Totally tall sounds totally younger. From meaning composition to social perception.

Abstract

Research on meaning typically separates semantic meaning − the linguistic content conventionally associated with an expression − from social meaning − the social qualities and attributes that expressions convey about their users. This divide, however, has recently been questioned by work pointing to a principled connection between these domains ([1], [9]). Using the intensifier totally as a test case, I extend this program by showing that, in contexts where only a speaker-oriented reading is possible, the social meaning of the intensifier − measured in terms of Age, Gender, Solidarity and Status perception − is more prominent than in those where a lexically compositional interpretation is licensed. I explain this difference in terms of the interactional pragmatic effects that speaker-oriented totally indexes, which are conversely missing for the lexical reading. These results reveal a principled connection between the two dimensions of meaning, meanwhile pointing to social perception as a novel methodology for research in experimental semantics.