Blog CRC1646

The workshop „Social Meaning and Grammar“ was organized by Laura Reimer and Andreas Trotzke and took place on 10-11 February 2026 at the University of Zurich. It invited contributions from formal linguistics frameworks analysing social meaning components, sociolinguistic frameworks focusing on linguistic form, and experimental work on processing social meaning, including questions regarding acquisition, comprehension, and production. This interdisciplinary focus made the workshop an ideal venue for project B03 to present its ongoing research on indirectness in discourse.

The workshop brought together researchers working at the intersection of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. The programme featured keynote presentations and poster sessions exploring how grammatical structures encode social meaning. Topics ranged from formal analyses of politeness markers to experimental investigations of how speakers process socially loaded linguistic forms. The workshop provided a valuable opportunity to engage with cutting-edge research on the grammatical encoding of social information across different languages.

Julia Demina presented the research of B03 in a poster entitled „Indirect Requests as Grammaticized Social Updates: A Cross-linguistic Study“. The poster presented the theoretical framework and methodology of the project, which investigates how indirect requests function as performative social updates that are syntactically encoded in grammar. Drawing on Krifka's (2023, 2024) commitment-based syntax and Wiltschko's (2016, 2021) Interactional Spine Hypothesis, the research explores how interactional moves can result in social updates when they are conventionalized and socially binding.

The poster outlined the project's cross-linguistic methodology based on Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) in written form, following the CCSARP tradition (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). The study examines three typologically diverse languages: Russian, Chinese, and Turkish, with parallel examples demonstrating ability-based indirect requests in each language. The research design manipulates two social variables: relative power relations between speaker and hearer, and the level of imposition involved in the request. With data from 145 participants per language, the project tests whether interactional context triggers specific grammatical forms, thereby providing empirical evidence for the hypothesis that social meaning manifests as stable correspondences between interactional context and grammatical structure.

A key innovation presented was the project's three-layer annotation scheme: morphosyntactic annotation, pragmatic strategies, and modification patterns. The main principle of morphosyntactic annotation follows a TYPE-FORM-REALIZATION hierarchy, enabling systematic cross-linguistic comparison of how different languages grammatically encode indirect speech acts.

During the poster session, colleagues provided valuable feedback on the theoretical integration of commitment-based approaches with the Interactional Spine Hypothesis. Discussions with other researchers working on speech act syntax and social meaning yielded constructive suggestions for extending the analysis and potentially led to future collaborations. The cross-linguistic dimension of the project, comparing structurally and typologically diverse languages, was particularly appreciated by participants interested in the universality and language-specificity of social grammar.

Overall, participation in the „Social Meaning and Grammar“ workshop allowed project B03 to introduce the CRC 1646 to the social grammar research community, to foster relationships with researchers working on the syntax-pragmatics interface, and to deepen our understanding of how grammar encodes social meaning. The workshop's focus on innovative approaches to social grammar directly aligns with the CRC's core goals of investigating linguistic creativity in communication and the mechanisms by which speakers create and process indirect speech acts.

Zurich, photo: Julia Demina © SFB 1646

Julia Demina (B03), photo: Sascha Hermannski, © SFB 1646

Project B03, photo: Sascha Hermannski, © SFB 1646

back row from left to right: Raoul Schubert & René Nicolas

front row from left to right: Arndt Riester, Jutta Hartmann, Tanja Ackermann & Julia Demina