Especially in the first half of the twentieth century, language was viewed as a vehicle for the transmission of facts and ideas. Later on, scholars working in linguistic frameworks such as Functional and Cognitive Linguistics, (Historical) Sociolinguistics and Functional Sociolinguistics, have emphasized the social relevance of language, focusing, for example, on linguistic concepts such as deixis, modality, or honorific language, or embedding larger linguistic patterns in their social contexts, through notions such as register, sociolect, genre, etc. The main aim of this article is to systematize these observations, through an investigation of how the central, though ill-understood notion of “social meaning” can be captured. The starting point for the discussion is the work that has been done in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This framework distinguishes “social” (“interpersonal”) meaning from two other types of meaning, and offers a typology of different types of contexts with which these different meanings resonate. In order to achieve a more satisfactory account of social meaning, however, I argue that we need to connect SFL to a theory of how signs convey meaning. The discussion is relevant for Ancient Greek in its entirety, but focuses specifically on Post-classical Greek: as a case study, I discuss five private letters from the so-called Theophanes archive (IV AD).

特别是在二十世纪上半叶，语言被视为传播事实和思想的工具。后来，从事功能和认知语言学、（历史）社会语言学和功能社会语言学等语言学框架的学者强调了语言的社会相关性，例如关注指示语、情态或敬语等语言概念，或通过诸如语域、社会方言、体裁等概念，将更大的语言模式嵌入到他们的社会背景中。本文的主要目的是通过调查“社会意义”这一核心但未被充分理解的概念如何将这些观察系统化” 可以捕获。讨论的起点是在系统功能语言学框架下所做的工作（SFL）。该框架将“社会”（“人际”）意义与其他两种意义区分开来，并提供了这些不同意义产生共鸣的不同类型背景的类型学。然而，为了更令人满意地解释社会意义，我认为我们需要将SFL与符号如何传达意义的理论联系起来。讨论与整个古希腊语相关，但特别关注后古典希腊语：作为案例研究，我讨论了所谓的 Theophanes 档案 (IV AD) 中的五封私人 信件。