Research

PhilPeople Profile 

Dissertation

My dissertation focuses on stylistic variation (or style shifting). As socially competent speakers, we use different words (e.g. rabbit/bunny), sounds (e.g. walking/walkin’), and syntactic structures (e.g. there aren’t any bagels/ain’t no bagels) as we move between social contexts. What are speakers doing when they shift styles, and why is this behavior rational? I argue that we should understand these choices in terms of speakers’ efforts to conform to (or deliberately violate) social norms. That is, we use linguistic forms we think are appropriate (or manifestly inappropriate) for members of our community to use in our present social context:

Stylistic variation is a mechanism for interlocutors to coordinate on shared expectations for social interaction. 

My view thus treats stylistic variation as embedded within a larger system of rational, cooperative, norm-governed conversational behavior, rather than as an independent mechanism for social expression. This approach shows how sociolinguistic phenomena can be integrated into philosophy of language while preserving standard assumptions and explanatory frameworks. My approach also has implications for other socially-meaningful forms of speech, including slang, honorifics, slurs, and dogwhistles.

Works in Progress

Social meaning and linguistic convention. Some expressions, like slang, jargon, and sociolinguistic variants, carry social meaning and play socially-important functions in discourse. By analogy with honorifics, one might think these expressions conventionally encode secondary, use-conditional contents. I agree with others that this hypothesis is false. However, other scholars have misapplied key linguistic diagnostic tests in arguing for this conclusion. I show that these diagnostics are inconclusive, and provide independent reasons to reject the hypothesis.

The problem of dialect continua for the ontology of languages. Dialectologists observe cases in which linguistic differences increase cumulatively as one travels from village to village in a particular direction. While adjacent villages can communicate, distant villages cannot; but there is no non-arbitrary location to place a border between languages. This poses problems for individuating and counting languages. I propose a pluralist solution, inspired by the work of David Lewis, according to which the linguistic repertoire of a single 'monolingual' speaker may be a part of very many overlapping linguistic conventions.

Other Projects

• A paper defending Lewisian Conventionalism against the objection that it cannot explain socially-motivated changes to linguistic conventions

• A paper arguing against recently proposed Semantic Expressivist theories of metalinguistic negotiation

• A paper on the semantics, pragmatics, and dynamics of counterfactual conditionals in discourse context

• A paper on the extended mind hypothesis

• A paper on the relation between linguistic and mental representational content, in which I reject the view that language essentially functions to express the mental states of speakers

• A paper discussing whether we can learn about metaphysical reality by investigating into the nature of certain 'transparent' concepts (such as concepts of moral goodness or consciousness). What must reality be like in order for us to be able to learn about it in this way?