Burnett Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2019

Formal Models of Social Meaning and Identity Construction through Language

One of the most powerful ideas of the past quarter century is that our personal and social identities and their various components (gender, age, class etc.) are not natural properties, but are socially constructed through the combination of our actions and others' interpretations of them. Research in sociolinguistics has shown that language is critical to this process, and our interlocutors take into account not only what we say but also how we say it. For example, studies have shown that speakers using colloquial expressions (like pronouncing the word 'drinking' as drinkin') are perceived to be friendlier than speakers saying the same thing using more formal expressions (i.e. saying…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.