Home The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”

  • Michael Silverstein
Published/Copyright: November 13, 2021

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.


Corresponding author: Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

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.

References

Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 [1934/35]. Discourse in the novel. In Michael Holquist (ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays, translated by Caryl Emerson, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.Search in Google Scholar

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton & Co.10.1515/9783112316009Search in Google Scholar

de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.Search in Google Scholar

Dixon, Robert Malcom Ward. 1971. A method of semantic description. In Danny D. Steinberg & Leon A. Jakobovits (eds.), Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology, 436–471. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1515/9783110822939.63Search in Google Scholar

Gal, Susan. 2005. Language ideologies compared: Metaphors and circulations of public and private. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1). 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.23.Search in Google Scholar

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Goffman, Erving. 1976. Replies and responses. Language in Society 5(3). 257–313. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500007156.Search in Google Scholar

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of talk. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar

Harkness, Nicholas. 2013. Softer soju in South Korea. Anthropological Theory 13(1/2). 12–30.10.1177/1463499613483394Search in Google Scholar

Hastings, Adi & Paul Manning. 2004. Introduction: Acts of alterity. Language & Communication 24. 291–311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2004.07.001.Search in Google Scholar

Irvine, Judith T. & Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, 35–84. Oxford: Currey.Search in Google Scholar

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in language, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Jakobson, Roman. 1971 [1957]. Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb. In Selected writings, vol. 2: Word and Language, 130–147. The Hague: Mouton.10.1515/9783110873269.130Search in Google Scholar

Jespersen, Otto. 1923. Language: Its nature, development and origin. London & New York: Allen & Unwin.Search in Google Scholar

Parmentier, Richard J. 1985. Signs’ place in Medias Res: Peirce’s concept of semiotic mediation. In Elizabeth Mertz & Richard J. Parmentier (eds.), Semiotic mediation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives, 23–48. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.10.1016/B978-0-12-491280-9.50008-XSearch in Google Scholar

Peirce, Charles S. 1903. A syllabus of certain topics of logic. In Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss (eds.), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce 1/2, 180–202/219–225. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Peirce, Charles S. 1998 [1904]. New elements (Καινα στοιχεια) [Ms. 217]. In The Peirce Edition Project (eds.), The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings, vol. 2, 300–324. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Searle, John. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139173438Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Keith Basso & Ellen Selby (eds.), Meaning in anthropology, 11–56. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language structure and linguistic ideology. In Paul R. Clyne, William F. Hanks & Carol L. Hofbauer (eds.), The elements: A Parasession on linguistic units and levels, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 1985a. The culture of language in Chinookan narrative texts; or, on saying that … in Chinook. In Johanna Nichols & Anthony C. Woodbury (eds.), Grammar inside and outside the clause: Some approaches to theory from the field, 132–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 1985b. On the pragmatic ‘poetry’ of prose: Parallelism, repetition, and cohesive structure in the time course of dyadic conversation. In Deborah Schiffin (ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context, 181–199. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 1985c. Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology. In Elizabeth Mertz & Richard J. Parmentier (eds.), Semiotic mediation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives, 219–259. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.10.1016/B978-0-12-491280-9.50016-9Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 1993. Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In John A. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511621031.004Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 1998. The improvisational performance of culture in realtime discursive practice. In R. Keith Sawyer (ed.), Creativity in performance, 265–312. Greenwich, CT: Ablex.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 2000. Whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality. In Paul Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: ideologies, polities, and identities, 85–138. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 2001 [1977]. The limits of awareness. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 382–401. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3/4). 193–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0271-5309(03)00013-2.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 2004. ‘Cultural’ concepts and the language-culture nexus. Current Anthropology 45(5). 621–652. https://doi.org/10.1086/423971.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 2013. Discourse and the no-thing-ness of culture. Signs and Society 1(2). 327–366. https://doi.org/10.1086/673252.Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 2014a. Denotation and the pragmatics of language. In Nick J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman & Jack Sidnell (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic anthropology, 128–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139342872.007Search in Google Scholar

Silverstein, Michael. 2014b. The voice of Jacob: Entextualization, contextualization, and identity. ELH 81(2). 483–520. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2014.0022.Search in Google Scholar

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956 [1938]. Some verbal categories of Hopi. In John B. Carroll (ed.), Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, 112–124. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.10.2307/409181Search in Google Scholar

Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2021-11-13
Published in Print: 2021-11-25

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 28.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ijsl-2021-2124/html
Scroll to top button