The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”
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Michael Silverstein
Abstract
Conventional indexicality is semiotically effective when regimented by its meta-indexical (or “metapragmatic”) interpretant, a conceptual scheme presumed upon by participants in communication that determines the categories of possibility for a relevant “here-and-now” of indexically signaled co-presence, just as, conversely, such an interpretant is an emergent consequence of the sign’s pointing to its object. In the more general case of non-denotational indexicality – forms indicating everything from perduring demographic characteristics of participants in interaction to their role incumbencies, voicings of identity, and momentary relational attitudes and affects (loosely termed “stances”) – the culture – and thus group-specific metapragmatics (or “ethno-metapragmatics”) is central to how indexicals entail the mutual (il)legibility of interlocutors and the (in)coherence of interactional projects in which they are engaged, the “interactional text” of what is happening. This inherent metapragmatic functionality of models of indexical signs and their contexts is, in general, itself influenced by genres of metapragmatic discourse about social life that “circulate” among networks of people who participate in certain sites of sociality. Such “circulation” is a virtual reality that comes into being via chains of interdiscursivity, allowing us to imagine an “ideological” plane with its own order of virtual semiotic dialectic that, notwithstanding, we experience in actual interactional context by its effects on the ever-changing what and how of indexicality.
Acknowledgments
This paper is based on a lecture given by Michael Silverstein at the University of Vienna, July 17, 2018 at the invitation of Jürgen Spitzmüller and Mi-Cha Flubacher, as part of the Summer School 2018 – Metapragmatics, Language Ideologies and Positioning Practices at the Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, July 16–20, 2018. Tragically, Michael Silverstein fell ill when the article went into production and died before it was published. The final editing has been done, with Silverstein’s consent, by Constantine V. Nakassis and Jürgen Spitzmüller. The paper has not been peer-reviewed.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Language ideologies and social positioning: the restoration of a “much needed bridge”
- The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”
- Figures of personhood: time, space, and affect as heuristics for metapragmatic analysis
- (Meta-)communicative work in a counselling centre for refugees: reiteration, erasure and agency
- Insurgent words: challenging the coloniality of language
- Indexical borders: the sociolinguistic scales of the shibboleth
- Book Review
- Tim McNamara: Language and Subjectivity
- Varia
- Access and reach of linguistic repertoires in periods of change: a theoretical approach to sociolinguistic inequalities
- Chinese teenagers’ perceptions of vitality of Hokkien Chinese in Penang, Malaysia
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Language ideologies and social positioning: the restoration of a “much needed bridge”
- The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”
- Figures of personhood: time, space, and affect as heuristics for metapragmatic analysis
- (Meta-)communicative work in a counselling centre for refugees: reiteration, erasure and agency
- Insurgent words: challenging the coloniality of language
- Indexical borders: the sociolinguistic scales of the shibboleth
- Book Review
- Tim McNamara: Language and Subjectivity
- Varia
- Access and reach of linguistic repertoires in periods of change: a theoretical approach to sociolinguistic inequalities
- Chinese teenagers’ perceptions of vitality of Hokkien Chinese in Penang, Malaysia