Abstract for Sally McConnel-Ginet's talk

Truth and language users' (sometimes conflicting) interests
Sally McConnel-Ginet (Cornell University)
May 10, 2007 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

Truth-conditional theories of natural language semantics can seem inadequate for illuminating the communicative significance of content words like friend, love, marriage, warm, beautiful. Content words often vary significantly across contexts in their contribution to truth conditions and to communicated inferences; they sometimes also serve as the focus for social negotiation or conflict. Although this variability and contestability is seen across many semantic domains, it is work on linguistic dimensions of sex, gender, and sexuality that has raised for me most compellingly fundamental questions about word meanings and linguistic competence. In this talk I will argue that word meanings are often sensitive to the interests at stake for language users deploying them in particular communicative exchanges, but that truth conditions remain critical for understanding linguistic meaning