NeWMe
We are a research group investigating how people negotiate word meanings in interaction — both in spoken conversations and in online interaction, such as social media discussions. Our research is grounded in a dialogical perspective on language and communication, emphasizing that meaning is dynamically shaped through interaction, where participants collaboratively construct and challenge meanings in context.
What is Word Meaning Negotiation?
Word meaning negotiation (WMN) occurs when participants in a conversation temporarily shift focus from the ongoing topic to discuss the meaning of a word. This can happen in casual conversations, online debates, or formal discussions such as media interviews or political debates.
A negotiation often begins with a meta-linguistic clarification request (“What do you mean by X?”) or a meta-linguistic objection to a word choice or its implied meaning (“That is not (the meaning of) X!”). Participants then engage in negotiation using strategies such as defining the word, giving examples, contrasting it with alternatives, or appealing to external sources (e.g., dictionaries). By studying these interactions, we aim to understand how meaning is established in conversation, how shared understandings emerge, and why negotiating meaning is a fundamental part of interaction.
Our Research Objectives
Our project, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), seeks to map and analyze the mechanisms behind word meaning negotiation. We are developing an extensive corpus of WMN sequences. This currently includes spoken dialogue data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and online interactional data from Reddit, and will continue to expand with Swedish interactional data from the discussion forums Familjeliv and Flashback. Our research focuses on:
- How WMNs are initiated - what triggers them, and in what types of conversations they arise.
- The conversational strategies people use - definitions, examples, contrasts, etc.
- What type of meaning the negotiations focus on. We distinguish between meaning potential (a word's range of possible aspects of meaning based on its semantic properties) and situated meaning (how a word is used in a specific interaction).
- How word meanings shift over time and whether we can trace these changes systematically.
- Developing methods for the automatic identification and analysis of WMN in interactional data, combining corpus linguistics and AI-based techniques.
Interdisciplinary and Societal Impact
Our work combines linguistics, computational methods, and interaction analysis, making it relevant to fields such as communication studies, artificial intelligence, and language technology. By examining authentic interactions, we identify the mechanisms and strategies people use to negotiate word meanings, uncovering patterns in how meaning is co-constructed and adapted across different contexts.
One of our outreach initiatives is the blog Inte bara semantik, where we explore examples of word meaning negotiation in current events, making our research accessible to a broader audience.
Project Team and Collaborators
Staffan Larsson - Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg (Project leader)
Jenny Myrendal - Department of Education, Communication, and Learning, University of Gothenburg (Project member)
Bill Noble - Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg
Kaj Ailomaa - Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg
Aina Garí Soler - Inria, Paris
Chloé Clavel - Inria Paris
Matthieu Labeau - Télécom Paris