LinguisticsNOW Colloquium – Jessica Rett (UCLA)

LinguisticsNOW is a joint colloquia series hosted by the Department of Linguistics at UBC and Simon Fraser University that aims to bring the most exciting new work in linguistics to the Northwest. The speaker for this year’s edition of LinguisticsNOW is Jessica Rett (University of California, Los Angeles).

The event will be held in-person at the Harbour Centre in Downtown Vancouver, in room 7000 Earl & Jennie Lohn Policy Room.

Title: The meaning of ‘cancer’: hijacked terms and lexical metasemantics

Abstract

What does the word ‘cancer’ mean? The goal of this talk is two-fold: first, I present a series of experiments showing a significant difference between what non-experts think ‘cancer’ means, and what their doctors think it means — and even of significant differences between types of specialists. Second, I provide evidence that these subtle lexical semantic differences are part of what we know when we use language to communicate, and therefore should be part of what semanticists model when they model how meaning works in language. I suggest how we might be able to repurpose formal tools from the study of other demographically sensitive words (like dogwhistles) to model this metasemantic knowledge compositionally.