On the Integration of Cognitive and Social Pressures in Referring Expression Production: Evidence from the Language of Politics

Abstract: 

In this dissertation, I develop a unified model of referring expression production that integrates three pressures known to shape linguistic choice — referential informativity, social-indexical identity construction, and cognitive cost — within a socially-enriched extension of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. Across three studies, I hold referential informativity approximately constant in order to isolate the trade-off between social-indexical identity and cognitive cost, taking sociopolitical identity and ideology as my empirical domain. First, a corpus analysis of some 15,000 news articles discussing hot-button issues related to transgender individuals from Breitbart News, NPR, and PinkNews shows that the referring expressions trans woman, transgender woman, and biological male are deployed to ideological ends such that neither a purely referential nor a purely cost-based account can explain their distributions. A pair of experiments on gender-neutral role nouns (e.g. congressperson, firefighter) then moves the inquiry to the individual level while dialing down the social stakes, showing that production is jointly conditioned by political identity, gender ideology, and lexical frequency, while processing is sensitive only to the latter. Finally, a novel-word-learning study experimentally controls exposure to novel terms (e.g. crowdcloaking and herdblurring) produced by fictional left- or right-leaning social media users, showing that sociopolitical alignment modulates production above and beyond the effects of exposure while leaving lexical access untouched. Together, the three studies argue that referring expression production is best understood as a rational process which simultaneously balances cognitive and social work, that the relative weighting of these pressures is itself modulated by the social temperature of the choice space, and that the architecture for combining them is both empirically necessary and formally tractable.