Speaker: Rebecca Lee, Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder
Bio: Rebecca Lee is a doctoral student in Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is also completing certificates in Cognitive Science and Culture, Language, and Social Practice. She received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley in 2013, and her MA in Linguistics from CU Boulder in 2020. Her work combines perspectives from cognitive semantics, construction grammar, and sociocultural linguistics. Specifically, she studies the mental representation of lexical and constructional polysemy, and social variation in the use of polysemous words in different communities of practice. Relatedly, she also examines how the syntax-semantics interface can be leveraged to study social and political ideologies, and is interested in interrogating the relationship between semantic and social meaning. Rebecca has presented her research at a variety of conferences, such as those organized by the American Anthropological Association, the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association, and The Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor, and her work will soon be published in the Proceedings of the Fifty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Rebecca also has a passion for teaching, and has recently developed a Figurative Language course at CU Boulder.
Abstract: In this talk, I integrate cognitive sociolinguistic corpus approaches to semantic variation (Glynn 2014) with cognitive discourse analytic and linguistic anthropological approaches to ideology (Hart 2014, Hill 2008), uncovering differences in construal of the word racist by two ideologically opposed groups of tweeters. This work differs from traditional studies of polysemy, in that different uses of racist are not necessarily conceptually autonomous senses in one person’s mind, but presuppose oppositional perspectives on race and society between different groups of people. In two corpus studies, I examine tweets from two groups of tweeters, those who self-identify with “blacklivesmatter” vs those who identify with “MAGA,” investigating the distributional patterns associated with different uses of racist by these groups. Building on insights from linguistic anthropology about competing conceptualizations of racism in US society, specifically the “folk theory” of white racism vs critical perspectives on racism (Hill 2008, Hodges 2016), I uncover areas where these conceptualizations are apparent in variation at the syntax-semantics interface. BLM and MAGA tweeters often modify different kinds of entities with the word racist and use different grammatical constructions with the word whose semantic frames presuppose ideologically conflicting beliefs about racism. This emphasis on ideological distinction expands upon traditional notions of polysemy, by demonstrating that some variation in meaning is perspectival and intersubjective, evident in contested usage.