Not Just Semantics: Word Meaning Negotiation in Social Media and Spoken Interaction

Word meaning negotiations concern what a word means, or should mean. They occur, for example, in everyday spoken conversation and social media interaction. Negotiations often start with a discussion participant remarking on a word choice by another participant.

They then discuss the meaning of the word more or less explicitly, for example by giving examples and definitions and by contrasting the word to other words.Word meaning negotiations are fundamental for enabling us to use our words with more or less the same meaning.

It is also closely connected to rhetoric and argumentation, where different meanings are often associated with different views on a controversial topic.

Yet, to date there is very little empirically founded research on how word meanings are negotiated in naturally-occurring interaction.The overall aim of this project is to investigate how meanings of words are interactively negotiated in social media and in spoken interaction.

We will do this by collecting a corpus of word meaning negotiations and analysing them quantitatively and qualitatively.

We will also develop tools for automatically detecting and analysing such negotiations.Learning more about word meaning negotiations will allow us to better understand how words come to have the meanings they have, and the role that meanings of specific words play in argumentation.

We will learn more about why people talk (and even fight) about meanings, and why talk about meaning is not "just semantics".