whistle: Formal Approaches to the Communication of Conflicting Identities in Discourse” in front of a jury composed of Nicholas Asher (CNRS - Université de Toulouse 3), Jonathan Ginzburg (Université de Paris), Elin McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University), Denis Paperno (Utrecht University), and Jennifer Saul (University of Waterloo). Below is the summary of his PhD work:
Formal linguistics has devised a number of sophisticated mathematical objects to try and describe linguistic phenomena with as much precision as possible for the last decades. There is however one area of linguistics that has historically evaded attempts at formalization: sociolinguistics. The few attempts at formalizing sociolinguistics results are fairly recent. Inspired by tools from formal pragmatics, they have expanded the concept of linguistic interpretation to the interpretation not only of message content, but of social meaning as well, leading to elaborate formal models that are at the basis of entire research programmes.
There has been however few attempts at linking the works from formal pragmatics and semantics—focusing mostly on the interpretation of content—and formal sociolinguistics—focusing on the interpretation of social meaning. Notably, there have been no attempts at giving a picture in formal terms of situations whereby the social meaning contained within an utterance can influence the content interpretation of that utterance by listeners.
In this work, we focus on situations where speakers send messages where the social meaning and content interpretations vary according to who receives them. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as dogwhistle politics, since it has been mostly studied in the context of political discourse. Using formal tools from pragmatics (Rational Speech Act models) and their adaptations in the realm of sociolinguistics (Social Meaning Games), we aim to construct a model that can accurately describes these situations, where the retrieval of the identity of the speaker can supposedly lead to a variety of interpretations, linking the notions of social meaning and content meaning in a single kind of linguistic game.
Beyond this endeavor, a key characteristic of dogwhistles is that they are supposedly hidden messages (to a point). This leads to a situation where it can be difficult to assess whether a given utterance does or does not contain a dogwhistle. Acknowledging this, we have tried to give a definition of dogwhistles that goes beyond their mere description and could be applied to the endeavor of finding them in text, using concepts from distributional semantics, vector space models of language and machine learning.
18/02/2022
Nous organisons une rencontre entre des chercheur·euse·s du Laboratoire Parole et Langage à Aix et le Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle à Paris le 17 mai prochain. Nous présenterons nos travaux en cours et discuterons de nos différents thèmes de recherche.
Quentin Dénigot, Julie Abbou et James German commenceront par parler de “Merging formal, experimental and social approaches”, suivi de Heather Burnett, Alexander Martin et Laurent Prévot sur “Formalizing social meaning using formal semantics”. Pour terminer, nous écouterons Yiming Liang, Maria Candea et Cristel Portes sur le thème de “Spontaneous speech”.
11/05/2021
Nous organisons une journée d’études virtuelle le 29 octobre prochain autour de la question du genre grammatical en français. Nous avons invité quelques chercheur·euse·s qui présenteront leurs travaux (achevés ou en cours) qui traitent la question d’un point de vue expérimental. Nous aurons notamment le plaisir d’accueillir Pascal Gygax (U. de Fribourg) ; Aixiu An & Anne Abeillé (U. de Paris) ; Hualin Xiao, Brent Strickland & Sharon Peperkamp (ENS Ulm) ainsi que Céline Pozniak (U. Paris 8).
Afin d’assurer la convivialité de cette rencontre, nous avons décidé de limiter les effectifs. Il n’y a donc pas de lien de participation public. Si cette journée d’études vous intéresse et que vous voudriez y participer en tant que spectateur·ice, veuillez contacter Heather Burnett directement.
20/10/2020