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cnsadwLANGUAGE IN CULTURE
Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language
Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient the
identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael
Silverstein (–) was at the forefront of the study of language
in culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innova-
tions in a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people
say but how we say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in
interaction. At the same time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds
discrete events, stabilizing and transforming societies, politics, and
markets through chains of activity. Presenting his magisterial theo-
retical vision in engaging prose, Silverstein unpacks technical terms
through myriad examples – from brilliant readings of Marcel
Marceau’s pantomime, the class-laced banter of graduate students,
and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian gossip and US
courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and anthropol-
ogy while offering his distinctive semiotic approach, redefining how
we think about language and culture.
(–) was the Charles F. Grey
Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and
Psychology at the University of Chicago. His groundbreaking semi-
otic programme was shared with hundreds of students through his
Language in Culture course, which he taught for almost fifty years
and is distilled in this book. Silverstein was awarded a MacArthur
fellowship in and the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service
to Anthropology in . Dedicated to growing the field of
linguistic anthropology, he was a president of the Society of Linguistic
Anthropology, and the founding Director of the Center for the Study of
Communication and Society.
“Brilliant, comprehensive, and always thought-provoking, Language in Culture is a
truly singular contribution. Silverstein has brought his subtle and elegantly laid-
out theoretical approach together with the acute and generative exploration of
detailed exemplary cases – and always in his own distinctive and engaging voice.
This is bound to be an immediate classic of lasting resonance.”
Don Brenneis, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus,
University of California, Santa Cruz
“This treasure of a book lays out the total linguistic fact, with all of Silverstein’s
classic brilliance, erudition, and mischievousness.”
Penelope Eckert, Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita, Stanford University
“It’s difficult to find words to characterize adequately Michael Silverstein’s genius,
or the significance of his work. He is a singular figure. It’s tempting to think of
him as a kind of Saussure for our century, except that, as this elegantly constructed
volume reveals, Silverstein disassembles Saussure’s framework and uses the com-
ponent parts – along with myriad elements from elsewhere (Peirce, Whorf, Sapir,
Jakobson, Bakhtin, and many others) – to build a wondrous new construction
that allows a breathtakingly rich view of how language works and of what happens
when we use it.”
Michael Lucey, Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of Comparative
Literature and French, University of California, Berkeley
“With his signature searing clarity and punning wit, Michael Silverstein at long
last lays out in print what decades of students have heard – the detailed, layered,
and at once remarkably robust and subtle semiotic mechanisms through which we
co-construct our worlds, or wreck them, hold them in a precarious order or teeter
off course.”
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology &
Gender Studies, Columbia University
LANGUAGE IN CULTURE
Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN
University of Chicago
E. SUMMERSON CARR
University of Chicago
SUSAN GAL
University of Chicago
CONSTANTINE V. NAKASSIS
University of Chicago
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© Michael Silverstein
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of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
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– editor. | Nakassis, Constantine V., – editor.
: Language in culture : lectures on the social semiotics of language / Michael Silverstein ;
completed with the editorial assistance of E. Summerson Carr, University of Chicago, Susan Gal,
University of Chicago, Constantine V. Nakassis, University of Chicago.
: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
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remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Figures page vi
Foreword, by Mara Tapp xi
Preface xv
Introduction: Getting – and Getting Across – the Message
Lecture : Text
Lecture : Event
Lecture : Context
Lecture : Enregisterment
Lecture : Variation
Lecture : Categoriality
Lecture : Relativity
Lecture : Knowledge
Editorial Acknowledgments, by E. Summerson Carr, Susan Gal,
and Constantine V. Nakassis
References
Index
v
Figures
. The mime Marcel Marceau “virtually” leaning and drinking,
aiming a gun, feeling a wall, and playing a violin page
. Practical poetry of turn-taking
. Taking out the trash
. Dimensions of a communicative event
. Schema of deictic topology of spatial regions
. Structure of tense in two-term systems (past/non-past,
future/non-future)
. Response to danger-of-death question, Schiffrin interview
. Re-transcribed Schiffrin interview, lines –
. Re-transcribed Schiffrin interview, lines –
. Re-transcribed Schiffrin interview, lines –
. Some examples of adjacency pairs
. Schema of the explicit primary performative
. Types of performatives
. Delocutionary metapragmatics
. Some examples of explicit primary performatives in
ritualized interaction
. Dynamic figuration in ritual
. Typical Wolof greeting exchange
. Form and dynamic figuration of Wolof greeting ritual
. The dynamic figuration of the Catholic Eucharist
. The textual structure of full-blown cultural ritual and everyday
discourse in social context compared
. Types of syntactic formula in American English that count
as “mands”
. Ervin-Tripp’s chart, “Summary of directive types”
. Pragmatic (or indexical) paradigms
. Contextual dimensions of forms of address
vi
List of Figures vii
. Duncan and Fiske interlocking conversation design (U of
Chicago, )
. Transcript of Mr. A and Ms. C, Phase I
. Differentially stressed elements of information-seeking WH-
questions
. Schemata of Ms. C’s articulated knowledge of the School of
Social Service Administration (SSA) curriculum
. Mr. A and Ms. C, Phase I continued
. Mr. A and Ms. C, Phase I continued, Phase II
. Transposed deixis denoted by the phrase out here
. New Rochelle in the New York City conurbation
. Geographical identity emblems of Mr. A and Ms. C
. Metricalization of Mr. A–Ms. C “GTKY” Phase I
. Metricalization of Mr. A–Ms. C “GTKY” Phase II
. Metricalization of Mr. A–Ms. C “GTKY” Phase III
. Mr. A and Ms. C, Phase II continued, Phase III
. Comparison of Mr. A’s and Ms. C’s emergent identities
and attitudes
. Timeline of events in the William Kennedy Smith trial,
. Transcript of Mr. Roy Black “nailing down an answer” from
Ms. Anne Mercer
. Simplest approximation of enregisterment, schematically
. The two-dimensional semantic (a) in equilibrium and
(b) under tension
. Speech-event-focused view of noun phrase categories
. Registers (so-called speech levels) in Javanese etiquette system:
urban, peasant, and prijaji
. Register alternatives (speech styles) for a sentence in Javanese
. Aspects of panchayat and talanoa as positive and negative
ritual forms
. Partial transcript of a talanoa session in Bhatgaon, part
. Partial transcript of a talanoa session in Bhatgaon, part
. Event-contextual semiotic of indexicality
. Representation of how culture of standard construes variation
. Advertising for the musical My Fair Lady and its movie
adaptation
. Amex advertising brochure from –, Reagan era
. Arnie Levin cartoon (New Yorker, ) contrasting two
pronunciations of the everyday round, red vegetable
viii List of Figures
. Distribution of postvocalic <r> in New York City, Lower
East Side by socioeconomic class (SEC) of speaker and
contextual style
. Registers in New York City, Lower East Side
.a Structures of New York City vowel systems by style and class
.b Structures of New York City vowel systems by style and class
. Ideologically driven change in the anaphoric/
cataphoric paradigm
. Inoculation of status term differentiated by sex of denotatum
. Contrastive features of two local political genres in
Gapun village
. Gapun woman (Sake) delivering a kros to a neighboring
woman (Erapo)
. Men in Gapun expressing anger
. Men in Gapun reflecting on how (not) to express anger
. Before and after for clothing makeovers (stills from Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy)
. Starbucks corporate instructions for how to order
Starbucks coffee
. Barista rant about incompetent/resistant customer order
. Phases of the aesthetic encounter with wine
. Diagram of poetic orderliness of a wine note
. Examples of tasting notes from Wine Advocate and
Stephen Tanzer
. Genre structure of Wine Advocate wine-tasting note
. Metrical analysis of wine note from Stephen Tanzer
. The “Eucharistic” semiotics of qualia-fication
. Thurber’s joke in a New Yorker drawing
. Standardized terminology of the “wine aroma wheel”
. Popular presentation of the “wine aroma wheel”
. Unveiling of the “sake aroma wheel”
. The beer flavor wheel
. The “Frenchness” of wine illustrated: summoning brand to
consumer consciousness
. Wine-note-like coffee-tasting notes from a Starbucks
customer flyer
. Colombian coffee in the image of French wine
. A chocolate-tasting note on the wrapping of a product of
Lindt & Sprüngli Ltd., chocolatiers
. A tasting note by the noblest of beasts
List of Figures ix
. Gary Vaynerchuk of The Wine Library videotaping his
wine blog
. Rod Markus, a “tea sommelier” examines a brewing pot of tea
. Some aspects of denotational acts of reference
. The basic “Post-Lockean rectangle” [U of C: quadrangle],
“solved” in folk intuition and enshrined in much philosophy of
language and mind
. Conceptual knowledge revealed in denotational (in)coherence,
contrasting inexplicit and explicit meta-semantics
. Iterable constituency structure of an English sentence
. Paradigmatic sets within syntagmatic frames (constituencies)
in English
. Praguean refinements of Saussureanism
. -, -, -, and -point landmark-and-region phonemic
structures imposed as the cognitive organization of articulation
in the oral cavity
. Grammatico-semantic categoriality (on parallel with phonetic-
phonological categoriality)
. Whorfian dimensions of contrast of (word-centered) categories
. Whorf’s “modulus” categories exemplified
. Whorf’s diagram for “different ways in which English
and Nootka formulate the same event”
. Sentence formation in Nootka
. Whorf’s chart showing the contrast between a “temporal”
English and a “timeless” Hopi
. Categories of the (standard-register) English predicating/
verbal phrase
. Grammatical interaction of tense and aspect in English
. Some classificatory distinctions of formal, notional,
and referential noun classes
. Some extensions of the Dyirbal noun class/gender system
. Dyirbal noun class/gender system
. Typology of predicate types
. Speech-event-focused view of the noun phrase categories
. Grammatical and cultural analysis of the English lexeme
vacuum cleaner-
. Grammatical and cultural analysis of English kin terms,
father and mother
. Real-world descriptive boundaries for conceptual domains
denotationally extended
x List of Figures
. Munsell color chips, as used by the World Color Survey
. Berlin and Kay universal sequence of lexicalization of hue foci
(revised)
. Expressions elaborating the denotational domain of color
in English
. The four unique hues of the visible spectrum
. Perception of hue and wavelengths of light as a function of
opponent-process pairs
. Brightness, saturation, and hue-circle mapped onto the
Munsell Color System
. Taxonomy of denotational domain of color in English
. Conklin’s twenty questions to isolate Hanunóo’s “basic
color terms”
. Conklin’s glosses of Hanunóo visual quality terms
. Hanunóo “cultural concepts” that frame “hue” and the
dimensional paradigm
. Mursi “color” vocabulary
. William Safire’s perspective on “political coloration”
. Text-metrical structure of William Safire’s “The Candidates’
Hue and Dye”
. Constituent structure of the English noun phrase
spun limestone
. Analogy as a diagrammatic iconic relationship among forms
. Analogies of measure phrases in English
. Clock face as iconic indexical of the spatialization of “time”
. Whorf’s Messrs./Mmes.’ Everybody on “time”
. Edibility ascriptions of domesticated and forest animals among
Thai villagers
. Parallelism across rules of human exogamy, rules of human
domestic access, and rules of edibility of animals among
Thai villagers
. Plan of Thai villager’s elevated house and of its ground-
level undercroft
. Mr. A and Mr. B doing language in culture and culture
in language
. Conceptual space of undergraduate affiliations of Messrs.
A and B
. Conceptual space of professional school affiliations of Messrs.
A and B
Foreword
by Mara Tapp
There is nothing ordinary about this book. It began in the mind of
Michael Silverstein, my husband and greatest love, when he first arrived
at the University of Chicago in fall , charged with teaching “Language
and Culture,” an introductory course, to Anthropology graduate students.
The first move he made was to rename the course “Language in Culture.”
This change captured his view of the role language plays in our lives, and
offered a key to his past and future scholarship and teaching, not to
mention his insistence on the inseparability of language and culture, a
philosophy to which he would convert as many as possible for the rest of
his life. Over the five decades in which U of C was Michael’s intellectual
home, he taught this course nearly every year to anthropology and linguis-
tics students. Michael was delighted that his former students now teach it
all over the world.
In he decided to organize his “Language in Culture” course into
eight lectures for the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America
in Lexington, Kentucky. He delivered them that summer. Then, heeding
long-standing requests from colleagues and students, Michael embarked on
transforming those lectures into a book, drawing on his fifty years teaching
an ever-evolving course that had become so identified with him. His
intention was that this volume would be less technical than his usual work,
and therefore more appealing to a wider audience.
In the meantime, Michael had been invited to give the Nora and Edward
Ryerson Lecture, an honor bestowed by the U of C to celebrate the
scholarship of a small corps of distinguished faculty. He decided to include
that text in the book as the basis of its Introduction. Before he could deliver
his lecture, Michael was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer that ended his
life in just over a year. He wanted very much to finish this book but
understood that might not be possible. Several close colleagues offered a
solution. They proposed to carry out several workshops, a format Michael
xi
xii Foreword
favored, in which they and others would critique his manuscript in its raw
form, as a means of helping him to finish it. He was touched, and imme-
diately dubbed this corps “Michael’s Book Posse.” It met three times, and
was an extraordinary intellectual gift of respect and love, a way to acknowl-
edge and return his decades of engaging with and commenting on
their work.
Tragically, Michael was not able to finish the book before he died on
July , . The three colleagues who had come up with the Book Posse
idea, E. Summerson Carr, Susan Gal, and Constantine V. Nakassis,
stepped up and used its meeting transcripts, full of Michael’s characteris-
tically expansive amplifications on and explanations of his ideas and
lectures, and his earlier publications, to inform this work, completing the
task of taking it from lectures to book. That approach brought both
Michael’s ideas and his voice back to life in this, his new last work. My
gratitude is profound for the monumental efforts, and the immensity and
generosity of this gift from this organizing trio and all members of
Michael’s Book Posse – Asif Agha, Richard Bauman, Judith T. Irvine,
Michael Lempert, John Lucy, Paul Manning, Elizabeth Mertz, Robert
Moore, and Kristina Wirtz. As a final step, I asked two former students of
Michael’s, both close colleagues and friends, Nicholas Harkness and
Robert Moore, to review the completed manuscript. To them, I am also
deeply grateful.
I, along with many of Michael’s colleagues and former students, now
colleagues, believed his best work was ahead of him. He intended to retire
when he turned seventy-five in September so that he could devote
more time to his scholarship and personal life. Michael’s work is very
technical, but his goal always was to help people to understand how
language really works. The infectiousness of his love of language, and the
way it functions in human relations around the world, is present on every
page of this book. In his last year Michael said that he was able to connect
his early works to his later ones, creating a lifetime arc of his thoughts and
scholarship. This book, then, is the actualization of the beginning of that
effort, offering a sense of the sum of where he was intellectually shortly
before he died. One could argue that Michael’s legacy starts with these
“Language in Culture” lectures, first imagined when he was twenty-five,
initially in the haze of a drug-induced hospital confinement and then a
lengthy recovery from surgery for an ankle injury that happened while
playing frisbee on the first day of fieldwork in . He built the Language
in Culture legacy, refining it over five decades. Now it will continue to be
carried on in the work of his former students, whom he welcomed with
Foreword xiii
enthusiasm to their shared profession and whose scholarly contributions
made him so proud, of his colleagues, and of all the others he encountered
who were intellectually, philosophically, ethically, and morally touched by
him. In these ways, Michael lives on. For that I am grateful beyond words
or imagining. Michael would have been too, and he would have found the
perfect words to express that.
Preface
In presenting these lectures to the reader I want to use our time together to
sketch the intellectual adventure I’ve been on, along with students and
colleagues, for about fifty years now – an adventure, I gratefully say,
stimulated that long ago by an invitation out of the blue from the
University of Chicago to teach a graduate course on “Language in Culture”
during a visiting assistant professorship in Autumn Quarter, . This set of
lectures is an abbreviated version of that course – most recently taught at the
Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute held at the University
of Kentucky’s Lexington campus in eight ca. eighty-minute sessions (versus
the twenty two-hour lectures of the full course) – as its message has crystallized
over the many intervening years.
Over the course of my career, I have drawn together strands of linguistic
theory I was first exposed to in interaction with my Harvard teacher, Roman
Jakobson, through whom I was introduced to the semiotics of Charles
Sanders Peirce and as well to Jakobson’s re-fashioning of Moscow and
Prague formalist poetics. At Chicago I was welcomed into a heady intellec-
tual milieu of all my then-senior sociocultural anthropologist colleagues
eager to understand the symbols and meanings of culture – symbols and
meanings most clearly at issue in the central foci of anthropological inves-
tigation: ritual. The following lectures were written and refined over a career
of these stimulating interactions and outline my approach to linguistic
anthropology, that is, to the semiotics of language in culture.
xv
Introduction: Getting – and Getting Across –
the Message
We experience social life through the central medium of verbal messages.
What coordination we achieve with others depends upon the fact that we
talk to each other; we write and read in graphic forms; we manually sign
(as well as gesture) in the visual channel. But what do we know about how
verbal messages really work? No matter what your English composition
teacher might have told you, I think linguistic anthropologists have
developed new light to shed on the matter.
Paradoxically enough, to understand how verbal messages do their
sociocultural work, we need to think about the nonverbal practice of
pantomime. This silent performance art form – there’s after all no lan-
guage in it! – consists entirely of movements of the body and its various
parts in an otherwise seemingly empty space. From the flow or sequence of
such movements, the mime’s audience of spectators – the mime’s
addressees – come to see that the sequence of body and facial movement
is tracing some culturally coherent event or recognizable experience in a
determinate (if only imagined) frame of objects, populated physical spaces,
and social situations that are almost – “virtually” is a good word – present,
too, because the addressees project them as they try to make organized
sense of the form of the movements (Figure .).
A successful mime immerses her- or himself in a thickening and
dense context that the spectators need to project or supply as the counterpart,
the complement (with an ‘e’) of the body movements to make a whole
interpretation. The body movements gradually come to perceived coher-
ence in recognizable ways in a gradually determinate framing envelope, the
necessary counterpart effect. The “text” (as we might call it) of bodily
movement thus projects the surround of “context.” Reciprocally, “context”
comes to encompass or frame performer and addressees as in a compatibly
same or similar social space of interpretation. As an event takes shape
relative to the now no longer indeterminate context, the mime can even
display affect or emotion (and even instill affect and emotion in the
Introduction
Figure . The mime Marcel Marceau “virtually” leaning and drinking, aiming a gun,
feeling a wall, and playing a violin.
From Le Mime Marcel Marceau, , dir. by Dominique Delouche.
spectators). The mime and her or his addressees thus achieve a kind of
social relationship: They both come to be intuitively understood kinds or
types of personae or characters with human feelings and understandings
through the magic of what we can term the dynamic text–context structure
that comes into being in cognitive and affective space and is transformed
over event-time.
The keywords here are text and context. Keep in mind that I’ve
described a structure at the center of the mime’s magic, text-coming-to-
linkage-with-context: The structure emerges over the interval of performed
bodily narrative in a space gradually dimensionalized with volumes, planes,
lines, and points within, as well as with projectively imagined people and
things that, reciprocally, render the mime’s narrative coherent for the
audience. The audience “gets” the complex message that the mime
endeavors to “get across” by projecting a densely structured context that
no one actually sees, but everyone comes to understand must be there.
Participants fill in even unnamed and, indeed, unnamable aspects of self-
Introduction
and other-definitions with an astonishing uniformity and alacrity by
drawing on the culture in and of the message.
This set of lectures elaborates my account of the dynamic text–context
structure in real time and space as we turn to discursive interaction,
interaction that centers on the unfolding of discourse, of language-in-
use. We will come to see that discourse, too, works in social life as a kind
of multimodal pantomime, once we make the right analytic moves to
study it, a central undertaking of linguistic anthropology over the last
several decades. This analytic approach will ultimately take us to chains or
networks of discursive activity that are immanent in – but far exceed –
particular speech events.
So what happens when two or more people – or even persons and non-
human beings of some sort – participate in a discursive interaction, that is,
a social interaction centering on the deployment of language or its equiv-
alent? In one of my disciplines, linguistics, the focus is on the fact of
grammar underlying one kind of regularity in discourse. Grammar is the
universal condition of representational form anchoring every human com-
municative regime. No language lacks a grammar. In discourse, the
grammar of language allows us to refer to entities and conditions in any
cognizable universe. We do so as we predicate modally true states of affairs
about those entities and conditions.
Linguistics also centers on the forms called sentences and their parts
which give regular shape to how we go about our referring and predicating.
Such grammatical shapes lurk in our utterances as templates for arrange-
ments implicit in the uttered signals; I like to think of a grammatical
analysis as like an in-depth X-ray of the actual referring-and-predicating
discourse in discursive interaction. But does this really determine the mes-
sage one “gets” when someone tries to “get across” a message? (To jump
ahead, the answer is: no.)
By contrast, consider the “interaction” aspect of what we mean by
discursive interaction, the focus of fields such as sociology, anthropology,
and social psychology. As social scientists, we are interested in the ways
people are not mere psychobiological organisms; we are interested in
persons with many identities defined by collective societal structures and
their workings. As such, individuals are organized into crosscutting groups.
They instantiate or inhabit, as well, distinguishable categories of social
existence in terms that they use to understand how they affect one another,
in effect reflexively interpreting themselves and others. “Interaction,” then,
is the cover term for all events of co-participatory coordination of the
people and other beings of an imaginable social universe. Much interaction
Introduction
depends essentially on discourse; this is discursive interaction, whether
face-to-face or remote.
So using language allows us to represent and communicate about the world
of our experience and imagination. Language is also our social instrumentality
for bringing groupness and social identities into being in the here-and-now,
allowing us as persons to coordinate in such terms. We can’t pretend that
language lacks its representational function. However, we can forge further to
productively think about how the very same signals we use to represent also
may play a critical role as the medium of social coordination – on the face of it,
a very different function. In the course of communication, discourse – the
processual aspect of language – unfolds, as one says, in the “social context”
that it effectively brings into being. The “context” of discourse, as we can
perhaps now see, is the always transformable structure of salient social
identities and relationships that comes, over interactional time, to frame the
ever-moving interactional here-and-now; though projected, in fact, from the
“text” of discourse, “context” at every moment is that framework in which
individuals socially coordinate in one or more ways.
We may start out not knowing much about an individual with whom
we are interacting, and vice versa, so we make a stab at uttering something,
as the top left of Figure . suggests. Our interactional partner contributes
something back (a second utterance), sharpening the parameters of iden-
tity on which interaction proceeds (top-right). We make a further conver-
sational move, perhaps even more revealing of who is involved in what,
and what, therefore, must be going on socially (bottom-left). And, in kind,
our counterpart’s next co-contribution about a represented world makes
clear the dimensions of identity and the social consequences now possible
if interaction is to proceed (bottom-right), and so on and so forth.
Such alternating turn-contributions constitute one of the elementary
forms of measure or unitization of dyadic – two-co-contributor – interac-
tion. Such alternating contributions are termed “adjacency pairs,” where
what one says in, say, even-numbered positions links up with what
someone else has said in odd-numbered positions, and where one says
something in an odd-numbered position expecting the interlocutor to
contribute an even-numbered utterance to the event. It is like a dance or,
better, a practical “poetry” of turn-taking, a clear example of a principle of
metricalization, of measure which, when violated, constitutes trouble the
participants have to address, as we’ll see in a moment.
Just think of all the different ways we greet each other in social
encounters: “Hi, how’re ya doin’!” uttered to our interlocutor contrasts
markedly with “Hello; how do you do?” Note that the difference between
Introduction
1
2
1
1
2
2
3
3
4
Figure . Practical poetry of turn-taking. . = First utterance; . = Response (second)
utterance; . = Reaction to , third utterance; . = Reaction to , fourth utterance. NB: The
plane between the interactants in the figure represents the thickening medium of textuality,
co-constructed across the multiple turns.
Adapted from Michael Silverstein, “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of
Discourse,” College English Vol. , No. (), figure ; Copyright © by the National Council
of Teachers of English; used with permission.
these otherwise equivalently uttered greetings actually plays upon the
grammatical forms out of which the interrogative phrases are composed,
not upon any real difference of content words (how, you, do-), but instead
upon grammatical and phonetic style. Except for the grammatical vari-
ance – in grammarian’s terms, progressive aspect versus punctual, and
stative versus active control – an otherwise identical question is being
Introduction
asked here. Each form of question is, moreover, compatible with the
special initial greeting word, Hi or Hello as the case may be. Seeking a
compatible response from the individual greeted, each variant will have set
up – will have made salient and contextually real – the social reality of
possibly in-play identities of self-and-other that can thus be presumed
upon – that will have been “gotten across” – in whatever interaction
may follow. The interlocutory partner “gets” the interactional import of
the variant message by producing a compatible or non-controverting
response, indicating that understanding of the social-relationship-come-
into-being is mutual. “Hi, how’re ya doin’!” offers friendly “in-groupness.”
“Hello; how do you do?” offers the distance of status-dependent position-
ality as salient in the situation, to which one had better pay attention. For
students of culture, the crucial question is: which is accepted, in each
instance, or contravened in the pas de deux of alternating co-participation?
As you can see, it’s not so much what one says in the way of contrib-
uting to a representation of something; it’s how one says what one says by
way of such a contribution that does the work of social coordination. We can
never successfully “get across” such a message until someone else “gets” it,
as revealed in a confirmatory or at least non-contravening return, one that
is compatibly (as we say) in the same interactionally relevant denotational
register. (Imagine the uneasy, if always productive situation if someone
answers the proffered first register variant, the “Hi!” form, with the second,
the “Hello” form: Oops! It’s like saying, “Keep your social distance, bub,
and pay attention to who I am – and who you are not!”) Only we don’t
have to say this explicitly; just using the understood context-shaping
variant as opposed to a register alternative does the trick.
So we can think now of discourse – using language and similar cultural
signs, hand or face gestures, body stance, and the like – as the very medium of
how people engage each other in social interaction. People try to compose
and convey messages that they presume are, to varying degrees, “appropriate”
to or allowable in the social context. People attempt to speak to the who –
what – where – and – why of the social situation as defined for them up to
some point in an interaction. Thus, given the purposiveness of communi-
cation, such messages are, to varying degrees, “effective” in clarifying, in
maintaining, in contesting, or in transforming not only the participants, but
also the social context in determinate ways – that is, if social life mediated by
discourse has any regularity or normativity to it (as, empirically, it seems to).
Discourse is cumulative in time and space, to be evaluated not only in
terms of semantic and logical coherence – the focus of the tradition of the
Enlightenment in the West – but as well in terms of its degrees and kinds of
coherence of social effect, both within and across interactional encounters.
Introduction
A. B.
(1) “There’s some more trash to take
out under that table over there.”
(2) [surprised, incredulous facial
expression; frozen body stance]
. . . (2.0) . . .
(3) “Oh, sorry! Forgive me;
I thought you were the janitor”
Figure . Taking out the trash.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of
Discourse,” College English Vol. , No. (), figure ; Copyright © by the National Council
of Teachers of English; used with permission.
Logical coherence of what one says is measured as an aspect of what I like
to call denotational textuality, representations of an experienced or
imagined world that one co-constructs in the course of communication.
By contrast, when we are interested in the coherence of discourse as action
in the realm of social coordination, we can study interactional textuality,
how discursive forms bring about the understanding of what is happening
in the cause-and-effect world of social coordination.
An account of denotation tries to answer the question “What did they
say?” An account of interaction answers the question “In-and-by (denota-
tionally) saying such-and-such using thus-and-such signs, what did they
bring about in social life?” The next question becomes: How is denota-
tional textuality, properly viewed, projected into interactional textuality?
As in our example of greeting, how does how one says what one denotes
come to count as what one contributes to the envelope of social life (and
lives) in which communication is experienced?
Even the most carefully intended or strategized purposive acts of an
individual can go astray in all kinds of ways because interacting individuals
may not already be mutually coordinated as social types. The transcript in
Figure . reveals that as interaction proceeds between a certain A and B,
even if it seems to cause a coordination problem it can be, as it were,
re-calibrated through alternate, remediating coordination of power-laden
Introduction
identities. All through the magic of messages that are themselves about
“getting” and “getting across” messages!
Here’s the scene of interaction. It is after-hours in some organizational
headquarters, for example a suite of departmental offices in a college or
university. Through a door left ajar, B walks into A’s office in the evening
at the time when office-cleaning regularly happens; A is staring at a
computer screen in a corner of the office. A verbalizes without looking
away from the computer screen: “There’s some more trash to take out
under that table over there.” B: [surprised, incredulous facial expression,
frozen body stance]. A [turning to take in B]: “Oh, sorry! I thought you
were the janitor!” Individual A reveals that the first turn-at-talk mistakenly
ascribed an identity to B that lay behind the particular formulation – the
how – of the message used. In explanation, A describes that identity to
which A’s turn was directed: “I thought you were the . . .” with a status
term, part of our metalevel vocabulary of social differentiation, in partic-
ular, a so-called noun of agency, a noun that denotes a status derived from
someone’s habitual or institutional role to perform. In this sector of the
American English cultural community, A’s meta-comment counts as an
“apology plus excuse” for A’s prior turn-at-talk that reflexively recognizes it
as a social faux pas on A’s part and thus invites closure and discounting of
the interactional segment of which it was intended as a turn. The unit-
segment of which it was a first contribution is termed an adjacency pair,
you will recall, the reaction to which, contributed by B, was not talk, but
was B’s stopped-in-one’s-tracks bodily reaction. An apology plus excuse for
A’s prior misconstrual counts as an attempt to defuse the situation of
surprise or affront on B’s part and to allow a reset, partial or complete, of
the relationship between A and B for any further interaction.
What message is A apologizing for? A was simply trying to “get across” a
message appropriate for an interactional context presumed to exist at that
moment of utterance. A’s original turn-at-talk was offered as a “hint” that
counts as a request or order for B to do something. Why did A presume, in
issuing the hint-as-order, that B would know – in that projectively com-
municated identity – what to do? Denotationally, A’s first utterance
appears to be just a statement of contextual fact, but of course a statement
of contextual fact that informed B of the existence of “some more trash” –
that is to say, in addition to the usual or nearby available-to-sight trash – in
a perhaps unexpected or non-visible location at some remove from where
the speaker then was, “under that table over there.” But note not merely
some more trash; some more trash to “take out,” that is, out of A’s office,
by someone: to be sure, by the addressee, B. So A is specifying a focus of
Introduction
attention for B, the extra trash A’s utterance is locating under a landmark,
a certain table, in relation to which speaker and addressee then were, and
formulating a purposive action to be accomplished by someone in respect
of it – guess who?
Did A utter something like, “Might you please take out the trash under
that table in the corner of the office?” or even, with pointing gesture, “Take
out the trash under that table over there!” No. As linguistic anthropolo-
gists, we are interested in the specific form A’s message took in practice, as
opposed to several possible forms, so as to discern the participants’
presumed-upon and ever thickening social context, including B’s second-
turn reaction.
In American English, to any competent user of the language, what
A uttered did count interactionally as a command (a directive in the
interactional text) that put B in the position of having either to comply
with its terms or not. A’s misguided usage has, in fact, precisely conformed
to the late Susan Ervin-Tripp’s () classic empirical finding that such
hints-as-directives occur in the register of talk either among intimate
familiars or to someone expected to conform to routine role expectations
of a job or similar circumstance where identities and the presumption of
associated role fulfillment are clear. How so?
In our office-cleaning example, it is important for us to recognize that
A is not simply reporting a state of affairs under an office table as an
interactionally irrelevant denotational text – as B certainly recognized,
taken aback in the framework of this particular interactional situation by
what B took, with justification, to be a directive issued by A under a
presumption of mistaken identity. A had apparently been presuming upon
the temporality of what goes on in the organizational site of an office
building, including the habitual organizational functions like office-
cleaning. Knowing only that someone has entered A’s office, A’s first
utterance appears to rest on presumption of B’s stipulated role within
the organization’s structure of statuses, thinking it must be the janitor. A’s
presumptuous utterance points to (or, indexes) this understanding of the
pre-discursive social context as the operative framework. Since A and
B apparently share discursive-interactional norms (or, register norms) of
the kind Ervin-Tripp identified, B has interpreted what interactional text is
building in-and-by A’s utterance, and accordingly B performs “surprise” or
even “shock” at A’s misidentifying presumption in uttering the directive.
Notably, B has not really responded to A’s directive in kind, either
silently doing the stipulated task, doing it with a verbal signal (“no
problem”; “sure thing, boss”), or offering an excuse for non-compliance.
Introduction
B’s bodily communication is in effect a commentary on A’s ascriptive boo-
boo, a meta-discursive or metapragmatic move, we will term it, cutting
the misguided would-be effect of the prior turn off at the pass, as it were.
B has thus declined to participate in the interaction under the identity
A had apparently ascribed to B. (“Don’t you speak to me like that, young
man/lady!” – you may have heard from an elder, at one or another time
during your teen years, issuing to you a verbal metapragmatic response.)
Similarly, A’s following “apology plus excuse” is, in effect, a responsive
commentary on that bodily commentary by B in rejecting the presump-
tion of A’s directive. A, as we can now see, justifies the use of the hint-as-
directive utterance by revealing A’s incorrect presumption of the role-
relational facts of the pre-discursive context that both A and B implicitly
know as members of the culture. Both participants know the norms and
how these norms are usually invoked in-and-by actual utterance in social
context. And perhaps both A and B share the assumption that were B a
slightly junior co-worker, A might well have said, “Might I possibly impose
on you to help me by taking out that trash under the table over there?” All
in conformity with the way the how of utterance, the specific syntactic
formula, points to or indexes the dimensions of social context (i.e.,
institutional role, rank, status) relative to which one from among a whole
pragmatic paradigm of variant forms is appropriate and effective.
At least A apologizes to B, with an excuse as well, a precursor to any
repair or reset of the social relationship, indeed the social ranking. A’s
apology is perhaps to be followed by an appropriately calibrated greeting
ritual based on actual identities and mutually acceptable role relationality.
This puts everyone on the proper footing in a post-workday collegial
encounter framed as “dropping in to a colleague’s office after-hours”
(A might, then, continue: “Good to see you, B! I was meaning to ask
you about your new journal article but didn’t get a chance earlier.”)
First, it is very important to see that even in this brief exchange there is a
social context that is not only presumed upon (pointed to, indexed) by the
particular forms of the utterances, but is also transformed over the time of
interaction as a function of each of the co-contributions to an emerging
doubly organized text – both the “what-has-been said” denotational text
and the “what-has-been-done” interactional text. Second, it is clear that
discourse in this turn-bound manifestation is not structured merely like a
run of beads serially strung along on a chain, whether sentences or turn-
utterances or whatever. Rather, there is a complex chunking of layered
segments organizing text, some more closely internally structured accord-
ing to what the participants contribute to unfolding metrical forms like
Introduction
adjacency pairs; and, as well, there is a hierarchical relationship of turn
contributions that come to count as text and meta-text, the metadiscourse –
here, the adjacency-pair Turns and – commenting on the text a-building
under a particular interpretation (sometimes explicitly announced) of what
was said, who said it to whom, and what it presumably counted as in the
way of an interactional textual segment (for example, A’s presumptuous
and misdirected attempt at an “order” via an offhand formulation as a hint
to the “janitor”). A’s Turn is the first part of an incomplete adjacency
pair, B’s Turn acted out in pantomime opening a meta-discursive
sequence completed by A’s Turn . As we see, the time-bound unfolding
of units of discourse can precipitate multiple orders of functional structure
of textuality.
So discourse as it unfolds over interactional intervals is measured out not
necessarily in words and phrases that interest us as grammarians, but by all
kinds of segment units drawn from a repertoire of alternative forms that point
to specific conditions in the context in which they occur, sets of possible
indexically potent alternatives, as we term them. As we will see in the pages
that follow, in analyzing discourse, the significant units of formal indexical
variance come into view through patterned repetition, parallelism, positional
contrast, and so on – in short, a “poetics” of an emergent textuality-in-
context. In interactional phases, a potentially highly elaborate structure of
seeming hierarchical depth unfolds, even though at every significant identi-
fiable phase of discourse something about the used form makes salient the
parameters of context that confirm and render clear what has been going on –
up to that point – and what will have been going on because of its occurrence –
that is, how its contribution makes the context clear and thus, reciprocally,
how the context clarifies the text. Each significant segment-unit presumes
upon a particular configuration of social context and, insofar as this segment
succeeds in its interactional contribution, confirms or transforms the context
in which it now occurs. Recall our earlier examples. Just as the gestures of the
mime Marcel Marceau (Figure .) unfold, and in their combination begin to
“fill out” a perceivable context that was not immediately visible, so too with
the Pharaoh and his interlocutor (Figure .) and our office example; as they
proceed, participants fill out the context of their interaction, utterance by
utterance, exchange by exchange, chunk by chunk across the plane of
textuality. It really does seem to be an indexical – context-presuming and
context-entailing – “pantomime,” the systematic character of which is gener-
ally beyond language users’ consciousness or ken.
Now for those of you still with me, all this minute detail in an account
of a two-turn greeting routine or a three-turn interactional misfire may
Introduction
seem highly irrelevant to important and serious matters. And if you’re still
with me, I would now claim that these examples in fact clearly demon-
strate my paradoxical assertion that verbal discourse in social interaction
works like language-less pantomime insofar as affording what we say in an
interactional sense by continuously projecting its context. Full-sentence
turn-utterances like these examples are, in this respect, low-lying fruit.
But what about the real subtleties of how we coordinate as interlocutors
in running discourse, defining ourselves and projecting identities on
others, and producing other kinds of consequential social action? Here,
we find, individuals periodically give off indexical signals that gradually
cumulate over the duration of an encounter, allowing us to make cumu-
lative sense of who – that is, sociologically speaking, what – they are
presenting as identifiable persons in their contributions to an interactional
event. In such everyday discursive interactions, what actually goes into
what I’ve been calling “the how of what we say or signal to each other?”
What are the building blocks of interaction more generally and how are
they combined? This series of lectures, as it has evolved over the course of
my career, unfolds the principled answers to these questions.
In order to start, we first turn to the semiotics and poetics of ritual, that
central focus of anthropological investigation that was once called the
“symbols and meanings” of culture. Indeed, as demonstrated in the
coming lectures, rituals constitute the ne plus ultra phenomena of discur-
sive interaction: Ritual forms unfold in space and time as complex, densely
laminated metricalizations of signs, which make sense only in a context of
beliefs or presumptions that they index; and further, the unfolding textual
form of ritual tropically instantiates that which it represents (a process I’ve
come to term dynamic figuration). Surely everyday discursive interaction,
to the degree it is effective, is a less vivid form of ritual, though interaction
ritual it is (as the late Erving Goffman [] intuited). Or, put another
way, ritual is the asymptotically full-tilt version of the semiotics of everyday
discursive interaction, elaborated and intensified with all manner of incre-
mental semiotic codes.
And indeed, cracking the poetic code, as it were, of everyday discourse
in the light of ritual will lead us to many institutional sites: to courtrooms,
where ritual dialogues of “truth” and therefore “justice” abound; to gossip
exchanges in a Fijian Indian village and in a New Guinea village; as well as
to US commodity cultures of various kinds (oinoglossia, or “wine talk,” and
its emanations into other realms of connoisseurship). We will also delve
into US politics, where pundits work at “getting across” a “message” that a
polity’s electorate “gets” as intended. As we will see, this “messaging” is the
Introduction
central medium of an increasingly market-structured imagination. Through
these cases, we will learn to rethink the relationship between, on the one
hand, grammatical categories – the universal condition of representational
form – and, on the other hand, cultural concepts – which are the building
blocks of the categorial knowledge – as invoked in everyday discourse (so-
called interaction ritual) and full-tilt ritual. Indeed, as we’ve already seen,
how we formulate utterances in interaction, from among a pragmatic
paradigm of possible, grammatically variant forms – which can become part
of registers of alternative forms – identifies not only the cultural category
invoked, but also “who” we are as socially identifiable types of persons
(institutional role, rank, status) and what dimensions of social context are
in play.
In short, the intent of these lectures is to outline a coherent conceptual
and theoretical framing necessary for the empirical study of language in
culture. Yet culture cannot be sensed or studied directly. We cannot study
culture except by analyzing its effects in and on discursive interaction.
Many of the concepts and theoretical framings that we deploy to demon-
strate this are drawn from and have individually made their way into large
and varied literatures; our goal here is to integrate them into a systematic
overview that relates them one to another. The lectures are built around
the most central and important of such integrating concepts, of necessity
leaving out many areas and leaving unexplored many of the theoretical
organons from which we draw and reformulate (which I have covered in
the more capacious course sequence and in some of my other writings).
To pursue this, the lectures follow three major thematic foci that
comprise the narrative arc introducing the material. At its conclusion, that
narrative arc cycles back to the givens of its beginning in the first lectures,
attempting to demonstrate the dynamic, always contextualized condition
of the knowledge people have of how to use their language effectively as an
instrument communicating thought about their worlds of experience
and imagination.
The first section (Lectures –) is best captioned with the sequence
text – event – context. It presumes that an obvious place to start is the
face-to-face situation of discursive interaction that mediates social relations
among co-calibrating individuals. It is frequently, if myopically, identified
as the central “micro-social” universe in which linguistic anthropologists
are interested to explain the norms of how “saying something” using
denotational code (forms that refer within presumed universes and that
modally predicate states of affairs involving referents) comes to count as
“doing something” in the framework of interpersonal social action.
Introduction
However, one of the aims of the book is to dissolve such “micro- vs.
macro-” thinking by semiotic analysis that connects any single event to its
essential interdiscursivities within implicit social-organizational connec-
tions and institutionalizations, visible only at relatively encompassing and
abstract planes of analysis but central to any particular event.
Following on the multi-authored volume Natural Histories of Discourse
(Silverstein and Urban ), the lectures develop the understanding that
there is an entextualization/contextualization dialectic at work in the
emergence of textuality, that is, of a relatively bounded and internally
structured configuration or array of signs (e.g., grammatico-lexically con-
forming denotational language forms) such that elements of the whole in
various ways point to – index – the “context” in which they have occurred as
something distinct from “text” and external to it. As introduced above, just
as “text” emerges in a potentially coherent and cumulative way as arrays of
signs thicken and become dense along several dimensions of structuration,
so also does “context.” “Context” thus becomes alive and salient in new ways
to those interacting from how it was indexed at prior phases of the process of
entextualization/contextualization. In terms of demonstrating this dialectic,
the universally recognized ritual “event” – publicly salient within a group of
adherents to its performative efficacy – is the paradigmatic best case of the
entextualization/contextualization dialectic.
In the first section, we probe what Roman Jakobson () termed the
“poetic function” – dense internal co-textuality characteristic of the
metricalized unfolding of ritual in socio-spatio-temporality – and general-
ize its virtues in relation to the overall ritual principles of hyper-meta-
semiosis as a strategy for self-grounding of a text outside the realm of the
here-and-now and thus for authoritative textuality seemingly coming from
form itself. We demonstrate that ritual operates semiotically as indexical
iconicity, blending two of the modes of semiosis proposed by Charles
Sanders Peirce, and over the socio-spatio-temporal interval of its perfor-
mance ritual traces, through meta-semiotic “trope,” a dynamic figuration
such that the unfolding of emergent structures of signs depicts (“figurates”)
that which it is understood to bring about in the context of its perfor-
mance. Ritual connects to and maps cosmic knowledge (that is, intensional
states of belief about the universe among adherents) into the here-and-now
of performance, consequently renewing or revitalizing the connection
between adherence and now fulfilled or realized experience.
Thus, we bring the framework of dynamic figuration evidenced in ritual
to bear on understanding what more generally happens in the course of
everyday discursive interaction. We show that the performative efficacy of
Introduction
using particular forms within a “poetics” of unfolding textual structure in
fact seems to depict or figurate points within categorial knowledge struc-
tures, seemingly made real in the here-and-now as they are indexically
invoked by participants in discursive interaction. In new ways we come to
see how participants inhabit the relational roles of a communicative event
not as abstract cognitions, but as socially identifiable types of persons,
multiply and intersectionally legible one to another within group-relative
(or what we will be calling ethno-meta-semiotic) schemata of social
differentiation.
Such identifications are dynamically in play in the socio-spatio-temporal
course of unfolding discursive interaction. So the indexical relationship
between particular sign-forms that individuals deploy in interaction, the
values of those sign-forms along intersecting dimensions of contrast, and
the classification of kinds of social personae looms large in how “doing
things with [sign]s” depends upon the license of the individuals involved
legitimately or authoritatively to do so. Hence, the second section
(Lectures –) concentrates on enregisterment and variation, for which
we must step back from the (seemingly) singular event of discursive
interaction to approach a field extensionally manifest in crisscrossing fields
of interdiscursivity across events. Such a field is, as well, intensionally
manifest in ideologically informed – hence, socially locatable – non-
disinterested meta-semiotic beliefs and meta-semiotic discourse through
which members of a social group anchor normative expectations about
who uses what kind of sign-forms to consequential effect in particular
contexts – in short, an at least implicitly felt correlation between social
personae, communicatively dependent interactional projects, and the
forms normatively expectable for the accomplishment thereof.
Such an expected or felt correlation is part of speakers’ metapragmatic
consciousness and is ordered around what we called above pragmatic
paradigms. These are alternate variants which, in speakers’ intuitions,
evoke and are congruent with particular socially identifiable person types,
interactional projects, and scenes. Building on this implicit sense that
code-users have – their intuition of congruence of some (but not other)
alternates of pragmatic paradigms over the socio-spatio-temporal course of
unfolding of an entextualization – we can begin to define register by what
kinds of signal forms (alternate pragmatic variants) normatively co-occur in
the unfolding of discourse. Registers, in short, emerge from pragmatic
paradigms. We will learn that register phenomena very frequently are
salient to members of the speech community by virtue of certain register
shibboleths, the occurrence of which immediately keys the communication;
Introduction
insofar as such shibboleths permit a range of co-occurrent other forms as
congruent (or at least not non-congruent) with them, registers are elastic and
fuzzy-edged. Very frequently, with a sense of anchoring in shibboleths, there
is not simply an intuition but an explicit meta-semiotic discourse about
register – which is central to the thoroughgoing character of some forms of
enregisterment as a socio-semiotic fact – as well as an associated elaboration
of ethno-meta-semiotic terms for register phenomena and their contextual
effects.
There is no known speech community which lacks at least implicit
understandings of register and a dynamic, ever-shifting experience of the
many phenomena of enregisterment within the overall indexical system in
which people communicate. The facts of socio-historically specific enre-
gisterment set up a dialectical semiotic process as the essence of social
indexicality; this dialectic breaks the system open to contingencies of social
life and dissolves the synchrony versus diachrony distinction on which
have long rested various structuralist understandings of the fate of language
systems in their own rarefied order of temporality distinct from that of
utterance and action. It will be clear that the account I am proposing is at
variance with – indeed, in direct opposition to – many of the foundational
assumptions and methodological tendencies of Saussurean and other
structuralist approaches and their heirs and derivatives in linguistics
and anthropology.
The second section, therefore, underscores that so-called “variation” in
the forms people use in denotational communication is everywhere framed
by facts of enregisterment. Every correlational study under the banner of
“sociolinguistic variation” is of this sort when investigating a language
community enregistered through highly developed ethno-metapragmatic
concepts of standardization, for example. Standardization is the imposi-
tion by authoritative institutionalization of a sliding-scale – and socio-
historically ever-changing – set of congruent “do”s and “don’t”s concep-
tualized as shibboleths of value. Use of every prescription in the standard
register – that is, the language as metapragmatically understood by
speakers – is at the top and center of a conceptual cone of variation, with
progressively de-valued down-and-out-ness accruing to those whose usage
is marginal, inconsistent, or even completely disjoint from the preferred
manifestation of form in somebody’s list. Metapragmatic discourse about
standardization also functions to regiment the value of many kinds of
objects that are not language but are organized through pragmatic para-
digms: food, drink, and clothing are major examples of such phenomena,
as we will see.
Introduction
Here, there are important methodological implications. Absent the
anchoring of standardization, it takes ethnographic and linguistic anthro-
pological ingenuity to discover the local ideological systems of value in
which register shibboleths come to be recognized, what role they play in
the social-indexical performativity of language-in-use, and how variation of
forms is selectively attracted to and enveloped by the system of enregister-
ment so that the leading edges of still non-ideologically encompassed
variation can be discerned by an inquiring analyst. Needless to say, none
of this has been on the now fifty-year agenda of sociolinguistic variationist
work under the disciplinary aegis of linguistics, with only “sociophonetics”
approaching the necessarily dialectical understanding of how enregister-
ment plays its role, as we will discuss in Lectures and .
The third section of the narrative arc returns us, with new modes and
methods of understanding, to reconsider the post-Enlightenment focus on
“language and thought,” traditional folk concepts of culture, mentality,
and the like being the key ideological shapings here. We return with an
enriched understanding of how denotational forms are laden with index-
ical semiosis and hence could never be merely “grammar” instantiated in
the “execution” (Saussure ) of langue via parole (or as Chomsky would
have it, the realization of “competence” in “performance,” nothing in the
latter affecting anything in the former). The narrative foci here, in Lectures
–, are categoriality – relativity – knowledge. These insert our discus-
sion into the grand themes of philosophy that have unfolded certainly
from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding ([]),
but now we place them explicitly within a neo-Peircean semiotics and
a neo-Durkheimian anchoring of ritual and ritualization at society’s semi-
otic heart.
We first develop the notion, derived in the instance from the Boasian
() tradition in which Sapir – Bloomfield – Whorf worked, that
grammatical categories are points in intensional mappings from linguistic
form to conceptual differentiations that we can pinpoint within structures
of synonymy, hyponymy, taxonomy, meronymy, seriation, et cetera at the
plane of intensional conceptualization – what philosophers of language
have called “sense” (Lyons ). Grammatical categories in this tradition,
thus, are ultimately relevant to extensionalizing conceptual distinctions as
the very models of categorization of experience and imagination. We
motivate, via a phonologico-phonetic analogue, the concept of intensional
prototypy, and show that extensionalization of intensional categories
defined by and generalized from intensional prototypes of the phonolo-
gico-phonetic plane of structure gives us the basis for understanding the
Introduction
proper structure-conforming relationship between “sense” (intension) and
“reference” (extension). Grammatical categories emerge from structural
analysis of denotational form plus the understanding that these project
into distinct denotational domains so long as, just as in phonologico-
phonetic analysis, we can begin to see cross-linguistic comparability in
the way of calibration of one conceptual system with another.
But there are other modes of meaningfulness central to the way lan-
guage in this denotational-structural sense “covers,” as it were, the uni-
verse, allowing speakers to denote anything and everything. In particular,
we will need to consider lexicalization, the existence in every language of
lexemes – sets of simplex morphemes up to grammatically conforming
expressions made up of such simplexes – that are again and again confused
by the technically untrained with language as such (hence, seeing the
“dictionary” as the “language” and essentially ignoring grammar in
the linguist’s sense as the real central fact of denotation). Among all the
machinery of linguistic form effortlessly controlled by native users, lexemes
have some special properties: In speakers’ metapragmatic intuition they
are foci of awareness and attention. This enables lexemes’ property of
conveying not merely a semantic structure projectable from the
grammatical-categorial facts of how they project into specific denotational
domains that are structurally and cross-linguistically justified, but as well
what we will term “cultural” concepts that arise in, and ultimately are
relevant to, a kind of ritual of “conceptual baptism” involving – of course! –
the dynamic figuration of intensionalization from an extensional event
of denotation.
Nothing illustrates the points of this last arc in the narrative better than
the long and tortuous investigation of the denotational domain of “color.”
Technically extensionalizable for the stimulus–response experimental
laboratory with a psychophysical metalanguage of “hue” – “saturation” –
“brightness,” “color” is universally coded in language by a grammar
organized around a small number of simplex lexemes, a fundamental
paradigmatic set of oppositions, that then can be put into grammatically
conforming expressions of one or another sort. At the grammatico-lexical
plane, “color” has the properties various writers have confused with so-
called “linguistic relativity”: Insofar as “color” is in fact a denotational
domain, it simply conforms to expectation about how one system, though
of delicacy n in categorial subdivisions, can be calibrated with another
system of perhaps n+j categorial subdivisions, just as is the case in
phonologico-phonetic calibration. The point is, the intensional prototypes –
both those implemented in some particular system and those only implicitly
Introduction
available to it – are system-independent, and in this sense “universal” (see
Berlin and Kay ).
Yet, Berlin and Kay entirely set aside anything we might term the
“cultural” concepts cued and conveyed by the use of the various color
terms and emergent from local ethno-metapragmatic understandings of
how such phenomena are part of experienced social life. Here, Conklin’s
([]) discussion of the “semantics” [= pragmatics anchored in
entextualization] of Hanunóo “color” and Turton’s () discussion of
Mursi cattle-skin-derived “color” categories are to the point, showing that
cultural models supersede whatever universals render the vocabulary con-
forming to calibration within the domain.
So it is the implementation of lexicon and lexically based expressions as
discursive metapragmatics for social practice that generates sites of
authoritative knowledge. Whorf ([]) already saw this for
European “cultural” concepts of “time,” ultimately anchored to the emer-
gence, post- CE, of the sprung-mechanism clock. “Time” becomes a
linearized essence mensurated via the clock and calendar; by contrast, the
denotational domain indexed by grammatical categories of Tense, where
these exist, is all about seriation of events relative to the event of commu-
nication in which a token of the category is used, having nothing inher-
ently to do with clock-time in the Western mode. All “cultural” concepts
are of such sort. As we see through a return to the beginning of our
narrative arc, cultural concepts and forms of cultural knowledge that are
indexically invoked in-and-by sign use are immanent in social activity –
from everyday discursive interaction to full-tilt ritual; from face-to-face
events of interaction to larger-scale social formations – and thus to the
coherence and efficacy of social coordination.
***
Finally, I want to emphasize two points. First, the sociological and anthro-
pological legacy we have is a relatively clear-eyed view of the distinction
between social structure – the presumed-upon orderliness of the social
universe – and social-organizational process; morphology, if you will, and
physiology. Communication in the sense of discursive interaction is the
central mediator of process, as this introduction has emphasized.
Communicative events have a who – a to-whom – about whom/what –
by what means – where-in-social-space-time quality about them, of course.
But we note that repeated, relatively alike or genred events of communi-
cation involving relatively similarly recruited kinds of people as their
Introduction
personnel is the path of institutionalization of such events, and these
processes of institutionalization are normativities involved in both senses
of that term (the statistical or aggregate and the [ethno-]stipulative or
prescriptive). So these are some fundamentals to keep in mind as we think
about communication of all kinds and the essential and mediating role of
poetics in it.
Second, there is an important larger consideration in the way we look at
language in the post-Enlightenment West. We generally think about the
powerful lineage of Bacon – Hobbes – Boyle – Locke and the founding of
the Royal Society and its various Continental imitators in the developing
view of language as a central instrumentality of scientific thought.
However, a central initial force in the emergence of modern Western
views of language as an instrument of rationality and logical inference
was the anti-Catholic bias of the Protestant Reformation, which especially
focused on ritual and ceremonialism and all that it was made of. Of course,
good things – like formal linguistics, analytic philosophy, and cognitive
science – can eventually emerge from bad beginnings. But the simplifying
model of the structure of discourse measured only by its logical, its
syllogistic coherence, and the belief that this emerges, sentence-by-sen-
tence, from grammatical structure, jettisons from our intellectual program
any consideration of how language is universally the semiotic medium par
excellence for social coordination. This view of language certainly works
well enough to run computational machinery, but that’s why there is such
a problem with human–machine interfaces that take no account of dis-
course and other semiosis in their natural – that is, sociocultural – habitats.
To be sure, there is something deliciously ironic in our use of the theories
and methods of empirical semiotics, a rational scientific discourse about
sociocultural meaning, to understand the systematicity of how communi-
cation actually works in far-from-rational or logical – if effective – ways in
spite of ourselves, cultural creatures in the first instance. But perhaps this
brief introduction has – I hope – whetted interest in the lectures to follow,
as they reveal in detail how the modern semiotic or hermeneutic social
sciences of analyzing discourse go about their valuable work of figuring out
how in the theater of social life we are such dynamically figurated stuff as
messages make of us.
Text
Language-in-use as denotational semiotic and language-in-use as con-
sequential social action: How are the two related? From deixis with
scope over grammatical forms to social indexicality in context. Critique
of componential analysis of the communicative event. Metricalization –
patterned chunking of discourse as such – Jakobsonian “poetics” as
co-textuality of and via deixis. Entextualization–contextualization.
As social scientists we study the events of communication so as to reveal
something about the way the order of social formations is experienced and
sometimes revealed to those within. We study both the way these forma-
tions are drawn into events in which those within attempt to coordinate
one with another and how such events are part and parcel of how such
social formations come into being, persist over historical time, and are
transformed. We are devoted to the goal of giving an adequate account of
how we “do things with words” and with other modalities of interpersonal
behavior, looking “upward” and “outward” from particular events to the
framing sociocultural structures that give meaning and value to event-
bound particulars. The received wisdom for how to go about the study of
such coordination is to start with individual communicative events,
senders and receivers, and the informational messages that they transmit
to each other. We, too, will begin there, though we will quickly see the
narrowness and insufficiency of such an approach.
Instead, to draw together the three central and interlocking themes of
these lectures, we want to see that language (discourse) is understandable as
() appropriate and effective social action (“praxis”; “practice”; pragmatics;
how we “do [socially consequential] things with words” so as to effect
inter-agent [-actant] coordination in events of communication); () a
central site for the creation of cultural value, revealing how interests
and situated projects play out in social formations via the dialectics of
indexicality; and () a medium and locus of cultural (by which we mean,
socio-historically specific) knowledge of the universe of experience and
Lecture : Text
imagination, “distributed” among members of social categories and
groups. In fact, when we get to the last section of the lectures (Lectures
–), I hope you see that the discursive study of what we call “cultural
concepts” – the organization of ideas about the conceptualizable universe
that people rely on in their social relations – feeds back into the first theme,
that of effective social action.
The first theme itself can be divided into sections that we will begin now to
unpack: text and context; performativity and ritual; interaction ritual. In this
lecture, we take up the first section on text and the dialectics of entextualiza-
tion and contextualization, focusing on how denotation (roughly: messag-
ing) is related to social action, especially its coordination, via deixis and social
indexicality. To do so we proceed through the following thematics that
build upon each other: () message and indexicality, () deixis and denota-
tion, () denotational text, and () indexicality and the poetics of deixis in a
denotational text.
Message and Indexicality
Anything can be a “message” to another in relation to all the other
experienceables or imaginables of our being. The “coding” of any aspect
of sensory or perceivable experience can serve as a modality of messaging:
our bodily features and hexis; our clothing (or its absence); our self-
positioning and kinesis or stasis, among other aspects. How can we capture
the systematicity, if any, of the way these different communicative modal-
ities seem to work together in such a way as to bring participants to social
coordination in groups?
One way of addressing this question, which has interested students of
communication, is to invoke the idea that through the systematicity of
these modalities participants co-contribute to an emergent denotational
structure, a linguistic representation of states of affairs in the universe. Our
focus here is on the way that such denotational structure comes to stand
between – to “mediate” – individuals’ interactional roles. Individuals
inhabiting those interactional roles (which themselves “morph” over the
time course of interaction) come to define themselves and the interacting
other as they engage in a social event, a structured “happening” around the
denotational structure/text (though, we must remember, such happenings
are also structured through, and can be carried off by, non-denotational
signs such as co-speech gesture, gaze, bodily hexis, dress, and so on). Such
an engagement is always a matter of cause and effect: How the utterances
that occur bring about what we experience of coordination – and
Message & Indexicality
dis-coordination! – in social life. This cause-and-effect “bringing about” is,
from a semiotic perspective, a mode of what Charles Sanders Peirce termed
indexicality.
To grasp the workings of indexicality, we have to abandon the common
folk notion of the communicative event as a kind of tennis match, viewed
from the stands, with the ball (message) going predictably between (ide-
ally) the two participants. This image is misleading: As a participant in
everyday interaction, you don’t “see” social life – you experience it from
the “inside,” as a player, so to speak, moment by moment, as a process, an
unfolding. One needs to find an analytic standpoint from which to view
the “action” in a way that is alive to, but not limited by, the perspective of
an interested “player.” This processual approach is what I have called “the
sign’s eye view” of communicative events; particularly relevant for us here
is how, from the sign’s eye, semiotic activity indexes (invokes or points to,
presupposes or entails) features of its own context (“speakers,” “receivers,”
“codes,” “channels,” and so on – the very variables stipulated by the ball-
tossing folk model). Individuals inhabit roles relationally, one with respect
to another, so that we must overcome whatever asymmetries we may
imagine in folk terms (for example, that individual A “says something
to” individual B, making it seem very much that A is an agentive doer and
B merely a slug of a target at which the verbal missile is directed).
In fact, and as pictured in the interaction between the Pharaoh and his
interlocutor in the Introduction, mutual coordination in one or another
way is the necessary condition of social consequentiality. The plane of
textuality is the co-constructed medium of interaction, not the net across
which we “lob” messages. And frequently, whatever message occurs
when A “says something” to B, we don’t know its actual – or even its
conventional – consequentiality until and only as B “says something back”
to A of a particular sort, revealing in this follow-up segment (a second pair-
part of an adjacency pair in the terminology of Conversation Analysis)
what must have been the case between A and B in the earlier segment of
event-time. So not only do the most carefully intended or strategized
purposive acts fail – one hopes not this discussion – they can go astray
in all kinds of ways because actants like A and B are at particular moments
not mutually coordinated as mutually presupposable social types, as we
saw, for instance, in the example of “taking out the trash” from
the Introduction.
What, then, is indexicality in language-in-use? To get an initial intuitive
feel for it, let us direct attention to Figure ., a more complex elabora-
tion – but also transformation, as we’ll see – of the folk model of
Lecture : Text
Figure . Dimensions of a communicative event.
Elaborated from Jakobson and adapted from Silverstein a:; used with permission.
communication mentioned earlier, as more schematically laid out in
Roman Jakobson’s () famous paper “Linguistics and Poetics.” (Dell
Hymes drew heavily on this paper and its schematizing of the speech event
to develop his “ethnography of speaking/communication.”)
In contrast to the image of a tennis match, think of this as an abstract
schema: All of the components of this schematic representation of a
communicative event are potentially present as indexable in a single
Message & Indexicality
moment of interaction; any of them may be pointed to by the sign
activity underway. But it is important to understand that such “compo-
nents” of the speech situation are not primordial, but instead are indexi-
cally realized phenomena projected by the unfolding of signs, which either
indexically presuppose such “components” as part of the intelligibility of the
sign, or creatively entail them by the sign’s occurrence. The in
this diagram is equivalent to the token word- and expression-forms that
occur – that is, that are perceived to be present – in events of commu-
nication; the stipulates any regularities by which pairings of
form-types with denotational concepts are immanent in the way parsable
messages can correspond to the semantic denotata (represented as the
undifferentiated in Figure .), that is, how sign-types under-
lying sign-tokens bear what philosophers term “senses” by virtue of their
mutual distributional systematicity. The denotational message thus (co-)
occurs as such in its relevant (s) of transmission only by
presuming upon the existence of a grammar by which it is (in)formed
and upon the existence of a denotational universe in which an entity or
state of affairs can be determinately differentiated in-and-by use of some
expression-form that one can evaluate as by-degrees “appropriate” to so
doing in the moment (and, by inscriptional techniques, at some
future point).
It is important to note that the message qua denotational communica-
tion bears an indexical relationship to any grammatical principles defining
whatever regularity the message manifests in-and-by occurring; the mes-
sage, if normatively con-form-ing, presumes upon (indexically presup-
poses) its principles of internal structuration. This underlies our ability,
as either prescriptive or descriptive grammarians, to use terms like “[+ani-
mate] Noun” or “DP” (determiner phrase), et cetera, whether as explicit
[“surface”] or implicit [“underlying”] distributional categories. As well, the
message bears an indexical relationship to its corresponding determinate
referent.
But, as the diagram suggests, these are not the only indexical relation-
ships contracted between a message – or any parsed fraction of a message –
and other dimensions of communication. Indeed, the diagram is useful
because it makes explicit many co-occurring dimensions. The total set of
such co-occurrences – indexical relationships – has traditionally been called
the of any isolable message (or message-fraction); the latter
(the message) can thus, by contrast, also be termed the precipitated
(a term especially – traditionally – used for messages of complex internal
structure).
Lecture : Text
The componential view given by the diagram usefully draws our atten-
tion to the many possible dimensions of an event. But it is also deceptive,
as is the folk view, given that the diagram obscures the dynamic nature of
speech events: the diagram is a frozen snapshot of the scope or “extent” of
the message. For, in fact, events are neither static nor pre-given, but rather
constituted by the dialectical relation of text and context. Indeed, one
conundrum of the componential view is the very question, what and
under what conditions is an event? To answer this question is to see
how text and context are constantly in a dynamic process of relational
becoming and interchanging by reciprocal determination (more on
this below).
For this reason, it has become customary to speak of the coordinated
processes of entextualization and contextualization. By entextualization
we mean the way that any message-segment comes to constitute part of a
more complex “textual” organization at every phase of a discursive inter-
action. As we can now see: by “message” we really mean any fraction of an
emergent entextualization. By contextualization we mean the way the
message-fractions in such a text are incrementally involved in indexical
relations that point beyond the text to an ever “thickening” context of
describable co-occurrents. Insofar as something about the form of the
message indexically signals (invokes, points to) one or more other aspects
of what, as a shorthand, we can say “surrounds” or frames it, we know that
message-form indexes not merely regularities of grammar as described
earlier, but other conditions of the form-token’s use.
For example, who – that is, sociologically speaking, what definable type
of individual or even biographical individual – seems to be inhabiting the
relational role of for some phase of a communication, and who
the role of , with consequences for how a message is formed
and/or what it denotes? (And, of course, not all interactions are dyadic; this
is a simplification.) Observe, also, that in only a vanishingly asymptotic
way does any message emerge from an abstracted “voice from nowhere,”
that is, from an individual inhabiting the role of sender without any
further identifiability as a kind of social person. How is such a person/
persons recruited to – there is the technical sociological term – the role of
speaker? How are persons recruited to the role of receiver or addressee?
Note that schemata of social differentiation (e.g., identity types) are
presumed upon, that is, indexically pointed to, in terms of which we may
be able to discover recurrent conventions for why So-and-So is or is not an
expected, unremarkable inhabitant of the relational role at the moment in
discursive-interactional space-time in which we are interested. One can
Message & Indexicality
also ask: Is there someone inhabiting the role of /,
the social characteristics of whom determine which of a set of alternative,
though semantically equivalent, forms occurs? With attention to local
socioculturally relevant space-time schemata that “locate” events of discur-
sive interaction, when – at what , schematically speaking – does a
message occur (for example, in relation to the event or state of affairs a
message denotes), and where, in what relevant scheme(s) of ,
particularly in respect of the locational topology of role inhabitance of
some referent in relation to sender, receiver, audience, et cetera in the
ongoing configuration of a communicative event as a text-in-context?
By introducing the diagram of co-occurrence of components or factors
in the communicative event, we have encountered the semiotic fact of
indexicality, and in particular we have suggested that any message or bit of
discourse at its instant of occurrence is indexical insofar as something
about it – its status as a sign-vehicle or semiotic form points to a meaningful
and interactionally relevant condition of one or more of the other compo-
nents of the communicative event. Indeed, a form may point to aspects of
the communicative event not listed in this diagram, and possibly “present”
only as virtual projections made by the participants – for instance pointing
to previous events, event-types or to genre expectations, cultural knowl-
edge of various sorts – thus not “present” at all until invoked in some way
by a participant. (In later lectures we will call this interdiscursivity.) And if
we maintain what I term the “sign’s eye view” of the communicative event,
and reject the supposedly external folk theorizing, then we see that the
“context” of any “text” is known only by following such indexical relation-
ships as they unfold over event-time. Indeed, such relationships constitute
the event as an event. The sign’s eye view points the analyst beyond the
spatially and temporally bounded image of event that is perhaps suggested
by the abstract diagram even as it gives the analyst a potential criterion by
which to answer the question of whether or not there’s an event here.
This all sounds easy, but has no empirical oomph; it leaves us with a
wonderful philosophical construct-in-principle, but if the text/context
relationship is constantly changing, isn’t indexicality a rather unworkable
and gooey idea? Recall that as we follow a discursive interaction, a social
interactional event mediated by language-in-use, we always observe the
thickening, gelling, or solidifying relationship of what seems to have been
uttered and the consequent state of social relations over the course of social
interactional event space-time. How may we see these kinds of facts in an
analytically useful way, so as to be able to make some interpretative claims
(the fancy word is hermeneutic) about what is happening in an event of
Lecture : Text
discursive or other semiotic interaction? Here are two metaphors that
might be useful to us in contemplating the problems of what might seem
like bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion in the realm of sociocultural indexicality
(certainly a horror to the usual linguist-on-the-street, all too often untrained
in any of the social or behavioral sciences).
We have already encountered the first metaphor in the Introduction:
pantomime. When we watch a mime, what is the semiotic going on?
Pantomime exemplifies the twin processes of entextualization and contex-
tualization, and the interplay of iconicity and indexicality, through the
internal coherence of its actions and its building of an event or “context”
away from the immediate performance. As we saw, the performance
consists of lots of bodily movement, not even requiring props, and from
that bodily movement the mime’s addressees fill in – they hypothesize and
thus understand – the framing conditions in which such bodily movement
makes purposive-functional sense. The bodily movement is the flow of
indexical sign behavior that iconically mimics – “mimes” – the bodily
movements indexically appropriate to and effective in some imaginable
and, if communicatively successful, actually reconstructable social actional
event (a “text”) involving all of the conditions that would frame such an
event (its “context”). Understanding, for example, who – that is, sociolog-
ically, what social type or intersection of social types with what affective
orientations to the interaction – is our addressee, our audience, et cetera
over the course of interaction is just such a concurrent indexical function
of discourse, as well as understanding what kind of purposive-functional
interactional text seems to be happening. Neither people nor situations
come pre-labeled in all respects, although some highly scripted events such
as weddings, court proceedings, and other rituals approach this, as we will
later see. Generally, however, it is up to the participants to fill in all this
information even for unnamed and indeed – except for technical discourse
like ours – unnamable things we do in self- and other-definition with an
astonishing uniformity and alacrity.
So think of all of the latent indexical functionality of behavior, including
utterance-behavior, as the metaphorical bodily movements of the mime.
And think of what emerges in the way of individuals being able mutually
to calibrate each other and coordinate in an interactional context as their
success in building a frame of intersubjective understandings of the social
“reality” in which they mutually present themselves. Note that what we are
interested in as social scientists is, in fact, the degree to which people can
do so and do do so on the basis of socio-historically specific, local
sociocultural norms and experiences which they rely upon and which have
Deixis & Denotation
no necessary dependence on what J. L. Austin famously called explicit
primary performativity, as we will see in the next lecture.
The second metaphor is salad dressing. A well-mixed salad dressing,
consisting of liquid oil and a water-based flavoring, is an emulsion, in
physical chemistry terms. Tiny droplets of the less physically dense liquid
are distributed throughout the matrix of the more physically dense one.
Now you know about oil and water in the folk saying: they don’t mix. So
in fact some of the classic ways of making salad dressing involve a
substance that helps the emulsion keep in emulsion-state, like mustard,
or paprika. If we look back at our diagram of the components of a
communicative event in Figure ., noting that co-occurrence of all of
them means that everything indexes everything else, then at first, horrified,
glance, it’s like a salad dressing in suspension state – everything mixed
together with no way of distinguishing what is the “message” here, the
continuing stuff the significance of which is a key to our being able to solve
the pantomime problem and be social actants and/or hermeneuts. Now, in
the realm of actual salad dressing, even with an emulsifier, if you set down
the vessel containing the well-mixed dressing for a sufficiently long time, lo
and behold – over time the emulsion separates with a sharp meniscus, a
boundary between substances, the low-specific-density substance on top,
the high-density substance below.
From the point of view of indexicality in our socially consequential
communicative event, coming to clarity as, respectively, a message or
“text” in projectively understood sociocultural “context” is like that state
of separation of the components of the salad-dressing emulsion. That’s
why, as you will see as we progress with our story over the next couple of
lectures, I will introduce our more realistic and processual understanding
of how social interaction works, on the basis of two coordinate or reciprocal
processes, what we called above entextualization – coming to count as
message-form over a stretch of interactional event – and contextualization –
coming to interpretative clarity as the state of context that frames or makes
indexical sense of the text. We are always looking to understand the emer-
gence of entextualization/contextualization in-and-at a particular moment
of realization.
Deixis and Denotation
Mimes and emulsion are useful for envisioning entextualization and con-
textualization, but there are more analytical procedures that reveal these
processes and to which we must therefore attend. As everyone who uses a
Lecture : Text
language intuitively knows, the normative, unproblematically acceptable
message-form with unproblematic contextual “appropriateness” and deno-
tational interpretability depends on – and thus has an indexical meaning
pointing to – the ever-shifting contextual conditions; as well, message-
form is, normatively, a token instantiation – and thus index – of
the contextual factor immanent in all denotation, namely grammar. All
of the study of contextual variability, no matter the particular disciplinary
name by which it is known and through which it is pursued – sociolin-
guistics, interactional linguistics, discourse functionalism, “critical” dis-
course analysis – is thus concerned with the pragmatics, the indexical
relations, of messages/texts in relation to the dimensions of their contexts.
Such approaches, ultimately, rely on the special tripartite relationship of
grammar – message – referent (denotatum) that is a kind of self-
limiting, abstract and idealized pragmatics of Enlightenment folk theory
and its disciplinary unfoldings. This tripartite focus leaves out, however, as
we argued above, a subsidiary study of grammatico-semantic regularity
that, because it is processual, is forever incomplete and emerges in the
wider pragmatic terms that encompass the wider “sign’s-eye view” of the
context in which it occurs.
Consider deixis, manifest in deictic linguistic categories. Deixis is a
special kind of indexicality – denotational indexicality – which will be
central in understanding everyday entextualization and its effectiveness in
the social work of discourse.
Most deictic (indexical-denotational; “shifter” [Jakobson ()])
categories – for example, Tense, Mood, Evidentiality associated with
predicating functions; Locus, Person, Coreference associated with referring
ones – are signaled by slight, morpheme-sized chunks of message – affixes,
clitics, et cetera – or lexical simplexes. Here, then, there, now, I, you, just
to name a few. Such forms pass by quickly as a phase of the communicative
event, but indexically anchor whole stretches of the message of which they
appear as constituent parts definable by the overall grammatico-semantic
parsing (such as phrasal projections of nouns and even clauses or other
typical projections of verbs) over the duration of which these context-
specifying indexed dimensions remain constant and relevant to the mean-
ing of the message-segment containing them. Grammarians frequently
have spoken of such deictics as binding operators “having scope over”
such a constituent of grammatico-semantically parsed message-form in
which they occur or with which they are in construction, in the sense
that, insofar as the larger constituent projects into a fraction of a propo-
sitional meaning, the deictic form anchors that meaning in a determinate
Deixis & Denotation
Figure . Schema of deictic topology of spatial regions.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced from Silverstein a, figures and
. This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
way by characterizing a particular referent and/or state of affairs as a
function of factors obtaining in the context of communication. So deictics
characterize entities on the plane of denotata – summarized in the single
term “referent” in the diagram – insofar as they are related in particular
ways to something about the components of the communicative situation.
In general, deictics superimpose on the communicative situation a topol-
ogy of regions within an overall quality-space – the basic one being a two-
way distinction of and not- – that clusters the referent and other
component(s) within that topology. Consider Figure . for English
spatial deictics here and (over) there.
So-called “Demonstratives” denote a referent of the phrase in which they
occur (in some languages, possibly comprising a nominal phrase by itself )
within a radial topology centered on the socio-spatial location of the
individual inhabiting the role of speaker: “distal” Demonstratives locate
the referent beyond a certain boundary (which can be made more precise by
invoking a specifically denoted framework, and even numerical degree
within such a framework); “proximal” Demonstratives, by failing to
invoke such a boundary, place the referent within a region close by. Note,
in this connection, the “presentational” use of the English “proximal”
Demonstrative this with hypo-stressed and pre-stressed-syllable low
tone for introducing a topic-worthy denotatum for the first time in some
vernacular ways of narrating – as in, “So this gúy comes up to us on the
Lecture : Text
SERIALITY VS. NON-SERIALITY [=“simultaneity”] of event-intervals in ‘Tense’ categories
‘past’ Tense [ … [ . ]En …] > [ . ]Esp =ref
non-‘past’ Tense
‘future’ Tense [ . ]Esp =ref >. [ … [ . ]En …]
non-‘future’ Tense
Key: En = Narrated Event; Esp=Event of Speech (or, Narrating event); ref=reference time
Figure . Structure of tense in two-term systems (past/non-past, future/non-future).
street” – which “brings close” (i.e., presents) some yet-to-be specified new
information. Here, note how the proximal (‘not-’) deictic has a wider
functional range than the distal deictic that.
Similarly, consider Tense (Figure .), which is minimally a two-way
distinction of a “” and a “non-.” Tense indexically locates the
predicated event or state of affairs projectable from a finite clause in which
the Tense marker occurs: for “” in an interval that serially precedes
the interval being experienced in-and-at the event of communicating that
clausal stretch of message; for “non-,” by contrast (and precisely akin
to the “proximal” deictic), vulgarly identified as “present” Tense, any
other kind of interval in non-serial relation to the communicative event
(in two-category systems), for example concurrent, concurrently expected,
or recurrent and hence including the concurrent (thus: “true present,”
“future,” and “habitual”).
So, in English, the Tense form is a suffix or equivalent on the main-
clause inflected verb “A man whistled while walking down the street,”
while the pragmatic meaning of ‑ed signals that the proposition “a man
whistle- while walking down the street” is to be evaluated for Truth/Falsity
in an interval preceding that experienced during the utterance of the
text-sentence “A man whistled while walking down the street.” Tense
systems with three contrasting members grammatically distinguish both
the vectorially “prior-and-non-concurrent (past)” from “subsequent-and-
non-concurrent (future)” from the residual “concurrent (present)”; more
complicated systems are documented as well.
Denotational Text
And note how the deictics of Evidentiality, indexing the Sender’s basis
for predicating some state of affairs, whether by having been the Receiver
of a communication (by someone else), the Experiencer of some percept,
et cetera, implies that the current communicative event in which the
Sender asserts something is itself a consequence of an earlier one with a
definite and different role structure. It is of the essence in gossip, which
interdiscursively indexes a chain of metapragmatic discourses, as we will
see later on in Lecture in Don Brenneis’s material from a Fijian village.
Denotational Text
Coming to an interactional event, we frequently have nothing but the
vaguest idea of who – remember, sociologically speaking, what identifiable
recruit to role relationality – inhabits the various roles, and to what end.
Nor do we often have much of an idea about what we should be paying
attention to in the coded “message” from which we must project purposive
and latent indexically revealed frames. As analysts of social life, we should
be reassured at least to this extent, that the participants in events of social
action have the same task, except that they have generally internalized the
knowledge as part of enculturation and socialization. We wish to make this
knowledge external.
In everyday life, a denotational text that comes into being during such
interaction ritual is a socio-spatio-temporal object that can very roughly be
related to what is being communicated or “said” against a backdrop of
rules of verbal structuration (grammar). However, the denotational text is
not to be confused with a model of so-called “literal meaning” of words
and phrases in sentences, nor certainly with any of the other sentence-
focused creations of twentieth-century linguistic semanticists and analytic
philosophers (in later lectures, we will diagnose such doctrines through
what we call the [post-]Lockean rectangle). We have long known that
these concepts are at best unworkable, and at worst incoherent, as useful as
they are to certain Enlightenment projects, such as building automata. No;
the denotational text is a co-textual structuring of signs in the interactional
here-and-now that comes into being as the “poetic” or metrical organiza-
tion of semiotic material involved in referring and predicating. It is the
differential “how” of what is being communicated that anchors – that
allows – the contextualizing indexing of identity.
Metricalization is the chunking of discourse into turns, parallelisms,
discourse markers, and other modes of signaling units and their bound-
aries, as well as into deictically mediated orderings of denotation that have
Lecture : Text
the force of conceptual metricalizations. As will be clear by now, one parses
and analyzes what counts as denotational text in a very different way from
what one might do if logical coherence or grammatical formedness were
what counts in relation to interaction. Where grammar involves relation-
ships of ordinality, that is, things occurring before or after one another, as
“first in phrase,” “second in phrase,” “third syllable from the end of a
word,” metricalization, by contrast is all about cardinality, that is, forms
occurring as equivalent units for repetition and elaboration. Denotational
information appears to be metricalized – given poetic form in a dimensio-
nalized measure space – by deixis, rhythmic units, two-part so-called
adjacency pairs, among other linguistic forms.
Working through a couple of concrete examples of the poetics of
entextualization/contextualization is the best way to clarify what is at issue.
In later lectures, we will come to understand how, through the machinery
of language, even two relative strangers come to interact as mutually
“visible” identities with outlooks and attitudes created in the course of
saying/doing things with words in a process that will be made interpreta-
tively visible to us. Below, however, I have chosen a text as illustration that
seems at first glance like a monologue, in order to focus on and highlight
the ubiquitous workings of denotational text: a narrative of a “danger-of-
death” experience. Even this apparent monologue, however, can be seen to
involve several “voices” – enactments of different characters/speakers – and
was itself located within a discursive interaction, as all denotational texts
are. The particular interaction that we look at below was labeled with
the metapragmatic term interview, so involving at least two speakers and
some simple question–answer sequences. This material was an “answer.”
Nevertheless, the focus here will be on how even a single speaker’s narrative –
analyzed as denotational text – is chunked and metricalized in ways that
reveal complex social indexicalities.
But first, a methodological note with conceptual implications. In order
to fix our specimens for analysis, we students of the social life of language
make recordings of events of language use, and then we transcribe such
recordings in fine detail in order to study at analytic speed what was, in the
real-time of interaction, flying by in words, facial and other body cues,
bodily alignment and orientation shifts, et cetera. In addition to fine-
grained linguistic analysis, we also generally get native language users’
reactions to and understandings of specific contributions to the interaction
that may be salient to them; this sharpens, but does not determine, our
analytic account. Through collecting as well as collating people’s reflective
sense of appropriateness and effectiveness of various denotational-textual
Indexicality & the Poetics of Deixis
forms in imaginatively interrogated contexts, we can begin to get a sense of
the differential indexical meanings, the pointings-to-context (what aspect
of context?), of (potentially or virtually) contrasting forms, the forms in a
pragmatic paradigm (that is, a contrastive paradigm of indexical forms).
In the case of the interaction in academic or related contexts by speakers of
educated American English, we can serve as our own consultants in this
respect, short-circuiting the usually required fieldwork. But even in famil-
iar cases, the transcription process – as many have noted – is already a
projectively analytical one, saturated with conceptual/theoretical and polit-
ical assumptions. Different kinds of transcription are called for, depending
on the goals of analysis. As we move through the transcript below, I will
specify how and why I have presented the written representation of this
text so as to do the analytic work necessary for our purposes here.
Indexicality and the Poetics of Deixis in a Denotational Text
Decades ago, when she was working on William Labov’s studies of
Philadelphia English in the s, the late Deborah Schiffrin () spoke
with sociolinguistic interviewees in the working-class and ethnic northeast of
the city. In the standard variationist interview, one asked “Was there any time
that you felt in danger of your life?” under the problematic notion that affective
involvement yields “vernacular” pronunciations uncontaminated by any self-
consciousness. A young woman being interviewed responded to this question
with a narrative (the first pair-part’s “answer”), as rendered in Figure ..
Observe how in Figure ., the text has been transformed and printed
in block form, stripped of any contextualizing information or of the
internal poetic structure of the text. This is the conventional printed way
of reproducing a denotational text in a text artifact, an object which, when
semiotically encountered, stimulates the “reader” to reconstruct it. But
depicting it in this way hides the very systematicity we are after. To get at
this systematicity, we begin by looking at this material as a denotational
text, following the deixis, the metricalization, and, ultimately, the subtle
and complex voicing of both a current / and others, as
well as a remembered (“”). As we’ll see, doing so reveals
that lurking inside the way we understand or model or interpret this
narrative as a denotational text, there also unfolds role-relational complex-
ity via a metrical structure that we can lay bare so as to reveal the complex
interactional function of the material.
In my re-transcription (Figure .), note how I use left-to-right placement
of material and columnar arrangement of this material item-under-item to
Lecture : Text
Figure . Response to danger-of-death question, Schiffrin interview.
From Michael Silverstein, “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of Discourse,” College
English Vol. , No. (), figure . Copyright © by the National Council of Teachers of
English; used with permission.
01 So we were in THIS CAR
02 an’ we were in Allentown,
03 it’s real dinky,
04 an’ it’s like real hick town
05 off o’ Allentown
06 right around there
07 in THIS FACTORY.
08 We just pulled into THIS LOT,
09 it just x was in THIS LOT,
10 and all of a sudden the buzzer sounds,
11 and ALL
12 THESE
13 GUYS come out,
Figure . Re-transcribed Schiffrin interview, lines –.
Adapted from Michael Silverstein, “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of
Discourse,” College English Vol. , No. (), figure ; Copyright © by the National Council
of Teachers of English; used with permission.
Indexicality & the Poetics of Deixis
highlight visually the metricalization that emerges from repetition and
parallelism (Silverstein a, a). In addition, I use typeface and color
to pick out specific dimensions of metricalization, whether of a semantic
class of items, particular deictic paradigms, et cetera. I draw lines between
apparent narrative episodes that are segmented as well with what Schiffrin
() terms discourse markers, deictics that also contribute to how
denotational text as segmented projects into adjacency pairs and other
contours of interactional text. As we follow along, you will see what my
interpretative “theory of the text” is, how it emerges over the course of
narrative event-time.
The narrative begins with scene-setting, using the predicate be-, so as to
introduce the sedentary state of multiply enclosed or framed circumstances
in which the crew found themselves. Note the past tense and the presenta-
tional “this” introducing a new denotatum in the first line. (Indeed, each
specification of location in the narrative, including the vehicle as an enclo-
sure, uses the recurrence of the presentational deictic form this.) Note the
whole parenthetical [right margin] that makes more precise where this
incident took place (lines –). Observe the topography: in a car, in a lot
surrounding a factory building, somewhere near Allentown. For those of
you who have never experienced Pennsylvania, note that Allentown is an old
and relatively small industrial city in the generally blue-collar Lehigh Valley
in the east, about fifty miles north-northwest of Philadelphia, not far in
distance but very distant in culture and lifestyle: There is a social geography
in this ethno-geography. It is already clear as well that the speaker is speaking
vernacular non-standard American English, where the form that is used to
introduce the denotatum, this car, indexically contrasts with the decidedly
persnickety form, a (certain) car, that belongs to our standard – even
academic – register. Already a vast amount of identity work, thus, has been
performed in-and-by beginning to locate the narrated event with respect to
the conditions of the current event of communication: two youngish white
ethnic Philadelphians in conversation about something that happened in or
around – eew! – Allentown.
Continuing with the transcript, note there is a vivid shift to the
“historical present” (in red in lines , ) – that is, the buzzer sounding
to the consciousness of the narrated individual at the time and in that
place, and note how “these guys” – plural of the presentational this guy –
“come out” (itself a proximal deictic verb) because the factory shift-change
buzzer has sounded.
Note in Figure . the shift back to narrator’s deixis, after this vivid
observation by the remembered “I” (line ). At this point, the scene-setting
Lecture : Text
14 and we didn’t know what t’ do,
15 ’cause we were stuck.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16 So we asked
17 SOME
18 GUY t’come over
19 an’ us x help.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20 So he opens the car,
21 and everyone gets out
22 except me
23 and my
24 girlfriend.
25 We were in the front
26 and we just didn’t feel like
27 getting out.
28 And all of a sudden these sparks start t’ fly.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Figure . Re-transcribed Schiffrin interview, lines –.
Adapted from Michael Silverstein, “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of
Discourse,” College English Vol. , No. (), figure . Copyright © by the National Council
of Teachers of English; used with permission.
and rather static state of things, in the past tense, resumes: the crew “didn’t
know what to do” inasmuch as they “were stuck” (line ). The narrator is
explaining the predicament to Schiffrin, as much as narrating a story,
motivating the affective state of increasingly apprehensive helplessness at
that earlier time, and thus the past tense is useful at this point in
the interaction.
Beginning a new episode with the discourse marker “So,” the crew stuck
in the vehicle “asked” (line ) – a metapragmatic report – a favor of some
random one of the workers exiting the factory to get to vehicles in the
parking lot, denoted here by some guy (lines –) – an alternative to
this guy, meaning whomsoever, that would equivalently have introduced
this new focal denotatum. Note how the narrator again shifts back to
present at this point (line ) as this fellow “opens” the door causing
everyone else to flee except the narrator and her girlfriend, the parenthet-
ical describing the remembered mood in a past tense (in blue; lines –)
Indexicality & the Poetics of Deixis
appropriate to the metricalization here. And then more perceptual reality,
all of a sudden sparks flying to the remembered consciousness narrated
with the by-now-expected present tense (marked in red) of deictic trans-
position (line ). She continues as shown in Figure ..
What follows, again marked off with the discourse marker “so,” is a
dialogue between the driver of the automobile and the would-be mechanic
(lines –). And then, again all of a sudden (line ) to the reanimated
consciousness of the (current) narrator, the experiential reality (present
tense, in red) of being in the front seat of the auto when the would-be
mechanic “gets in the car, sits down and starts to turn on the motor” (lines
–)!
Note the repetitive reports – parallelisms – of what the recalled self was
thinking (lines –), the close-to-perception – sight, smell – of the
intruder, and then the report of the actual thought responding to
Schiffrin’s query about close-to-death experiences: “an’ we thought, ‘that
was it!’” (line ). But “he got out” (line ), narratively concluding the
incident in the canonical past tense (in blue) anchored in the interaction
with Schiffrin, “after a while.” One can now observe both relief and a
release of narrative tension and a return to the interlocutory self of
the interview.
A brilliant, highly structured denotational text. Or at least it is revealed
as such, once we look for the “poetics” of the denotational text: the
repetition of presentational “this”’ car, factory, lot; the parallelism of
metapragmatic verbs “say” and “thought” over the whole narration; the
repetition of “guy[s]” and of “all of a sudden”; and, most importantly, the
alternation of historical present and past tense. This example shows how
effective deictic paradigms are in chunking or structuring the emergent
text, revealing a seemingly unitary narrative into a multiplex unfolding and
intertwining. Note how at every point in the emergence of this denota-
tional text, in the here-and-now of this telling, the structure of what was
previously uttered became part of the context for what was then being
added to the information conveyed. This is a special text-internal relation-
ship we term co-textuality. Further note that, as shown in my overall
diagram of the material examined, we can represent the overall co-
textuality as a beautiful ultimate structure, much as we can diagram the
internal morphosyntax of a finished sentence-type. But there is a key
difference: Such a diagram is abstracted from the crucial fact that co-
textual structure emerges over the space-time experience of discourse; my
diagram, by contrast, is a model of an emergent structure. It never ceases to
amaze me how complex and powerful must be the computational production
Lecture : Text
29 So the girl says,
30 “Look, you x do know what you’re doing?
31 Because
32 you know um …
33 this is not my car,
34 an’ if you don’t know what you’re doing,
35 just don’t do it.”
36 And he says,
37 “Yeah, I have t’do it from inside.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
38 And all of a sudden
39 He gets in the car,
40 sits down,
41 and starts
42 to
43 turn on the motor.
44 We thought
45 he was taking off with
46 us.
47 We thought x really
48 he was,
49 he was like rea—
50 with all tattoos and smelled,
51 an’ we thought [“]that was it![”]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
52 But he got out after a while.
Figure . Re-transcribed Schiffrin interview, lines –.
Adapted from Michael Silverstein, “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of
Discourse,” College English Vol. , No. (), figure . Copyright © by the National Council
of Teachers of English; used with permission.
and interpretation mechanisms of mind on which this depends, constantly
at-the-ready to revise an emerging denotational text in their hermeneutic –
interpretive – operations of entextualization/contextualization.
Indexicality & the Poetics of Deixis
Further notice that while this denotational text seemingly entextualizes a
monologic narrative, the dense poetic complexity of deixis and deictic
transposition creates two represented subjectivities, two deictic points-
from-which – origines [sg., origō-] – events are projected, the current
here-and-now remembering “I” and the then-and-there remembered
“I/me” in the conversation with Schiffrin, a represented virtual dialogue
of recuperated consciousness in the past and to the present, itself, impor-
tantly, embedded in an actual interactional dialogue with the interviewer.
Indeed, more is happening here than denotational text. There is what
we have been calling an interactional text emerging. Just as evident as the
text’s internal poetic structuring of denotation is that the narration is
designed as a second pair-part response to the “danger-of-death” question,
and oriented to a listener identified from Philadelphia vis-à-vis whom the
speaker locates self, by disalignment with Allentown, as not the sort of
person who would live in such a place. It is certainly not to be dismissed
that the interview took place in a white working-class neighborhood in
northeast Philadelphia, and that Schiffrin herself is a Philadelphian, as is
her interviewee. Thus, shared consciousness of Allentown, Pennsylvania’s
third most populous city (after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) with – for
Philadelphians – a negative emblematic loading could be presumed as a
dimension of the interactional context. And it serves as a geographical
landmark, note, in setting the scene of the “there-and-then” of the fright-
ening occasion the interviewee was asked to narrate.
Moreover, the narrative’s highly structured but also polished and fluent
form bears all the hallmarks of having been told before, its fluency an index
not only of a proficient teller but of possibly recoverable previous events of
telling. Thus, although tied to the moment of telling, the story is likely an
example of a familiar genre and quite possibly part of the speaker’s
repertoire of stories, so a re-telling, a re-contextualization. One can reflect
with admiration on the skill of the narrating interviewee drawing Schiffrin
in to co-experience, to mirror the affect of the reanimated moment with
which the narrator is as much in dialogue as in the interview situation she
is with Schiffrin. That, it seems to me, is a central feature of this snippet of
interview discourse, now considered not only as denotational text alone,
but as an interactional text projected from the extraordinary organization
of its forms which, as they unfold, precipitate denotational text.
In the next lecture, it is to this issue that we turn, to this question of
interactional textuality, or, what is done in-and-by discourse.
Event
Performativity (Austin) as conventionalized (metapragmatically
regimented) cause and effect. Interaction ritual in relation to full-
tilt ritual events. Adjacency-pair structures of metricalization in
discursive interaction. Explicit ritual’s “autonomous” performativity
via metricalization and other meta-semiotic tactics; hyper-meta-
semiosis and the space-time trajectory of dynamic figuration
(indexical iconicity).
In the last lecture we showed how “what is said” or conveyed in-and-by
discourse indexically presumes upon or “indexically presupposes” certain
conditions in the context of an emerging entextualization, revealed in the
emerging metrical patterns of denotational information organized by
deixis, repetition, parallelism (repetition with semantic substitutions),
and on occasion by metricalizing discourse markers (Schiffrin ) like
so, well, yeah, et cetera.
At the end of Lecture , we followed along as a denotational text, in
that instance an elicited narrative of what was claimed to be a remembered/
relived experience, came into being. At every point in the emergence of
this text, the structure of what was previously uttered by one of the
participants (i.e., Schiffrin and her interlocutor) became part of the context
for what was then being added to the information conveyed. This special
text-internal relationship is what we termed co-textuality.
As shown in my overall diagram of this narrative, we can represent
such a text’s overall co-textuality as a “poetic” structure (Jakobson
:–). Such a diagram is a model of the structure of a text, in
some ways not unlike perhaps a diagram of the internal morphosyntax of a
finished sentence-type. But it is crucially different. The diagram of the
internal morphosyntax of a sentence is abstracted from its co-textual
structure, which emerges over the speakers’ situated, real-time experience
of discourse. That emergent structure is what our diagram models.
Following Jakobson, we can say that the poetic structure of any complex
The Inadequacy of the Austinian “Performative”
message is a measure of its autonomy as a text, as opposed to its being
merely the instantiation of grammatically determinate form. As Jakobson
himself emphasized, the “study of poetic structure must overstep the limits
of poetry” (:), insofar as all discourse is poetically – that is,
metrically – patterned. By virtue of stabilizing what semiotic material is
“inside” the text and what, therefore, is “outside” of it, poetics act as what
we will call a reflexively calibrated metapragmatic function (Silverstein
a). We call this metapragmatic because it serves as a frame for the
pragmatics of discourse. We call it reflexively calibrated because it is
immanent to, and thus frames, the event of discourse in which it is
happening, though not necessarily in any denotationally explicit way.
In this lecture, I want to lay out “indexical entailment,” the context-
transforming direction of indexical cause and effect not in the realm merely
of “what is said,” but in the realm of “what is socioculturally done” or
effectuated – brought about in terms of norms of “effectiveness-in-con-
text” – so that discourse is as well the medium of moves in an interactional
text that tells us how individuals relate one to another in the events of the
social world. The lesson here is that every instance of entailing indexicality
depends upon – is licensed and regimented by, we say – a metapragmatic
(i.e., meta-indexical) function, whether discursively explicit – as we’ll see for
Austinian “performative utterances” – or implicit – as is maximally seen in
ritual, which rests on dense metricalization of all the communicative
machinery, language included, plus other “meta-” semiotic forms.
The Inadequacy of the Austinian “Performative”
Recall from the last lecture the concept of the adjacency pair, a metrical
structure linking utterances that is generated by interacting individuals
engaging one with another. Observe in Figure . how many adjacency
pairs have metapragmatic names, indicating how speakers identify the
social moves they metapragmatically ascribe to individuals in terms of
what their utterances normatively – “appropriately” – elicit in response/
respond to as elicited.
Thus, identifying some utterance form with the label invitation is
smoothly followed by something people label an acceptance, and, less
preferred, by an utterance labeled by speakers as a refusal or declination.
(The less preferred second generally triggers further adjacency-pair work,
such as elaborating reasons and modified invitation with new refusal, or
acceptance or conditional acceptance, et cetera, as we saw in our office-
cleaning example from the Introduction.)
Lecture : Event
Figure . Some examples of adjacency pairs.
Adapted from Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (, Cambridge University Press), p. , Table ..
Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.
However, very few adjacency pair-parts that we readily can label with
interpretations of what they achieve or accomplish during discursive inter-
action have the canonical grammatical formula identified by John L. Austin
(), the so-called explicit primary performative construction uttered
under properly licensed conditions. Such performative utterances – ritual
one-liners, as we can call them, such as “I promise you that I will come,” “I
bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow” – are, under the right “felicity
conditions,” strongly indexically entailing, bringing about some social effect
(or “perlocution”) in-and-by the utterance of the performative.
But notice that Austinian “explicit primary performative [EPP] utter-
ances,” as schematized in Figure ., are denotationally anchored to the
here-and-now by the personal deixis of the grammatical Agentive Subject
and Recipient (Direct or Indirect, as the case may be) Object. They also
depend crucially on the descriptor, the metapragmatic verb, which deno-
tationally describes the event in which a token of the form occurs. In doing
so, it reflexively denotes this event in which it occurs as one of the type
described by the verb. (Recall, here, the culminating EPP in a Euro-
American [Christian] wedding, which we’ll come to shortly.) In effect:
“What is now happening ought to be taken as, ought to count as an
instance of, such-and-such (whatever the descriptor stipulates).”
Of course, like any ritual act, an EPP frequently fails to count as – or, at
least, often counts differently from – its self-typifying metapragmatic verb,
so an “I warn you that . . .” construction may in fact instance a “threat,” a
descriptor that cannot, as it turns out in English, be used in an EPP
construction, though it describes a kind of social action with consequen-
tiality. There is, after all, no *“I threaten you that . . .!”
To capture this, Austin differentiated between the “illocutionary force” of
an utterance – the normative or conventional (or Legisign, as Peirce termed it)
consequentiality described by the verb in the EPP utterance – and its
The Inadequacy of the Austinian “Performative”
[First ‘Person’] – [Metapragmatic Descriptor] – (to/of) [Second ‘Person’] (– [COMP [S]])
AGENTIVE Subject ACTIVE TELIC (in)direct Object (stipulative
Min. Finite Predicate PROPOSITION)
I order you to move your automobile.
I ask of you that you move your automobile.
Move your automobile!
Key: ACTIVE = active voice; TELIC = verb whose semantics indicates the completedness of the denoted
event; COMP = complementizer; S = sentence (i.e., finite-proposition); Min. = minimal
Figure . Schema of the explicit primary performative.
“perlocutionary effect” (what actually is entailed by the utterance-act), and
retrodictively – since he endowed these utterances with a magic essence,
“force,” just like Bronislaw Malinowski’s () Trobrianders do for their
magical formulae – its possible “perlocutionary forces.” Though as you can
see, the whole matter is just really one of the possible gaps between lexically
coded normative expectation – the act-type that the verb predicates – and
what actually happens on an occasion of its use. These utterances are “explicit”
by having the canonical I – – you form, that is, they have explicit
denotation in a metapragmatic lexical word or expression, like the main verb or
predicate expression. They are “primary” because they transparently or explic-
itly describe the conventional – cosmically known – kind of act that an
utterance is supposed to instantiate; that is, they are the unmarked (unremark-
able) or regular way of accomplishing an understood move in interactional text
real-time. What is “cosmically known” in the case of an EPP, among other
things, is the semantic/denotational meaning of the verb which is part of
presupposed lexical knowledge. By combining the possibilities of primary/
non-primary, explicit/non-explicit one can create a whole two-by-two table of
possible types of consequential utterance-acts, only one small category of
which are of Austin’s explicit primary performative type (Figure .).
But is it the case that every utterance in a first adjacency pair-part position
must be, in effect, translated into an EPP for us to be able to respond in kind
with a coherent second? No. As you can see in Figure ., from the chart
made by Stephen Levinson, we actually have elaborate social knowledge of
metrical adjacency-pair structures, with an elaborate metapragmatic vocab-
ulary of descriptors, for how we come to consciousness about interaction and
its social cause-and-effect nature. And, though we can describe a particular
contribution to interaction as an act of such-and-such kind, vanishingly few
occur in the EPP form. Rather, it is the metricalization of discourse in its
Lecture : Event
Explicit Primary Performative
“Passengers are hereby warned [Institutional impersonal] to stand clear of the moving
platforms as trains enter and leave the station.”
(= “We hereby warn passengers…”)
Primary – but not Explicit – Performatives
“Stand clear of the moving platforms…!”
Non-primary and Non-Explicit Performative
“It is dangerous to stand near the edge of the moving platform.” [Hint?]
Labeling of Communicative Event-Segment
“Warning: danger at edge of moving platform!” [Signage or Recorded Verbiage; Visual
convention of ‘danger’ = Red–Orange–Yellow]
Figure . Types of performatives.
cumulative workings (or metapragmatic function, as we termed it above) –
and not transparent, denotational metapragmatic discourse – that allows us
to understand what people are doing in the way of coordinating socially.
But the situation is much worse for this Austinian “speech-act” approach,
for at least two reasons. First, if we start from EPP descriptors, the approach
provides no solution to the problem of what utterance expression might
count as an equivalent non-explicit, non-primary way of “doing [particular}
things with words,” like “promising” or “asking,” or “baptizing.” (Imagine
trying to derive the equivalence of “This salad tastes a bit flat” to “Pass the
salt” said by A to B as a first adjacency pair-part at table as a “request” for B so
to do! That is the problem this “theory” sets for us.) It cannot be solved
unless it were possible (which it is not) to develop an adequate theory of
language utterances (words, expressions, parsable constructions) that index
clear intentions-in-context of the utterers, even when not denotationally
externalized by EPP verbs (as attempted by, e.g., Grice).
This folk metapragmatics was developed by Paul Grice, another British philosopher, though one
resident in Berkeley, California, rather than Oxford. The Gricean theories of meaning-as-intention
are also empirical non-starters, retrodictive cracker-barrel ruminations about an individual speaking
agent’s both functionally clear and conventional intentionality – whatever that might mean –
operating in social context, thought up by a sociologically ignorant but highly ingenious native –
though we don’t have time to delve into these non-starters in systematic detail.
The Inadequacy of the Austinian “Performative”
Latin: uttering “ salve(te)!” as an act of greeting upon encounter > . . . >
French salut, n. > metapragmatic verb [“salu-”]er, ‘perform a “salut”’> EPP “Je vous salue!”
He harrumph-ed around the room.
[< performative act of throat-clearing as critical response]
He tsktsk-ed every problem I raised.
[< performative act of making tongue-tip click]
“Don’t you ‘Good-morning!’ me, young man! I know where you’ve spent the night!”
[< performative act of greeting by uttering a token of the phrase, good morning]
“D’oh!”
“Whatever!”
Figure . Delocutionary metapragmatics (compare with Benveniste , verbes
délocutifs).
Second, and historically, lexicalized verbal descriptors of EPPs, the core
of Austin’s focus, are constantly coming into and leaving the language
(Figure .).
Who today uses the former EPP verb quoth- any more, as in “Quoth
I, . . .”? Particular expressions, verbal and otherwise, happen to occur at any
moment in some particular language used among some particular com-
munity of practice in characteristic social acts; some of these are lexicalized
into verbal descriptors, metapragmatic expressions that denote what act
someone engages in, or can engage in. Did I catch you Googling the other
day, something you could not have been doing much more than twenty
years ago (the corporation was founded in )? Very few metapragmatic
descriptors then become EPP descriptors, as in French saluer, used in an
EPP je vous salue. But even noises are turned, with what Benveniste ()
termed a delocutionary derivation, into metapragmatic descriptors of
kinds of utterance-events with social consequentiality. In fact, in English
almost any expression or gesture can be so transformed. So, we should not
confuse the “performativity” of utterance-expressions in general – whatever
we say – with the completely arbitrary and historically contingent list of
lexical forms of EPP-usable head verbs (all hyponyms of “say,” note) to try
to build a theory of how language “works” as the medium of social action.
But if there is, in general, no direct association even of sentence-long
utterances with what they count as in the performance of socially conse-
quential acts, how can we actually study what goes on in real life? As we
noted in the Introduction, speakers have intuitions – and strong ideolog-
ically formed ones in the post-Enlightenment West – that language is just
to “talk about” the universe of experience and imagination; but if speakers
Lecture : Event
co-contribute to such talk, what emerges intersubjectively between them is
a gradually formed denotational text, a precipitated “what has been said”
by the aggregate of individuals, for example alternating as speakers. How,
however, using the tools we will develop in the analysis of ritual, does such
a denotational text as gradually precipitated come to count as – to be
consequential as – a particular interactional text, as what comes about in
the realm of social eventhood? This is the question before us in this and the
next lecture.
From Full-Tilt Ritual to Interaction Ritual
Austin’s happening to fall over EPPs, and in his hokey philosopher’s mode
trying to explain them, does remind us that for EPPs in particular to have
their indexically entailing cause-and-effect contribution to social life, sev-
eral conditions must be taken account of.
Who, by community convention, may normatively utter the formula,
denoting and affecting whom, before whom as observing or ratifying
others, and in what kind of institutionally formed event context?
Importantly, as well, there must be what Austin (:) terms “uptake”
of the act of utterance as first in a sequence of acts in what Conversation
Analysts would term one or more second adjacency pair-part acts that
indicate if and how participants and others have, in effect, understood the
performance of the utterance-formula at issue. And finally, the formula, too,
has a conventionally stipulated grammatico-lexical structure, deviations from
which may render the utterance invalid.
We should also note that EPPs are thick on the interpersonal social
ground when stakes are high in ritualized interactions, such as court-
rooms – we’ll see an example in the next lecture – and places of ritual
life-cycle transitions (Figure .), among other types of ritual – as we’ll see
later in this lecture.
This only hints at my broader argument, that the semiotics of explicit
primary performativity are a special case of the semiotics of ritual (indeed, as
Austin himself noted, rituals are often chock-full of EPPs of various sorts);
and further, that what Erving Goffman () calls “interaction ritual” and
full-tilt ritual differ not in kind but in degree. That is, that semiotically
speaking, ritual and everyday discourse share many comparable properties,
even if we do not attend to those properties in the same way. Indeed, once
we develop the analytic machinery to show how they are comparable – from
the “sign’s eye point of view,” as we put it in the previous lecture – we can
simultaneously understand the different intuitions that arise for those swept
From Full-Tilt Ritual to Interaction Ritual
Lawyerly and Courtroom (A;B) adjacency pair structures:
A: “Now I ask you, were you [in the vicinity of a brawl outside the milk-bar The Jolly Udder
on Wednesday, August 15th]?”
B: [compelled to respond in some fashion]
Compelled second adjacency pair-parts:
A: “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (so
help you God)?”
B: “I do [viz., solemnly swear …]”
Cf. marital “vows” in question–answer (QA; AB) format, where A = officiant and B =
intended spouse
Figure . Some examples of explicit primary performatives in ritualized interaction.
up into ritual (e.g., the phenomenology of ritual as “time out of time,” as
sacredly set apart from the profane; and vice versa, the “ordinariness” of
everyday discourse), such intuitions being systematic, if somewhat askew,
intuitive reanalyses of the always socio-spatio-temporally anchored dialec-
tics of entextualization and contextualization.
And indeed, by some fortuitous or serendipitous good luck, social
anthropologists and other nascent social scientists of yore – think of
Uncle Émile Durkheim and his The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life (), for example – have long looked at societies through the lens
of society’s explicitly recognized ritual events, events where the people
concerned have strong intuitions that textuality (elaborate and anxious
entextualization) is linked to – indeed, necessary to – consequentiality
(indexically entailing contextualization, a.k.a. “performativity”). So, for the
participants there is a purposive (hence, “functionally ‘efficient’”) clarity:
this ritual will accomplish or achieve such-and-such; that’s why we do it/
why I participate in it. We can locate this purposive sensibility under the
function of (ritual) discourse. For the analyst, however, there is also a
maximal functional clarity in that co-textuality (metricalization) sharply
defines a ritual text and hence its metapragmatic function, a function –
what we can call function – that undergirds but that must be distin-
guished from participants’ strategic sense of ritual function. (See
Silverstein a, , for more discussion of this distinction.)
Recall, here, the key problem: that we can study contextualization only
to the extent that entextualization demarcates co-textuality within text
and, thence, what can come to function as contextualizing in its effective-
ness. The claim in this lecture is that first, explicit rituals are hyper-meta-
semiotic – that is, they are densely simultaneously metricalized along and
across multiple intersecting dimensions, modes, and media. Second, why
Lecture : Event
ritual texts have such characteristics is that – metaphorically, of course –
these allow the ritual text to shout “I’m an autonomous text! I’m an
autonomous text!” in all kinds of ways, often producing the felt effect of
event-time-out-of-time, at least for participants, while necessarily being
deeply involved in space-time-person schemata of all sorts. Thus, ritual’s
consequentiality as an interactional text follows within the context it
indexically presupposes, generally a scheme of what I term “cosmic belief.”
Once we understand ritual entextualization/contextualization, we can go
on in the next couple of lectures to define any old denotational text and see
how it, too, projects into interactional text-in-context.
So, in thinking about “why” ritual works, we ought to keep in mind two
things: First, ritual does not always work, in fact. Ritual’s efficacy is
everywhere contingent. And second, whether ritual works or fails to work
on any given occasion, we can observe and analyze the mechanics – the
how – of ritual as a performance text-in-context, like all manifestations of
social life. But we must also keep in mind that what people locally
recognize as ritual they invest with an explicit power to transform social
life as manifested more generally, and so ritual becomes, ethnographically
speaking, a special kind of text-in-context, the “specialness” of which is, of
course, what we should seek to illuminate rather than simply assume.
Now, Austin certainly reminds us that on certain social occasions, an
individual utters a formula such as “I pronounce you husband and wife” –
in America, notwithstanding a Supreme Court decision, we are currently
still at war about whether or not “husband and husband” or “wife and
wife” can also occur in the formula, or just the term spouses. In-and-by the
utterance of the formula, under the proper circumstances – there’s the
catch – the social identities of two individuals are rendered other than what
they were before. There is ritual “efficacy” here, as not only Austin but the
natives, as it were, recognize, in that the uttering of a token (instance) of
the formula seems to map the context that existed before its utterance into
a transformed context that now exists after its utterance and, most impor-
tantly, is understood to be a consequence of its utterance. That is, the
social act of utterance seems to have a certain transformative power or
“force” – that is, when it works.
Austin, falling into extreme mysticism, tells us that “forces” – conven-
tional “illocutionary forces” and happenstance or actual “perlocutionary”
ones – suddenly arise in-and-by the utterance of such an EPP formula, and
Shazam! the “force” is causally consequential for social life. (It is no
different from the Trobriand Islanders of Malinowski’s [] account,
who understand that the garden magician, in whispering his incantations
From Full-Tilt Ritual to Interaction Ritual
over a client’s garden implements, hoe, rake, et cetera, in the middle of
the night, infuses them with growth principle – an essence – to make fat
yams at the end of the garden cycle for the person using those implements;
nor is it any different for any other kind of conventional belief in magical
forces suddenly coming into being as essences of sign-vehicle tokens/
representamina.)
I do not wish to dwell on error, because Austin is verbalizing(/making
explicit) the introspecting intuitions of the ethno-metapragmatic “folk”
interpreter of social life, not the social scientist; and while we always pay
attention to the native ethno-metapragmatic input to pragmatics, which
transforms indexicality in the dialectic of establishing the perceivable signs
of cultural value, as we will see in later lectures, I trust you see that you
cannot derive in any empirically useful way – as a student of such matters –
from EPPs a useful theory of what happens in interactional text, in English
or, more generally, in any other society and its language.
Now as Austin (:–, –) himself notes in elaborate, if
unsystematic and unscientific terms, there are elaborate preconditions on
the efficacy of speech acts. Recall the three sets of factors we noted earlier:
(a) who, by community convention, may normatively utter the formula,
denoting and affecting whom, before whom as observing or ratifying
others, and in what kind of institutionally formed event context;
(b) “uptake” of the act of utterance as first in a sequence of acts in what
Conversation Analysts would term one or more second adjacency
pair-part acts;
(c) a conventionally stipulated grammatico-lexical structure, deviations
from which may render the utterance invalid.
The preconditions are matters of what, sociologically speaking, we term
recruitment to role inhabitance on a particular institutionalized social
occasion. To recall our example of “I pronounce you husband and wife,”
we are dealing with a ceremonial occasion, that is, one recognized by
everyone in the community as a “ritual” occasion, specifically a “wedding.”
The individual occupying the role of Speaker/Sender of the message (the
“I” of the utterance) in question occupies this role – is “recruited” to it – by
virtue of being duly licensed or authorized by the state, by a church or
other collectivity of worshippers, or by both. Thus, “who” the Speaker is
really means what institutional preconditions map a determinate and
socially identifiable set of persons as the ones who can speak the formula
effectively, that is, with the power or force it can seem to have. Similarly,
we can investigate the principles of role recruitment as to who can occupy
Lecture : Event
the roles understood here to be the referents of the term you, here used
with its full etymological meaning of “Second Person non-Singular.” In
many Euro-American situations, this must be a dyad who have bureau-
cratically and in other ways registered their anticipatory intent to partici-
pate in this kind of ritual occasion as the “you” of the formulaic utterance.
Everyone in attendance already is cognizant of this. They are not a random
pair pulled off the street by the Speaker, nor indeed unprepared for the
utterance of the formula. They frequently have invited others to be
onlookers or Audience, as we say, witnesses to the culminating moment
who have been recruited to this aggregated role by invitation of the dyad in
question, their families, et cetera.
There will have been a time and place set for the ritual utterance, when
and where all of the roles will be properly inhabited in a determinate
configuration in which a central triad – Speaker and two Addressees –
become the attended-to central activity for the Audience in attendance,
marked off in ritual space-time, as it were, in some conventionally theatri-
calized staging (itself perhaps even in a sacred space). Formally walking in (a
“processional”) to take up the recruitment to role is frequently a carefully
choreographed figuration of the presumed-upon and impendingly trans-
formed social dynamics involved in a wedding. And all of this physical
activity is just a precursor to the static spatial text that allows the verbal text
to do its ritual work. For example, in a church setting, the central triad may
come to its configurative culmination in the apse or before the usual place of
liturgical exercises, with or without further Attendants in a flanking, tradi-
tionally gendered array, while the Audience will long since have filled the
pews down-and-around/behind the central activity. This general arrange-
ment is transposed even to secular enactments in various other kinds of
contexts, from courthouses to city halls to a parental backyard or rented
private club, in which a ritual processional and a ceremonial stasis precede
the ceremonial entextualization that includes the ritual utterance at
issue here (not to mention the carefully choreographed recessional as part
of the Austinian “uptake”).
We should take note of all this choreography and stasis, by the way,
because in it we already see some of what we need to get beyond Austin’s
limited sociological insight. The action-in-space-time of performing a
“wedding” in society brings individuals to be configured in certain ways
(including but not limited to the “marriage” itself ), as I have noted, having
been recruited from certain sociologically describable statuses outside the
event context of the ritual performance itself. The Speaker is an officiant
who speaks – if you pardon the pun – ex cathedra, that is, with the backing
From Full-Tilt Ritual to Interaction Ritual
of at least one organization in which his or her status exists before and
outside of the ritual. In a sense, then, this status-in-organization brings the
organization into the context of ritual performance; it makes it part of the
here-and-now of ritual performance. “In the name of our Savior Jesus
Christ and by the authority vested in me by the State of Illinois . . .”
precedes the Austinian performative formula as uttered by priests and
pastors in local churches in my state, who can speak in the name of the
divinity within the church organization and who, recognized by the state
government, have the civil power as well to transform individuals into
married dyads. It is not just anyone who can effectively utter the formula
in question, but someone who synecdochally – pars pro tota – figurates and
hence, ritually, is the church and/or state operating with the church’s and/
or state’s power of social definition and classification – and here, re-
classification in the here-and-now of the ritual.
Everyone at such a ceremony is there, we might point out, in-and-as
figuration within a dynamic drama in which a supplicating dyad, wishing
legitimation by church and/or state, with accompanying interested rela-
tives, friends, et cetera looking on, is legitimated as a social dyad of a
particular kind – think of the rights and benefits/costs that come with
marriage – in-and-by the ex cathedra utterance of the representative of the
controlling institutional collectivity or collectivities, church and/or state.
The Audience, those socially most concerned with the social status of the
supplicants, is conventionally delighted by and relieved at the outcome of
the supplication when ultimately granted in-and-by the utterance of the
formula, perhaps for many different reasons. All kinds of additional
figurations sometimes accompany, particularly figurations of “giving”-
and-“taking,” “sharing,” “earlier/former” versus “later/future,” and, of
course, dense manifestations of identities.
Let us turn, second, to Austinian “uptake.” In the immediate context,
one of the most common sequelae following the utterance of the explicit
primary performative is a public demonstration of affection, most generally
at the specific permission articulated by the officiant/Speaker still acting for
the supervening power of church and/or state: “You may kiss/embrace,” or
“You may kiss the bride” in a more sexist idiom, again an ex cathedra
license, pars pro tota, to the implied legitimation of sexuality – and of its
unfettered consequences – as a perquisite of the married state consequent
upon the occurrence of the ritual. And this done for all in the Audience to
see – and frequently applaud! (The first post-nuptial “kiss” before the
relevantly aggregated public ritually figurates what everyone understands is
to follow in private.)
Lecture : Event
Lastly consider the third factor of the text, the actual explicit primary
performative utterance, “(By the authority vested in me by . . . ,)
I pronounce you husband and wife.” Austin, you may recall, had the
expectable intuition of the native speaker that such an utterance – of
course, only when uttered in appropriate ritual-event space-time – was
quite different from the usual utterance predicating a truth about the
world, and that is why his initial guess was that there are two great classes
of utterances, the so-called “constative” and the so-called “performative.”
(He later gives this up in favor of his tripartition of locutionary – illocu-
tionary – perlocutionary acts, but alas discovers that every utterance-act,
even every erstwhile “constative” one, partakes of all three!) Yet he never
analyzed the text in any comparative detail. As it turns out, as we saw in
Figure ., universally, when such explicit primary performative utterances
occur, they have a comparable grammatico-lexical structure: “First Person,
Agentive-Volitional” grammatical Subject or equivalent; “Second Person,
Recipient/Benefactee” grammatical (Indirect) Object or equivalent; fre-
quently a complement nominal or subordinate clause denoting some
aspect of the condition brought about in-and-by the utterance; and the
head lexical verb of the formula a semantic hyponym of the verb say- with
minimal obligatory inflection to create a clause with a finite verb.
The last fact, true no matter whether one is using English or Chinook or
whatever, is very important to the grammatically sensitive. Minimal oblig-
atory inflection in the “First Person” is what we term “unmarked” (or
“zero”) inflection, the kind of grammatical marking used for purely formal,
as opposed to fully denotational purposes. In English, note that the simple
present tense form is used, contrasting with a descriptive proposition of
actually ongoing activity, such as – to continue with this verb pronounce-
– I am pronouncing you husband and wife, namely, a description of what
the Speaker-as-Referent is doing in-and-at the moment of utterance (hence
the use of true descriptive present of be- . . . -ing). But how does the
Speaker-as-Referent actually “do” or accomplish what this performative
utterance seems to do? Certainly not by simply describing the utterance-
act. The key to understanding how an explicit primary performative
utterance can effectuate a social transformation is to see that while the I
Agentive Subject and the you Recipient (Indirect) Object anchor the
utterance deictically (with indexical denotation) to the here-and-now of
the utterance context, in the EPP there is no functioning tense marking (as
in the -ing-form of the English), merely the formality of making a pseudo-
finite clause as constrained by grammatical requirements. The verb looks,
in fact, like a generic or habitual statement (compare “I pronounce
From Full-Tilt Ritual to Interaction Ritual
Bulgarian poorly”), relevantly to be evaluated as true or false whenever,
wherever. It is a statement of a law-like regularity, not a statement about
some specific occurrence such as what is going on in the here-and-now of
the ritual event. What it is communicating is, as I term it, following
Benjamin Lee Whorf ([]:), in “nomic” – generic law-stating –
relationship (or calibration) to the event in which it is uttered, rather than
a description of that event or of any other specific event. Thus, to our three
set of factors (a, b, c listed above), we add a fourth factor, that the EPP
involve:
(d) explicit metapragmatic discourse in figurated-reflexive [= “performa-
tive”], but really nomic, calibration (in English, simple present tense;
contrast I am pronouncing you husband and wife [true descriptive
present] versus I pronounce you husband and wife [nomic/generic
“habitual” with “zero” inflection]).
Under such preconditions as we have elaborated, uttering this formula
counts as performing the act/event. Given we can decipher all of the
preconditions such as I described above, what more does one need to be
able to decipher about this formula in order to understand its ritual force?
I think one needs to know four things: () first, as already noted, that
the tokens of I and of you refer to those inhabiting specific roles and
properly recruited to them. Here, “I” is the officiant invoking the authority
of some licensing organization(s), and “you” denotes the two individuals
wishing to be socially transformed; () that the expression husband and
wife denotes a generic relational dyad of kinship-status reciprocals such
that if “Y” = “X’s husband” then “X = “Y’s wife,” kinship terms being
inalienably possessed two-place relational semantic units not normally
used without explicit or at least denotationally implied possessor. As used
here, the very attempt at generic denotation of a collective dyad as the
outcome of the utterance addressed to the aggregate “you” of two individ-
uals is part of a larger idiomatic expression; () that larger idiomatic
expression, [pronounce- . . . [husband- and wife-]], meaning ‘verbally to
do [whatever this expression describes]’ is the effective performative oper-
ator here, what John Searle () would term (pronounce?) the “illocu-
tionary force indicating device.” It has a meaning parallel to [baptize-/
christen-/name- . . . [ ]], but its verb pronounce- is used for
non-proper nouns and adjectives, where its illocutionary targets are trans-
formed into instances of what is describable as a general social category
(should everything work), rather than into the referent of a specific
indexical like a proper name. Like most of our semantic knowledge, we
Lecture : Event
need only have the vaguest of intuitions of the meaning or “sense” of the
performative operator, so long as we are able to recognize new contextual
instances of its application, whether successful (effective) or unsuccessful
(ineffective) – for which all the ritual preparation is a good contextual cue;
() that an instance – a token, a replica in space-times – of this nomic or
predicatively generic grammatical expression is performed in this context
such that if we know what the expression in () means (even just to
recognize another instance) and to whom it is applying in the ritual
here-and-now, from (), then we know that this is a “wedding” here-
and-now or, as the formula makes so literally clear, a “union” of two
individuals into a single collective dyad-as-generically denotable, for which
this is the culminating transformative formula, a ritual one-liner to which
all that went before leads. And let no man [= person] rend it asunder, as
old timers used to say.
The formula, then, no less than all of the choreographed stages or phases
of the larger event (processional > configurative role inhabitance by the
focal triad of officiant and two erstwhile individuals, later a social dyad >
recessional at a wedding) is an inhabited figuration of its own social
significance as an outcome: licensed union of two individuals as a dyad
that is a recognized membership collectivity in society, itself in pars pro tota
representation by the witnessing (monitoring and reacting to)
the spectacle.
Every ritual works in this same way: by dynamic figuration. Dynamic
figuration mobilizes participants to role inhabitance by particular rules of
recruitment, enacting motion or movement in space and time across
multiple semiotic channels, including especially the verbal channel, and
that in effect diagrammatically portrays the sought-after transformative goal
or end of the event. Such dynamic figuration is a kind of indexical
iconicity – iconic (diagrammatic, in Peirce’s [Collected Papers, henceforth
CP .] terms) in that it pictorially depicts that which it indexically
enacts (in fact, entextualizes) in the emerging-in-real-time (hence,
dynamic) event of its happening for those recruited to the event. There
are three factors to keep in mind.
First, every ritual presumes upon participants’ knowledge of what I like
to term the “cosmic orders” immanent in its figurations by the very fact of
experiencing what is going on and being said, sung, danced, et cetera as
figuration (Figure .).
Cosmic orders, of course, have nothing inherently to do with astron-
omy – let alone astrology! What I am pointing to is cultural knowledge of
the normativities of the social universe, particular sectors of which are
From Full-Tilt Ritual to Interaction Ritual
Figure . Dynamic figuration in ritual.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Adapted from Silverstein a, figure . This
figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lecture : Event
relevant to particular rituals in society. In marriage in Euro-American
societies, for instance, the intuitive knowledge we have involving complex
structures of cognatic kinship – matters of consanguinity versus affinity;
individuals-aggregates-collectivities as manifest in kinship; sexuality
licensed in society versus guarded from society; state and/or church versus
individual and kin- and domestic units, even so-called “love,” erotic and
otherwise – are all key elements of cultural knowledge and its affective
orientational tugs on our psyches that are obviously being invoked by
aspects of the ritual-as-inhabitable framework of action. (Isn’t it wonderful
that one of the couple wore clothing that his/her parent wore at his/her
wedding! It makes us cry with sentiment.) They are the well from which
the very performability of ritual figuration is drawn.
Second, every ritual presumes upon participants’ knowledge of the
modalities of fixity – such as relative locations where different roles are
relationally inhabitable, such as internally complex illocutionarily-effective
formulae – which constitute at least the building blocks of the spatio-
temporally emergent “text” or textual structure (or architectonic) of the ritual
event. There is, in short, a densely intersected organization in space-time of
many highly patterned modalities of semiotic form through which ritual
participation communicates its figurations of the cosmic order. This is, in
essence, a “poetics” in the Jakobsonian (:–) sense, as we sug-
gested at the outset; that is, a simultaneous, multimodal metricalization of
an emergently determinate “inside” of a text in each of its modalities and
across all modalities that comes into being in any ritual, by which units of
accomplishment as ordered into text-segments can be measured out,
frequently seeming to induce a hierarchical clustering of partials of the
overall ritual event into phases that both participants and analysts can
experience as such. One or another of the modes of semiosis may pre-
dominate as the figurational focus in any such phase or segment, and,
scripted as all this is by dense metricalization, experiencing any current
phase of a ritual form, we know what has preceded and what will follow. In
short, ritual semiosis is densely co-textual at the same time as cosmically con-
textual, connecting both forms of indexicality being the very essence of its
mechanism. When one arrives at a wedding hearing the strains of
Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” one knows one has arrived too late to
witness the moment of ritual union, but one should be ready to participate
in the subsequent figuration of fecundity by participating in the collective
showering of the newly married couple with rice or – in a variant practice –
rose petals (which comes after the public kiss, of course and heightens its
pars pro tota ritual efficacy).
From Full-Tilt Ritual to Interaction Ritual
Third, every ritual presumes upon the connectivity of the two other
factors via the relevant role inhabitants’ participation in the event so as to
dynamically figurate, through all the partial phased figurations, the move-
ment from what is presumed upon as the initial state of things at T to
what is, if all goes well, a rather different state of things at interval-end T.
While, as just noted above, there is an overall poetics or dense metricaliza-
tion of laminated multimodalities by which we can even anticipate “what
comes next,” ritual is, when all is said and done, performed in socio-space-
time, not out of it (as some would-be mystics have it, when they reanalyze
the nomically invoked cosmic normativities, and the concomitant effect of
ritual text seeming to stand by itself, as though autonomous, which is what
rituals enact in their happening). It is a text-in-praesentia that gradually
emerges through what participants do in all the figuratively relevant
semiotic modes. Hence, ritual never just sets out “what is”; ritual takes
us from a “what has been” (before this moment in socio-space-time) to a
“what will have been” (if this ritual performance “works” as a figuration of
cause and effect).
Hence, all the anxiety about ritual efficacy is concerned with doing
things “correctly” so that the dynamic figuration constitutes a diagram of the
transformative power of what thus actually happens – i.e., in the instance,
will have happened – when everyone does his or her part over the space-
time course of ritual enactment indexically connected to the cosmic order
(we term this in Figure . the “cosmic axis” of instantiation whereby the
cosmic order is “made flesh,” rendered indexically here-and-now as the
“context”). Critique of ritual enactment, we find ethnographically, centers
on finding faults of performance to have constituted performance of a
faulty, that is, unsuccessful ritual. The bride and groom flubbed the
recitation of their vows, so the precondition for their being validly or
effectively “pronounced husband and wife” did not obtain (note the
inverse order of the binomials in such a traditional ceremony, by the
way: the first “ladies first” in a social aggregation, the second, “head of
collective household first”). In his or her preamble to uttering the perfor-
mative formula, the officiant called the groom by someone else’s name, so
he could not have been marrying the particular “you” standing before him
or her as the object of deixis in the ceremonially relevant role. Performance
of figuration traces the diagrammatic figuration of transformation that is
the essence of ritual, so that, poorly or questionably accomplished, it calls
into question the outcome (even legally, one might point out for the case
of weddings and other identity-transforming rituals). In a similar way,
garden magicians in Kiriwina are always being accused of not having
Lecture : Event
whispered the right formulae, or the complete formulae, or even any
formula of the garden magic, when the yams don’t grow big and succulent
(Malinowski )!
For the semiotically savvy ethnographer, knowledge of two realms of
this triad (social norms, or cosmic belief, and the spatio-temporal modal-
ities of ritual) points in the direction of being able to figure out the third
(the dynamic figuration of the text-in-context) in how ritual does its
sociocultural work.
As one can now understand, the entire substance – the how – of ritual
depends on iconic and indexical semiotic processes through which the
experienceable social world is transformed in some respect by appeal to
cultural presumptions about the universe. The case of the utterance of a
simple explicit, primary performative formula is a one-sentence-long ritual
text that depends essentially on participants’ sharing the knowledge of the
sense of the metapragmatic predicate. Some of these performative formu-
lae, such as [pronounce- . . . [husband- and wife-]], have elaborate pre-
conditions and “uptake” requirements as well, while many of what we
might term “everyday performatives,” such as [agree- that/to . . .], have
asymptotically vanishing non-linguistic contextual preconditions and
depend maximally on interlocutory partners to their utterance simply
knowing the verb’s sense.
Dynamic Figuration in Ritual (by Degrees)
When we look at more elaborate and indeed more public kinds of ritual
texts, we find that what facilitates performative success is not that interested
participants know the straightforward senses of words and expressions, or
the straightforward conventional indexicalities of nonverbal signs. Instead,
in keeping with the fact that ritual is figuration “all the way down,” such
figuration – operating at the level of meta-semiosis, in technical terms –
comprises the entirety of ritual. Such meta-semiosis manifests in a number
of different forms, all contributing to the overall macro-trope of autono-
mous performative power. Hence, the very ritual “text” must impress those
concerned with its effectiveness as a self-licensed and self-constructed entity-
in-space-time, deriving its power from the cosmic orders to which all its
semiotic components indexically appeal as instantiated tokens of types. The
dynamically emergent ritual “text” is built up, variously, from meta-
semantic (denotationally tropic or “metaphorical” in Peirce’s [CP .]
sense) and metapragmatic (entextualization-determining) devices, such as
we see abundantly illustrated in any greeting ritual (as we saw in the
Dynamic Figuration in Ritual (by Degrees)
Figure . Typical Wolof greeting exchange.
Adapted from Judith T. Irvine, Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (, Cambridge
University Press), pages –; Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through
PLSclear.
Introduction), especially so in the Wolof villagers’ greeting rituals in
Senegal, as described by Judith Irvine () some years ago. In this case,
a certain limited amount of contingency is apparent, as participants “manip-
ulate” the greeting ritual. In a second case, Christian liturgical service of the
Eucharist, as in other examples of full-tilt ritual, participants work hard to
try to eliminate contingency. Let us consider each example in turn.
Rural Wolof society, Irvine () tells us, is divided into a number of
hierarchically ranked caste groups, the two major groups being griots and
nobles, the former of which have as a traditional occupation praise-singing
for the latter. Such castes are ideologically associated with particular,
contrastive speech styles which, as we see below, become resources in
greeting rituals. Irvine focuses on interactional strategies associated with
actual examples of the ritual greeting against the backdrop of normative
expectations (see Figure . for an example of a typical greeting). These
are, as she terms them, “strategies of status manipulation,” that is, ways in
Lecture : Event
Form:
[1] Adjacency pair metricalization of turns - (Q/RI; A/RR)
[2] Movement through phases of metricalization
[3] Tempo – Sonority – Fluency of utterance delivery
[4] “Maussian” (1925) exchange of (greetingA B ; recompenseB A)
Dynamic figuration:
Initiator : Respondent :: lower : higher :: griot : noble :: active : passive :: wind : stone
Figure . Form and dynamic figuration of Wolof greeting ritual.
After Irvine
which an individual does indexical work to extricate him- or herself from
the expectations of this highly consequential public encounter.
If, as we note (Figure .), there is a rigid template of metricalization
built around a Question-and-Answer adjacency-pair structure, one’s posi-
tion in the utterance cycle derives, in local understanding, from one’s
position within a caste-like structure of social stratification. Nobles, need-
less to say, are higher-caste than griots, who are public speakers, pro-
pitiators of reputation and spokespersons for noble houses on ritual
occasions like weddings; thus, a griot greets (or, we should say, should
greet), while a noble is greeted (and celebrated as to lineage, deeds,
character). Griots speak sonorous, loud, rapid, elaborately metricalized
and grammatically and lexically fluent speech; nobles rasp softly and
deliberately (slowly), sometimes exhibiting disfluencies of grammar.
When a griot greets a noble, an act of upward propitiation, a recompense
is appropriately returned by the noble as a kind of “tip” for the good
words; griot verbal behavior has value within a political economy of
patronage. So goes, at least, the local understanding of speech and the
social types indexically invokable/enactable thereby.
Now, against the backdrop of dynamic figuration normal to the greeting
routine (as shown in Figure .), given the dense metricalization of the
greeting, in two-tiered structural forms that cluster the adjacency pairs into
distinct textual segments (as shown in Figure .) – like stanzas and lines
in European poetries – Irvine reports on how individuals can perform “role
distancing,” a kind of indexical editorializing on the fact that presumptions
of who – remember, sociologically what kind of person – one is are
incorrect or relationally dubious or up for negotiation, et cetera. In such
cases, one is, in effect, attempting to make the current greeting non-
canonical so that one’s relational status for whatever follows shifts accordingly.
Like a soldier stepping to the half-beat rather than the beat, thus syncopating
the metricalization of the march, one can steal one’s interlocutor’s position
Dynamic Figuration in Ritual (by Degrees)
in the adjacency-pair metricalization: before he or she knows it, he or she is
being greeted, or is greeting, in the poetry of turns! One can deliver one’s
utterances with the phonetic voice dynamics and tempo of who (or what)
one wants to be taken as in the greeting event, for example greeting in the
voice of a griot when one is a noble so as to signal indexically that little
recompense will result, et cetera. I hope you see that every greeting is a
ritual occasion for enhancing or attempting – if only for that social
relationship – to transform identity, and hence social positionality. In
doing so, one is not simply “doing things with words,” but doing things
with the meta-semiotic poetry of emergently metricalized (entextualized/
contextualized) discourse!
Note how the constrained, yet open-ended poetics of the ritual (its
metricalized adjacency pairs; the associated speech styles of speakers and of
roles [initiator, respondent]) and the contingencies involved are resources
for exploitation, for strategizing and manipulation by participants to
transformative (“performative”) indexical effect. We might contrast this
with full-tilt culturally recognized rituals whose hyper-meta-semiotics
(asymptotically) attempts to extinguish contingency by seemingly leaving
nothing to chance through their saturation of the entextualization/contex-
tualization dialectic by poetic structure.
As an example of just such a full-blown ritual, consider the Eucharist. In
this Catholic ritual, a person officiating at the service of the Eucharist
bounds off a figurational ritual space of objects at a table considered to be
an altar in the space-time of liturgical rite – wine poured from a cruet into a
chalice, wafers or pieces of bread on a paten or ceremonial plate (note the
special esoteric register for reference to the ritually important props), both
comestibles at the ritual table between him- or herself and a congregation
of co-participatory onlookers (Figure .).
He or she begins to tell the story of the Last Supper of Jesus and the
Apostles, specifically quoting in the transposed here-and-now of first-
person figural narration and, at the appropriate places for ostensive
In the Gospels, one finds the parallel narrative passages at Matthew :–, Mark :–, and
Luke :–; John :– articulates the mystical equivalences that underlie the liturgical
figuration in the Eucharistic service. For example: “And as they were eating Jesus took bread,
blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.’ Then he
took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. For this is My
blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. . . .’.” (Matthew
:–) “Then [Jesus] took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my
body which is given up for you – do this in my remembrance.’ Likewise he took the cup after they
had eaten and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you’” (Luke
:–).
Lecture : Event
Figure . The dynamic figuration of the Catholic Eucharist.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Adapted from Silverstein a, figure . This
figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dynamic Figuration in Ritual (by Degrees)
reference – pointing to the objects of the congregation’s perception and the
officiant’s narration – gesturally holding up in turn the ritual objects:
the congregants are informed that “This is my body,” and instructed
“Partake ye thereof!” and likewise “This is my blood,” “Drink ye of it!”
just as were the Apostles, according to the liturgical order of the fateful
Passover Seder (another ritual, note) that constitutes, by belief, actually
the first or authorizing occasion of the ritual in which the officiant
and congregants are participating in unbroken (indexical) chain. The
diagrammatic figuration thus is:
[In the here-and-now] Officiant : congregant ::
[At the sacred initiating moment] Jesus : Apostles.
The first is experienced, the second is part of the cosmic order of sacred
belief.
Observe, too, that the specific figurational equivalences – the ritual
baptism of objects with special names – will have been stated by someone
whose authority goes back – “indexically,” as we say – in presumptively
unbroken line to Jesus himself, via a causal chain of authorization. The
ritual action-to-follow with these now figurating signs has thus also been
given figurational value within the bounds of the ritual form. And, ritually
“transubstantiated” as these comestibles now have become, to eat and
drink, to consume or incorporate, we should say, is mystically followed by
an equal and opposite-or-greater incorporation. For as one consumes or
incorporates the host in turn, first the officiant him- or herself, and then
the totality of individual congregants, each figurationally re-sacrifices “the
lamb of God” in the “New Covenant” so as to be incorporated him- or
herself – through the figure of mutual co-participation – in the body-and-
blood of Jesus made institutional on earth, to wit, the church and its
spiritual corporation. The individual act of faith,
, figurates in the Eucharistic mystery an aggregate
becoming a collectivity “in Christ,” as one says with a pregnant metaphor
of containment made literal, such literalization being the case for metaphor
in all ritual.
This central ritual of Christian faith, moreover, is a brilliantly compact
chiastic structure of action, as classical rhetoric would see it, from the
Greek term for a marking with the letter Chi (χ), chiasmós, a crisscross
reciprocation figurating, of course, The Cross. Here, the ninety-degree
Of course, the precise nature of such transubstantiation has been a theological doctrine of some
controversial nature over the centuries, around which churches have fissioned.
Lecture : Event
Full-Blown Culturally Recognized Ritual Everyday Discourse-in-Social Context
Specialized esoteric registers > Exoteric denotational usage
Cosmogonic narrative / Structured beliefs > Default semantics of sense
Tropic denotation > “literal” denotation
Multiple parallel metrical modalities > Optional gestural reinforcement
Dense and explicit metricalization > Metricalization via deictic anchoring
HYPER-META-SEMIOTIC
∴ AUTONOMOUS TEXTUAL STRUCTURE
TEXTUAL STRUCTURE IN
IN ORDINARY SOCIAL CONTEXT
“COSMIC” CONTEXT
Figure . The textual structure of full-blown cultural ritual and everyday discourse in
social context compared.
perpendicularity of the iconic cross is dynamically figurated by reciprocal
action, a back-and-forth whereby a small ingestion figurating incorpora-
tion is tantamount to, that is, results in, a large counter-directional
incorporation into a mystical corporate union or fellowship. This is
literally an act – as in “social act” – of renewal of individual faith in the
divine, selfless, self-sacrificing agency of Jesus who became the sacrifice on
the Cross, this act the foundation for the faithful of Christianity-as-lived.
So what, then, is so semiotically special about ritual? As we have been
suggesting, performed and understood within its cultural order, a ritual is
in effect an intendedly self-grounding activity-event that compellingly
structures the here-and-now of participatory human experience as an
instance made flesh on earth – the instance a dynamic figuration – of
the universal or abstract, of the “cosmic” order upon which ritual efficacy
presumes. And how does ritual accomplish this dynamic figuration? As
Figure . summarizes, full-blown culturally recognized ritual, as we find
it, typically involves specialized esoteric registers of language, cosmogonic
narratives and structure beliefs, tropic denotation, multiple parallel metri-
cal modalities, and dense and explicit metricalization; in short, it is a
hyper-meta-semiotic that entextualizes itself as a seemingly autonomous
textual structure in “cosmic” context. By contrast, as we will see in the next
lecture, our everyday discourse in social context does not attend to these
dimensions, yet they are ever present in attenuated form (as summarized
Dynamic Figuration in Ritual (by Degrees)
on the right side of Figure .), a fact evinced by the intermediate
position of less ritualized interactions such as greetings, as discussed in
the Wolof case above.
Our research over several decades has revealed, thus, that if you want to
study the relationship between denotational text and interactional text –
between what one says and what-its-saying-counts-as-doing in the organi-
zation of social life – then look to ritual for cue, even if you’re interested in
the most banal everyday social coordination, as in ordinary greetings. In
particular, look to the form of ritual events and what they accomplish:
Ritual does its work, as we’ve seen, through its “poetic function” (Jakobson
), its hypertrophied spatio-temporally bound metrical organization of
potent tropes, unfolding in phased sequence in the course of performance
and participation. And on this basis, here is the claim about even everyday
discursive interaction, giving analytic precision to Erving Goffman’s
() observation that even in ordinary everyday life, “interaction ritual,”
as he put it, is the basis for how individuals coordinate with one another as
social beings. For once we see how ritual as such operates, we can tackle
ordinary discourse to see that, by degree, it works the same way insofar as it
works at all. It is to this task that we turn in the next lecture.
Here, we recognize that Goffman, as he himself indicated, was very much a Durkheimian, spelling
out the way in which face was a sacred object, protected and carefully maintained (or threatened and
undone) in-and-by the rituals of interpersonal interaction through which everyday life proceeds.
Context
From presupposed to entailed context; the sociocultural performa-
tivity of “everyday discourse” as a mapping across and “thickening”
of contextualization states; metapragmatically regimented norma-
tivity in “interaction ritual” (Goffman); identity work.
In the last lecture, we focused on ritual and ritualized uses of language that
seem to bring into being (that is, indexically entail) certain contextual
conditions. They do this as a function of the occurrence of some formulaic
(that is, densely and rigidly metricalized) linguistic form-tokens. We might
say that such form-tokens render salient and explicit a current contextual
focus of the emerging interactional text. By interactional text, here we
mean the social coordination through which the pantomime of interaction
is interpreted by participants along dimensions of social identity and
eventhood. In this way, analyzing discourse as the mediator of social life
rests on understanding how both big and little pieces of denotational text
come to serve as the effective signals of who – as sociological types – the
interactants “are” or “seem to be” at every phase of interaction and how
they perform social acts. When “appropriate,” such social acts are licensed
by who/what the interactants are, and when “inappropriate,” they chal-
lenge or make a bid for re-definition of self and/or other(s).
Contextualization, then, is the fact that discourse – language-in-use and
all its verbal and accompanying nonverbal signals – relevantly mediates
between “before” and “after” states of identity (inhabitable institutionalized
statuses, attitudes and orientations, affective conditions, and so on). Thus,
“context” grows in complexity and thickens sociologically and attitudinally
as discursive interaction proceeds by potentially incorporating the cumula-
tive effects of prior phases in the here-and-now of any communicative act.
It follows that contextualization works indexically, in-and-by precipitating
over intervals in real social space-time an interactional text of social acts.
Some of those social acts rise to consciousness and formulaic labeling,
Context
Need statements, such as “I need a match.”
Imperatives, such as “Gimme a match” and elliptical forms like “a match.”
Imbedded imperatives, such as “Could you gimme a match?” In these cases, agent, action, object, and
often beneficiary are as explicit as in direct imperatives, though they are imbedded in a frame with
other syntactic and semantic properties.
Permission directives, such as “May I have a match?” Bringing about the condition stated requires an
action by the hearer other than merely granting permission.
Question directives, like “Gotta match?” which do not specify the desired act.
Hints, such as “The matches are all gone.”
Figure . Types of syntactic formula in American English that count as “mands.”
Adapted from Ervin-Tripp :
stimulating – in folk and in ordinary-language philosophers – an over-
confident misrecognition of “what we do with words.” But the vast
majority of identity work (and other social activity) goes on unawares,
discontinuously in social space and time, and through implicit, non-
formulaic and unlabeled features of discourse.
Exemplifying this is the wonderful material on ordinary, everyday
“mands” – utterance-acts that count as “directions”/“requests”/“orders”/
“demands” (hear the word mand inside this?) – gathered some decades ago
in Berkeley, California, by Susan Ervin-Tripp and her seminar students.
The utterance types that counted as “mands” in their corpus come in
several different forms, ranging from “need-statements” to “hints,” as
shown in Figure ., as adapted from her article. Each is, needless
to say, a first pair-part of an adjacency pair, calling for some second pair-
part (e.g., fulfilling or refusing the mand in question).
When we look carefully at the social contexts in which such first
adjacency pair-parts are used with respect to their “uptake” – that is, their
second adjacency pair-part showing that it indeed counted as a mand for
the participants – they scale along dimensions of what we can immediately
recognize as asymmetries of deference entitlement – who has to pay
deference to whom – and in-group versus out-group presumption of the
social situation. Ervin-Tripp and her students investigated not merely the
utterance-forms, but the adjacency pairs, the seeming presupposable social
identities, and the event framings in which they occurred. That is to say,
the distribution of mand-types is calibrated to indexically presupposed
social context (institutional place; organizationally or other-derived
status of Sender/Receiver dyad; role-relational normativities, depending
on the site of uttered mand). Their data are summarized in Figure .,
Lecture : Context
Figure . Ervin-Tripp’s chart, “Summary of directive types.”
Reproduced from Susan Ervin-Tripp, “Is Sybil There? The Structure of Some American English
Directives,” Language in Society Vol. , No. (, Cambridge University Press), p. . Reproduced
with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear
reproduced from the same article, organized into the six different major
syntactic constructions that reappeared in their sample.
As we look at the social characteristics of the participants and the formal
characteristics of each of the moves in the adjacency pairs summarized in
the table, we note that at the top part of the chart, in the row summarizing
the conditions on use of Need-statements, after a first speaker utters such a
form, the respondent, to whom the first form was uttered, can comply
with the statement by merely supplying what is denoted as “needed” or
fulfilling the “needed” action. Nothing more is necessary. If the second
adjacency pair-part is non-compliant with the previously stated need,
Incidentally, since “neutralized” here means the use of the same surface expression for more than one
meaning, I disagree with Ervin-Tripp’s marking of Need statements as a “neutralized” form; the
entry should read “no.”
Context
however, some verbalization that “counts as” an excuse for the non-
performance or non-supply normatively occurs. Now note on the right
of the chart that a Need statement automatically counts as, or is a
performance of, a mand regularly when the addressee is a subordinate
within some organizational structure: a workplace, where there are hierar-
chies regulating who reports to whom, and whose status is, in the organi-
zational table of roles, higher than who else’s. An operating room, with a
surgeon uttering a mand to a scrub nurse: “I need/I’ll need a clamp”; or,
simply, with contextually permissible sluicing or constituent deletion,
“Clamp!” Need-statements unambiguously index an asymmetric higher-
to-lower, more-powerful-to-less-powerful, relationality within the relevant
corporate or organizational framework between Speaker and Addressee in
the first adjacency pair-part.
Matters work similarly for all of the other forms that come to count as
mands. Bald imperatives can also be used in such situations – hence, with
sluicing, merge in simply naming the thing or activity to be fulfilled – but
bald imperatives are also used with intimates, with familiars, in-group
Addressees. So the same form comes to index one of two dimensions of
social relations between Speaker and Addressee: on the one hand, mutually
recognized status asymmetry and on the other, relations of in-group versus
out-group positionality – parallel in pure indexical mode to the Speaker-
centric deixis of pointing to the Addressee’s social “here”ness versus social
“there”ness (as we discussed in Lecture ). And so on. By the time we reach
the last row, mands couched as what Ervin-Tripp – and all of us in the same
culture – term “hints,” it takes considerable work for an Addressee to infer
what is being asked for as a second adjacency pair-part, unless a routine of
some sort has been established with a particular form.
Pragmatic Paradigms:
Forms occurring in discourse that contrast by the
particular context they index (point to)
( form1 )
( form2 )
( . )
( . )
( . )
( formn )
Figure . Pragmatic (or indexical) paradigms.
Lecture : Context
Thus, the mand forms constitute what we can term a pragmatic (index-
ical) paradigm of formal alternants, as Figure . illustrates. Each form is
subtly linked to a social situation of a particular kind, and each social
situation allows unproblematic or unremarkable use of one or a couple of
the total set, this range of variation within the subset probably having
further pragmatic effects. And note that use of forms that fall outside such
norms constitute highly marked performative acts – like Ervin-Tripp’s
example of an older sister saying to a younger brother, “Could I trouble
you to take out the garbage, King Alfred?” (:) as though to a
deferred-to stranger who is, therefore, under no obligation so to do!
These two dimensions of social context – status asymmetry and in-
group versus out-group positionality – have been elaborately studied under
the rubric of “politeness,” since Roger Brown and Albert Gilman’s (
[]) pioneering paper of , “The Pronouns of Power and
Solidarity.” The first dimension has come to be termed “relational
deference entitlement” on some currently contextually relevant dimen-
sion – who performs deference to whom – and the second dimension
has been termed “solidarity” or “intimacy” (the horizontal dimension on
their chart), that is, “in-group [= intimate]” versus “out-group [= non-
intimate]” in the interlocutory dyad.
As shown in Figure ., American English lacks the widespread distinc-
tion between a deferential and distancing second-person address form;
think of French vous or Spanish Usted or German Sie said to a single
Addressee so as explicitly to do a little verbal bow, an acknowledgment of
the Addressee’s difference and distinction, used in these languages in
contrast to the leveling and intimate second-person address form –
Languages American English
with ADDRESSEE DEIXIS with FORM OF NAME
(e.g., French, Spanish, German)
Status Title (+ Last Name) Maximum Status Deference
vous, Usted, Sie Civilian Title + Last Name
Full First Name
tu, tu, du Nickname Maximum In-group Intimacy
Figure . Contextual dimensions of forms of address.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced from Silverstein a, figure . This
figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Context
French tu or Spanish tu or German du, indicating that we think of the
Addressee as “in-group” and in this way like the speaker, a familiar.
In American English, we use a whole paradigm of different forms of
people’s personal names to do the equivalent social interactional work, from
deference-indexing Title+Last Name (“Professor Obama”) invoking posi-
tional statuses across social divides down through Nicknames (“Barry”), the
most intimate, egalitarian, “in-group” form of address. The rules of appro-
priately contextualized use are – save in some folk observations in etiquette
books – inexplicit, but they follow fairly clear and salient register norms
common to communities of users: The kind of name-form one uses is
congruent with other kinds of occurring signs presuming upon identities
in interactional contexts. When people overstep the boundaries of how low
in the cline of name-forms we expect them to dip in addressing us, based on
the well-established conventions we learn and employ, we feel that a certain
jump to unearned familiarity has been attempted in presuming speaker–
addressee in-groupness. For instance, have you ever received a form-letter
solicitation for some cause that keeps repeating your first name as a paren-
thetical address term every couple of sentences? (“So, Michael, hunger in
America persists, and therefore, Michael, I’m calling on you to . . ..”) Or a
telephone solicitor, perhaps even worse? And sometimes even with your
name in its Nickname version! (“Is this Mike?” “Michael Silverstein here.”
“Mike, this is Joey from the Police Department’s Orphans Fund. How ya
doin’?” [Hangs up.]) The nerve of these folks!
This concept of the pragmatic paradigm – to which we will return in
introducing the concept of register in the next lecture – is centrally
important to our ability as analysts of discourse to formulate our models
of the entextualization/contextualizing processes through which people
really seem to relate one to another by virtue of what they co-construct
in communicative situations. Working through concrete examples is the
best way to clarify what is at issue. In the next section, we will come to
understand how, through the machinery of language, two relative strangers
come to interact as mutually legible identities with outlooks and attitudes
created in the course of saying/doing things with words in a process that is
interpretably legible to us. Following this we then turn to a second
example, of interaction ritual in a courtroom. In contrast to the emergent
identities of two similarly placed strangers getting acquainted, the roles in
court are more obviously institutionally assigned and asymmetrical. There
is a conflict of interest and very high stakes. Nevertheless, at issue in both
examples is the way identities are dynamically figurated through contex-
tualization in the course of interaction.
Lecture : Context
School of Social Service
Law School Participant
Administration Participant
[Room 1, Time Period 1:] Mr. A Ms. C
[Room 1, Time Period 2:] Mr. A Mr. B
[Room 2, Time Period 1:] Ms. D Mr. B
[Room 2, Time Period 2:] Ms. D Ms. C
Figure . Duncan and Fiske interlocking conversation design.
(University of Chicago, )
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
To begin, let’s walk through the transcript of the verbal channel of a
videotaped interaction that was recorded in February in a small room
on the campus of the University of Chicago by the late psychologists
Starkey Duncan and Donald Fiske for a study they were doing on so-called
nonverbal communication (Duncan and Fiske ). As Figure . illus-
trates, each subject had what I like to term, after Rodgers and Hammerstein,
a “Getting to Know You” conversation with two other individuals, one of
the same sex and one of the opposite sex, counterbalanced in order. So,
Mr. A of our transcript first spoke with Ms. C and then spoke with Mr.
B (a conversation we discuss in Lecture ). The participants were seated
and facing each other at approximately degrees in a small, quiet studio
room behind the moot court of the University of Chicago law school
building. My re-transcription is a rendering of the denotational language
that allows us to visualize each participant’s contribution in a distinct
column, a certain Mr. A the speaker on the left, a certain Ms. C the one
on the right. Overlaps of talk are visually indicated on the same horizontal
line, again better to visualize simultaneity of talk. Within each column, the
The pseudonyms, Mr. A, Mr. B, and Ms. C are my own.
For technical reasons, we no longer have access to the original video image of Mr. A and Ms. C’s
interaction, made with now defunct Betamax™ technology, but trained transcribers from the
Department of Linguistics synchronized their transcript to a millisecond counting track.
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
repetitions, the syntactic and semantic parallelisms of form, are pictured in
vertical alignment to emphasize the decidedly metrical qualities of how
discourse is entextualized through repetition-with-variation. Mr. A was
then a student in the Law School and Ms. C was then a student in the
School of Social Service Administration (or, social work). They did not
have any prior acquaintance, so far as we know, and in fact all they had
been told about each other beforehand was that their interlocutor was a
graduate student matriculated in another one of the professional schools of
the University of Chicago, just like them.
Now, obviously each participant brings to the interaction a presumption
of certain basic demographics of the interacting other that are the specific
initial conditions of context. Each interlocutor can presume upon or rely
on this mutual knowledge from the outset. Mr. A is male, Ms. C, female.
That both are graduate students presumes a certain academic achievement
on the part of each, perhaps even a certain fluency to be expected in
standard expository American English. Both have signed up to participate,
for pay, in this research that involved their having a chat with two
individuals otherwise previously unknown to them; the experience as an
engagement of individuals’ effort has something of the quality of chatting
with a complete, though safe, stranger in a waiting room, on an airplane or
train, in a singles bar, et cetera. The interactional text emerges principally,
thus, as a kind of “Getting to Know You” (GTKY) event, and we will
see that the transcript of the denotational text centers heavily on the
GTKY expectables in this presupposable interactional context and not
much more.
The video camera started, each individual offers the “My name is . . .”
formula, male first, female second (see Figure ., lines –). Notice that
Mr. A alludes to the fact that directions to have a “natural” conversation
have been given (line ): “we’re s’ppose ta begin !” framed by a mitigat-
ing hedge, “I guess,” that Ms. C, agreeing, mirrors (line ). If we contrast
this to what Mr. A could have but did not say, for example, “So let’s start
now,” with its clear and take-charge directive force – though that seems to
be what he is exercising – we can understand the interactional appropri-
ateness of his immediately following excuse for having in fact taken charge
(line ): “I háte forced conversations first of all but” – but, the circum-
stances of the Duncan and Fiske experiment that have brought him and
Ms. C together as research subjects in a “forced conversation” require that
they begin. Notwithstanding – Mr. A says the equivalent in vernacular
register, “but anyway” – Mr. A launches into a first question (lines –),
inquiring after Ms. C’s affiliation to a professional school of the University.
Figure . Transcript of Mr. A (left column) and Ms. C (right column), Phase I.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Adapted from Silverstein a, pages –. This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer
, pages –. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
Now, it is important to see that by this point A and C have already
become biographical individuals in relation to each other, not only a male
professional school student and a female one; they have mutually intro-
duced themselves with informal but very American-sounding names,
including surnames. Observe, then, that Mr. A immediately picks up on
this to use Ms. C’s first name in its relatively nickname-like variant (NN in
line ) in communicating his first question (“Betty” would be a parallel,
instead of “Elizabeth” were Ms. C named “Elizabeth Smith,” in other
words). Here, recall Figure . and our earlier discussion of American
address terms.
In this form of nickname address, Mr. A is doing at least one of the
following: (a) clearly presuming upon the framing presumption of their
both being professional school students compelled both to engage in
conversation, in other words being very much equals “in the same boat”
who have introduced themselves with the informal first name; and/or
(b) acting the part of the young man in control of a GTKY interaction,
inquiring about a young woman with the possible eventuality of, for
example, getting her phone number; or (c) – much more problematic
but, as we will see, perhaps consistent with his emerging identity –
talking down to a female from a lawyerly (or at least future lawyerly)
perch, in a metaphor of speaking in a friendly but professionally con-
descending manner to a presumptively lower-status client. Note that
each interpretation is a door opened to a framework of possible rela-
tional identities suddenly rendered “in play” at the moment of utter-
ance; each is a deployment of the verbal sign that better defines the
interacting parties.
Now recall, since Mr. A can presume that both individuals know that
each is in a professional school at the university, he formulates his question
thus: “What school are yóu in – are yóu –.” As shown in Figure ., from a
whole pragmatic paradigm of differentially stressed forms the heavily
stressed form yóu is, of course, contrastive, as the focally new information
of Mr. A’s inquiry is not the fact that Ms. C is in a professional school –
they both already know that they both are – but the identity of hers as
opposed to his (which he oh so well knows!); that is, I know what
professional school I’m in, which one, by contrast, are you in? Note also,
here, the rather more vernacular “what school” rather than the more
academic-expository register “which school” (of the many at U of C).
From Mr. A’s perspective, the two are interacting not only across the
gender divide but, as becomes clear at the outset, also across the divide of
Lecture : Context
“Whát school are you in?” – confirming possibly misheard earlier information
“Whàt school are you ín?” – possible enrollment in one or another school
“What schóol are you in?” – from among a set of possibilities in shared knowledge
›“What school are yóu in?” – by contrast to the one someone else [here, Speaker] is in
FORMAL: “Which school …?”
Figure . Differentially stressed elements of information-seeking WH-questions.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced from Silverstein a, figure . This
figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mr. A’s Law School identity and Ms. C’s identity as a student in, as it now
turns out, the School of Social Service Administration (SSA).
Observe that Ms. C answers Mr. A’s first question, cutting off his
continuing second question in line (note his contrastively stressed yóu)
by overlapping the beginning of her turn, “I’m . . .”, which she finishes in
line “. . . at SSA !”. In response, Mr. A even professes, a bit conde-
scendingly from the position of the law school student, not to know even
what this school in the University of Chicago is all about: “Oh well!” (line
) – Oh registering her answer plus well, a contrastive or elaborating
interactional paragraph-opener and a marker that a development of infor-
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
mation is about to follow. “What do they dó over there (I don’t know),” he
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continues. This is a formulation that has three important things for us
to notice.
First, the question is formulaic as a communication of the speaker’s
utter bafflement. Using ‘do-support’ auxiliation of the main verb do-,
which in the declarative indexes assertorial affirmation (“I díd do it,
officer!” upon being apprehended), in the interrogative order seems to
enact the exact inverse, communicating from a stance where one has no
idea whatsoever about something unexpected or out of the ordinary.
Examining an exotic sex toy in a shop, one asks the salesperson, “What
does one do with this, can you tell me?” Or, watching someone keep a
straight face while everyone laughs, we think, “How does he do it?” So in
uttering this formula, Mr. A is pointing to – indexing himself – as an
On the conversational distribution and interactional function of the interjection well, see the
example-rich discussion in Schiffrin :–.
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
individual now enveloped in baffled ignorance. (For example, why would
there even be such a professional school?)
A second linguistic feature to note is Mr. A’s use of the indefinite
human agent subject they to refer to Ms. C and her co-members of SSA.
This kind of construction, so common in the fantasies of paranoids, whom
“they” are always out to get, dissolves Ms. C into an organization, the
workings of which – notwithstanding it is a degree-granting professional
school within the university, just like Mr. A’s – are presumably controlled
by these imagined others, and of whom perhaps Ms. C is herself an
unwitting victim. Perhaps Mr. A has heard strange noises emanating from
the elegant Mies van der Rohe building that houses Chicago’s School of
Social Service Administration!
Third, Mr. A also substitutes “there” to refer to the SSA. This kind of
form we term a locational deictic, something that describes a place or
position in relation to the configuration of Speaker and Addressee in the
interlocutory event ongoing at the moment. In default use (as diagrammed
in Figure . in Lecture ), something that is ‘here’ as opposed to ‘there’ is
within the immediately proximal zone of the Speaker, as opposed to
something ‘there’ that is beyond that topological boundary in some inter-
actionally relevant framework in play (here, the professional schools
housed in distinct buildings on campus). Even more pointedly, according
to the usual deictic differentiation of here: there (again, see Figure .)
note that Mr. A uses the distal directional phrase to characterize SSA, one
that denotes a place at the end of a path from the here-and-now, “over
there.” It is a place relative to which, of course, he is indexing his own
distance – the path not taken to social work, as Robert Frost might have
had it.
Ms. C seems to respond at first (line ) as though Mr. A had indeed
been remarking on some strange things he knew to be happening at and
leaking out of her school’s headquarters: “Well↑,” she begins, with the
discourse marker of a segment of explanatory exposition, “it’s a school in
turmoil ríght at the moment I think.” She is explaining why what goes on
in SSA might seem off-kilter to an outsider, perhaps. But Mr. A restates his
complete ignorance in a register of yet stronger, affectively laden terms
(lines –): “Really? I – I have nó idea – conception at – at áll of whát
[they do. I’ve] never [heard of] SSA before.” As Mr. A reaches his hyper-
stressed “what,” Ms. C tries another explanatory paragraph starting in line
with “Well! you know it’s a school. . .” However, as we see in the
transcript, Mr. A has not relinquished the speaking turn, continuing to
remark that he had apparently never even heard of SSA before, or some
Lecture : Context
equivalent further disclaimer of knowledge. All this is extraordinary self-
distancing work on the part of Mr. A, and it is important to see that he is
not just professing unfamiliarity with the SSA.
So Mr. A is not just communicating a logical proposition about his own
state of knowledge, though he is, to be sure, doing that in the referring-and-
predicating mode. But the correctness or incorrectness of his denotational
descriptors for people and things are not what are interactionally salient
here, nor even the truth or falsity of his claims about them, his statements
predicating factual states of affairs. In deictically placing SSA at a dynamic
remove from himself in his talk about it, in his therefore justified accompa-
nying and follow-up turns professing personal ignorance about anything
going on at the school, he has effectuated a bit of interactional work. He has
performed the identity of someone heretofore unfamiliar and unconcerned
with Ms. C’s professional organization and training in social work, perhaps
now ready to entertain some information about it. He has also (dis)aligned
himself, taken a “stance” at an affective as well as cognitive distance with
respect to the denotatum in focus at the moment, SSA, which is where Ms.
C happens to live as a student. In so doing, he has achieved a certain distance
from the identity she has come to inhabit in the interaction. The “how” of
his denotational contributions, which could obviously have been differently
formulated, is beginning dynamically to figurate something of a distaff
personal being and manner for Ms. C in the interactional text a-building
here. The broader analytic moral for us here is this: In terms of such
pragmatic paradigms, how you say what you say about whatever or whom-
ever you’re communicating about, comes to count interactionally as what
you do in the way of creating the social organization of an ongoing
interaction with a communicating other.
Consider the linguistic tools that Mr. A has chosen in his, as it were,
interactional “social work” of the moment, the “how” of his contributions
to the flow of talk. Each one of the alternative forms we’ve been noticing
exists in what we have termed an indexical or pragmatic paradigm of
contextualizing alternatives that might be, in one way of interpreting
language, considered semantically or even truth-functionally equivalent.
But as an element in a pragmatic paradigm (recall Figure .), a linguistic
form bears a connotational significance – an indexical loading, we term it in
I should point out an irony in all this, by the way: that the two professional school’s buildings are
right near each other along th Street, just south of the Midway Plaisance that runs east–west
through the University of Chicago campus. They are separated by one intervening building and
S. Ellis Avenue, the front elevation of an undergraduate dormitory.
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
semiotic discourse analysis – that contributes to building an intersubjective
interactional frame that interacting individuals come relationally to inhabit
at particular social locations. In the pragmatic paradigm of personal name
types, Mr. A uses a nickname to address Ms. C. In the pragmatic paradigm
for resumptive anaphoric reference to the School of Social Service
Administration, Mr. A uses the distad path deictic over there. In the
pragmatic paradigm of inquiring about the functioning of some entity,
here SSA, Mr. A uses the ‘do-supported WH-interrogative’ of bafflement.
In the pragmatic paradigm of predicates of knowledge states, Mr. A uses
the over-the-top self-descriptor (to) have nó idea – conception at – at áll of,
thereby indexing high affective involvement through exaggerated absolute
gradience. In short, in the denotational-textual record, the cumulative,
enregistering effect of coherent – or at least non-incoherent – pragmatic
paradigmatic material (each bit contributing its indexical appropriateness
and, in context, indexical effectiveness) is what Mr. A and Ms. C rely on to
situate themselves, one with respect to the other, not merely as abstract
talking heads but as socially self- and other-placing individuals with
demographic and attitudinal biographies. This placing is the central inter-
actional textual work manifest in this short stretch of discourse.
But let us return to our transcript. Ms. C has given a parallelistic false
start in trying to explain to Mr. A what SSA is (lines –): “it’s a
school. . .,” but she breaks off, presumably just coming to process his
rather more preposterous claim – as it will turn out – of never having
even heard of her school before. Were that indeed literally the case, then
her having introduced herself earlier as being affiliated with “SSA” would
not have sufficed, and she appears consequently to start on glossing the
abbreviation for Mr. A: “whát SSA stands fór” as he twice backchannels
“Yeah! Yeah!” (lines –).
But at this point Ms. C simply begins to teach Mr. A all about the
various rubrics of the curriculum (lines –), indexing her own
schematic conceptual knowledge of taxonomies, meronomies, serial struc-
tures, et cetera, as shown in the diagram of Figure . that pictorially
renders the propositional content of what she is communicating. Perhaps
Mr. A did not expect such a long and complex explanation of precisely
what it is that Ms. C and her fellows “dó over there,” but it becomes quite
clear later on in the conversation that Mr. A probably had all the while had
a very good idea about what goes on in “SSA,” because later on in the
conversation, in relation to a sequence of geographical locations with
On the indexical use of such apparent denotational gradience for affective display, see Labov .
Lecture : Context
Curriculum of School of S[ocial] S[ervice] A[dministration]
(3 sequences = experimental programs)
______ _____ treatment ______ …… (several)
sequence
coordinated
social
treatment
methodology + groupwork + practicum
research
casework fieldwork
………………………………………………………
SSA (curriculum) 2 years
research
casework
Ms. C’s [coordinated social treatment] sequence >
groupwork
“something more community”
[year 1] > [year 2]
Figure . Schemata of Ms. C’s articulated knowledge of the School of Social Service
Administration (SSA) curriculum.
which Mr. A and Ms. C further identify each other, it emerges that he has
had some experience with the school: “Í lived with a gúy for part of the – at
the end of the summer – from Cornell as a matter [of fact] who was a
research assistant at SSÁ↑” (Figure ., lines –). So, as it turns
out, his professions of ignorance are merely part of a strategy of dismissal, a
self-distancing to count as a conversational put-down, that Ms. C simply
responds to cheerfully with full informational overload: Mr. A has to hear
the full story, as shown in the transcript and Figure ., whether he wants
to or not.
Observe that as Ms. C is coming to the end of her segment outlining the
curricular structure, Mr. A attempts to interrupt (Figure ., lines –),
actually overlapping her talk with a question about the SSA curriculum,
Figure . Mr. A and Ms. C, Phase I continued.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Adapted from Silverstein a, pages –. This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer
, pages –. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lecture : Context
“hów (long) how lóng a – thíng is it !”. Here, Ms. C has been speaking of
course sequences, programs, practicums, casework, fieldwork, et cetera,
and all Mr. A comes up with to term the complex SSA curriculum is
“thing” (line ). It is “a two year schóol ! – proféssional – school !”
Ms. C notes (lines –), suppressing the “just like yours, buddy!” while
Mr. A backchannels “uh húh !” and then she goes on to explain that she
will face decisions in her next, second year of the curriculum.
What Mr. A, by contrast, wants to do, in fact, is to complain about his
lot; this becomes a further strategy of metaphorical self-removal from his
circumstances. His comment on her description of her program, which he
begins as an overlapped turn as she is coming to the end of her account, is
the sarcastic “sóunds ! about as excíting as láw school#” (lines –),
obliquely revealing with which professional school he is affiliated. Note
that Ms. C may well have caught this by the time she has come to the end
of explaining her own affiliation and in which year of the two-year
curriculum she is matriculated. She does, after all, agree with Mr. A by
starting her turn with “Yéah” (line ). But note that, as is more or less
poetically or metrically scripted for two-party GTKY denotational textu-
ality, Ms. C obliges the compelling metrical quality of the interactional
genre with the mirroring counterpart question for Mr. A, “so téll me, -
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
what [school] yóu’re in and what year” – that is, of course, what profes-
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sional school and year of the curriculum, precisely the information she has
just finished giving about herself.
Here is Mr. A’s opening. He has already told Ms. C that he is in law
school; now he adds the additional requested information that “Î’m in my
second yéar hére !” (line ), and he launches into a long interactional
segment in which he confesses his misery as a second-year student in the
three-year University of Chicago Law School: “ít’s uh réal-ly real-ly hórrible
! it’s the wórst experíence I’ve ever had,” he notes in lines –,
complaining about workload and pressure (as he will also do with Mr.
B in his second conversation of the day – see Silverstein a, ).
Everything is piling up and getting worse for poor Mr. A – like the
snow, perhaps, at that winter quarter low-point of the academic year
(Figure ., lines –). Ms. C – recall, the future social worker –
follows along with some reassuring backchannel affirmations; what else can
Indeed, by the time he gets to Mr. B in the second time-period of Duncan and Fiske’s experiment,
Mr. A has polished his self presentation in ways that were not obvious to begin with in his first
conversation with Ms. C, so that he becomes more of the suffering East Coaster in a more efficient
way, suggesting an emergent interdiscursivity, even fine-tuned interactional strategy, across these two
putatively improvised conversations.
Figure . Mr. A and Ms. C, Phase I continued, Phase II.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Adapted from Silverstein a, pages –. This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer
, pages –. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lecture : Context
she do at this point short of stroking his feverish brow? After all, a
distressed student is venting right before her.
But matters of identity take a further revelatory turn as Mr. A tries to
self-diagnose his misery in terms of where he comes from, “the East” (line
), an American ethno-geographical phrase that always means the
Northeast and Middle Atlantic states, the focal urban first-tier center of
which is New York City, though the second-tier boundary conurbations
are Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC. Observe that Mr.
A contrasts “the East” with “the area here” (lines –), a.k.a. the
Midwest, the focal urban first-tier center of which is Chicago. The deixis
implies that “the East” is ‘there’ by contrast to where the interlocutors sit.
Mr. A does not like “the area here,” the Midwest, as compared with “the
East”; perhaps – as he several times later returns to – this is contributing to
his misery at law school. But this additional layer of complaint initiates a
long and interesting segment in which the participants choose particular
deictic locational phrases and place-names that index highly perspectival
ethno-geographical knowledge that serves further to place them one with
respect to the other in a most precise way. Let’s follow along.
Mr. A has wrapped himself in the identity of the displaced Easterner.
And true to his displacement, he uses the phrase “out here” for the region
around Chicago, in his contrastive query – again, note the hyper-stressed
yóu – for Ms. C “Are yóu from out hére – ór er #” (line ). As shown in
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Figure ., someone can be “out here” only if what, currently, he or she
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would term “there” is the actual perspectival origin-point – the deictic orīgō
is the technical term – from which a conceptual computation to reach
“here” starts elsewhere. (Contrast the deictic phrases in here and in there in
a pragmatic paradigm of denoting place.) In this case, given the two
regions Mr. A has compared, the Midwest explicitly termed “here,” it is
“the East” in the coastal northeasterly United States, that is, in a sense, Mr.
A’s permanent place of reference. The transposed deixis bespeaks – it
indexically performs – his suffering transported identity as a kind
of expatriate.
Ms. C, bless her social worker’s insight, must pick up on the pointed
East-Coast centrism of his perspective. To be sure, upon Mr. A’s ques-
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
tioning if she might be “from out hére – ór er #”, she reveals herself to be
.-.-.- .- .-.-
.-.-.- .- .-.-
.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
someone having grown up in (that is, “[coming] originally [from]”) South
Dakota (line ) – going east to west, even further “out here” than
Chicago, poor thing! But though she is “originally [from] South
Dakóta,” she adds “but I lived in New York last year” (lines –).
Maybe she has some Easterner chops after all! Ms. C assimilates Mr. A’s
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
Figure . Transposed deixis denoted by the phrase out here.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced from Silverstein a, figure .
This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
geographical framework, seeming to align herself, as it were, with it. Note
how she goes on in this very turn, another metrical mirror question to the
one he has just asked her (lines –), to resume his phrase about having
come from “the East,” asking “where in the East” to get down to the brass
tacks of location. Perhaps as a would-be social worker Ms. C is trying to
understand where Mr. A has come from such that he is so miserable at the
University of Chicago (and to regain some ground to boot).
“I’m –m from a place called New Rochélle,” says Mr. A in lines –.
A bit odd? Observe how he formulates this denotation with a metalinguis-
tic phrase, telling us that New Rochelle is a place and that it has that name.
Names, recall, are linguistic forms we either learn in a baptismal moment
where the referent is clear, or our interlocutor has to tell us that such-and-
such lexical form is, in fact, the name of something or someone that can be
otherwise described in common nominal phraseology (“No, dear. ‘Moon
Unit’ is the child’s given name.”). That’s precisely what Mr. A is doing:
telling Ms. C that he comes from a ‘place’ and New Rochelle is the name
with which people have, as it were, baptized that place. The presumption
is, presumably, that Ms. C, the South Dakotan now in Chicago “out
here” – by way of New York during the last year, for goodness sakes, as she
has just said! – would not know anything of the geography of New York
Lecture : Context
NEW ROCHELLE
YONKERS
THE BRONX
MANHATTAN
NEWARK
QUEENS
NEW YORK
BROOKLYN
STATEN ISLAND
Figure . New Rochelle in the New York City conurbation.
State, or that when she asks a “from where?” question exactly mirroring
Mr. A’s own, she does not realize that the answer will be a place-name
(as she had already supplied). It’s not merely presumption at this point in
the conversation, then, it’s a demeaning presumptuousness on the part of
Mr. A, who seems verbally to be putting on airs.
New Rochelle, as it turns out, is a suburb of New York City, on the
eastern side of Westchester County just a few miles north of the northern
city limit bounding the Borough of the Bronx (see Figure .). It is
socioeconomically respectable but, as these things go, hardly a rich one.
A guy from the ’burbs, our Mr. A. So what follows is rather interesting in
the way of revealing the cultural knowledge with which our two interloc-
utors are communicating identities. “New Rochelle↑” Ms. C affirms in line
, obviously recognizing the place-name. Mr. A, now having revealed
his suburb of origin, plays upon the nested structure of ethno-geographical
knowledge currently in play, to wit “The East” > “New York [State] >
“New Rochelle.” He even doubles his presumptuousness by asking,
“Where’d you live, in The City or what?” (lines –) using the phrase
“The City” that is the local population’s way to refer to the borough of
Manhattan, both those who are in the four other boroughs within the
New York City limits as well as those in the immediately surrounding
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
Mr. A Ms. C
“The East” “South Dakota”
vs. vs.
“the area here” = “out hére” “New York [State]”
[= Midwest];
“a place called New Rochelle” “Ithaca [N.Y.]”
vs. in
x
“The City” “Up Státe” [= Upstate]
Figure . Geographical identity emblems of Mr. A and Ms. C.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced from Silverstein a, figure .
This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
suburbs. Ms. C, recall, had earlier remarked, as though a counterbalance to
her South Dakota origin, that she had lived the previous year in New York;
given the ambiguity of designations of New York State and New York City,
we can see here the presumption on the part of Mr. A, the would-be New
Yorker, that Ms. C could only have really meant “The City” – else why
mention it?
As our chart of geographical affiliation in Figure . shows, Ms.
C seems really to be catching on by this time, and, not to be outdone,
while revealing that she lived elsewhere in New York State, “in Ithaca”
(line ), in fact, immediately adds, “up státe” (lines –) using the
very term that people in the New York City metropolitan area deploy
deictically to indicate their city-focused perspective on the ethno-geo-
graphical distinction between two regions of the state. “Úpstate” – note
the initial-syllable stress of this proper name – is a denotable region for
New York City urbanites and wannabes and begins north and west of the
instate bedroom suburbs of New York City. It was completely denota-
tionally gratuitous of Ms. C to add the regional designator “upstate,” of
course; that she did shows her assimilative alignment to the deictic pre-
sumptions of Mr. A. And yet, the performance is the somewhat flawed one
of the outsider, since Ms. C’s token is stressed on the wrong syllable, as
though a descriptive phrase – up#státe – rather than the desired regional
Compare, here, a Londoner’s use of The City to refer to the . mi that comprise that city’s
financial district in its historic center. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, we similarly traveled
“into The City,” to Manhattan, and by contrast, went “downtown” or “to downtown Brooklyn” to
its administrative center and district of department stores.
Lecture : Context
locative noun, Úpstate. (Another adaptable future social worker, we might
wonder, or someone playfully giving the interlocutor what he needs?)
But let us turn to consider Mr. A’s contributions, intercalated with the
segments of Ms. C’s reply to his question about where in New York she
had lived. Somewhat characteristically, one may say, Mr. A does not catch
the subtlety of Ms. C’s move, as he exclaims an “Óh óh óh!” of recognition
after she names Ithaca, New York (line ), and proceeds to add a stylized
phrase of “old boy” endearment for the noted university there, “Old
Córnell” (lines –), Ithaca’s most famous feature immortalized as a
phrase in a school song I should imagine every male New Yorker of a
certain age knew. (My high school’s school song, among many, was even
sung to the same melody, almost as widely known and as parodied as
Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March” music for graduation ceremo-
nies.) “Old Cornéll,” indeed, is a phrase that lives in the same kinds of
discourse as the self-descriptive phrase Mr. A will come to use to describe
himself in his next “forced conversation” that very day, “an old Jesuit boy.”
To take stock for a moment, note the symmetry of the information
about these interlocutors that has been established in a denotational text
precisely metricalized by Q-&-A segmentation. The information thus
revealed is fashioned into an intersubjective identity frame: Mr. A’s and
Ms. C’s biographies and orientations revealed not just by explicit self-
description, but implicitly, consequent inferentially upon deictic stance
and perspective, as they use particular descriptors in pragmatic paradigms
indexically connected with certain kinds of cultural knowledge associable
with certain socially locatable categories of people. You can see how, in an
orderly and metrically alternating way, first Mr. A and then, reciprocally,
Ms. C, inquire of each other about the details of their biographies along
similar framing social affiliations and schemata of social differentiation. We
can diagram the interaction in its three phases, then, as in Figures
.–., each precipitating a beautifully metricalized segment or chunk
of two-participant denotational structure.
There is what we term a kind of interactional ballet, a pas de deux as it
were, that unfolds in the real-time of discourse to a kind of metrical
segmentation, not only the alternating (Question; Answer) dyadic segmen-
tation, but sometimes the ((Question; Answer); Remark) or (Remark;
(Question; Answer)) triadic one, that is like a cookie-cutter iteratively
applicable to give metrical shape to the talk. As the interlocutors move
through the interactional work of establishing frames, the particular forms
they use in constructing their turns-at-talk point to – index – a kind of
social knowledge that is made relevant at that moment in-and-by the
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
Interactional Denotational Emblems Biographical
Segment Textual of Identity Interval
Sequence Turn-Structure Established Sequence
I.A. Mr. A queries Ms. C: C’s school
lines 1–60 Ms. C answers Mr. A: C’s school and year Ms. C = SSA, 1st year;
Mr. A remarks : A’s school Mr. A = Law T0
I.B. Present
lines 61–85 Ms. C queries Mr. A: A’s school and year
Mr. A answers Ms. C: A’s year Mr. A = Law, 2nd year,
Mr. A remarks : A’s school and affect negative assessment of law
school
Figures . Metricalization of Mr. A–Ms. C “GTKY” Phase I.
Interactional Denotational Emblems Biographical
Segment Textual of Identity Interval
Sequence Turn-Structure Established Sequence
II.A
lines 86–96 Mr. A remarks: A’s home Mr. A’s home ≈ “East”
Mr. A queries Ms. C: C’s home
Ms. C answers Mr. A: C’s home, Ms. C’s home = South Dakota,
C’s past residence Ms. C’s past residence = “but…lived
II.B in New York” T1 < T0
lines 97–101 Ms. C queries Mr. A: C’s home (“Where in the East?”) Past
Mr. A answers Ms. C: A’s home Mr. A’s home = New Rochelle, NY
II. C
lines 102–10 Mr. A. queries Ms. C: C’s past residence (NYC?)
Ms. C answers Mr. A: C’s past residence Ms. C’s past residence = “No, lived
in Ithaca”
≈ Upstate
Figure . Metricalization of Mr. A–Ms. C “GTKY” Phase II.
Interactional Denotational Emblems Biographical
Segment Textual of Identity Interval
Sequence Turn-Structure Established Sequence
III.A
Mr. A queries Ms. C: C’s undergraduate
lines 120–26
Ms. C answers Mr. A: C’s undergraduate Ms. C = in Valparaiso, IN T2 (> T1,
(Valparaiso University) <T0)
III.B Past
lines 127–42 Ms. C queries Mr. A: A’s undergraduate (between T1
Mr. A answers Ms. C: A’s undergraduate Mr. A = in Washington, DC, and T0)
Georgetown, University
Mr. A remarks: A’s background, change Mr. A = “Easterner born and bred,”
of residence and affect negative assessment of
“coming out here”
Figure . Metricalization of Mr. A–Ms. C “GTKY” Phase III.
meaningful element of a pragmatic paradigm they deploy. Mr. A and Ms.
C first concentrate on establishing their respective professional school
affiliations and their respective years matriculated in them. First Ms. C’s
identity characteristics, responding to Mr. A’s question, and then Mr. A’s,
Lecture : Context
volunteered just as Ms. C was obliging him with the poetically parallel
question. Then they go on to establish where they are “from,” as we say in
American English, first broached by Mr. A through his self-description as
being “from The East,” and somewhat more specifically indicated by Ms.
C in naming her natal state of South Dakota. New York, the state, turns
out to be a place in common to the two, and we have Mr. A’s New
Rochelle affiliation counterbalanced by Ms. C’s Ithaca (if only for a year).
Now Cornell University – you know, “old Córnell” – has been men-
tioned, opening a new framework of identities by affiliation. At this point
in the interaction (see Figure .), having denotationally incremented
Ms. C’s mention of Ithaca, New York, with a ceremonious mention of that
university, Mr. A contributes a remarkable autobiographical detail, viz.,
that “Í lived with a gúy for part of the – at the end of the summer – from
Cornell as a matter [of fact] who was a research assistant at SSÁ↑” (lines
–) whom he names at Ms. C’s request (redacted from the transcript,
as indicated by ellipses after lines ). Now as students of discursive
interaction who have the luxury of fixing transcriptions for systematic
analysis, it cannot but strike us that this experience of sharing an apart-
ment the summer before with a Cornell student (or former student) then
employed as a research assistant for a project at SSA is not quite consistent
with his earlier disclaimers of knowledge. Recall from lines –
(Figure .): “What do they dó over there (I don’t know) . . . I – I have
nó idea – conception at – at áll of what (they do) [I’ve] never (heard of )
SSA before!.”
The extract of transcript presented in Figure . now skips an interac-
tional segment about Ithaca, New York, that a more leisurely and complete
analysis would treat. Let me just say that there is another lengthy exposition
on the part of Ms. C, this one about the attractiveness of life “upstate”
where, by the way, Mr. A confesses to never having traveled (another
distancing move?). Ms. C explains of Ithaca that “it’s not just some little
town located in rural New York !.” Do we sense an affectively loaded plea
for non-urban urbanity creeping into Ms. C’s self-presentation?
At this point – Phase III, lines – – Mr. A turns the conversation
to previous educational institutions, a likely next step in GTKY for
professional school graduate students. Ms. C had earlier said that she came
from South Dakota, you will recall, even less “East” than Chicago, so Mr.
A asks, “Did yóu go tó ↑ school in South Dakota or er” – and Ms. C reveals
that she went to undergraduate school in Valparaiso, Indiana, just outside of
Chicago, “here” (lines –). She does not name Valparaiso University,
note, nor does Mr. A pursue the matter. To Ms. C’s obligingly symmetric
Figure . Mr. A and Ms. C, Phase II continued, Phase III.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Adapted from Silverstein a, pages –. This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer
, pages –. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lecture : Context
query of where he contrastively went to undergraduate school, “how about
yóu ! where’d yóu go to undergrad !” (lines –), Mr. A again makes
a very elaborate, almost ceremonial show of a response (lines –). Is it
his presumption that Ms. C might be ignorant of its full countervailing
status significance (Me, Georgetown; you, merely Valpo), or as well a
ceremonial elaboration, a stretching of the construction to emphasize his
“easternness,” the very subject matter to which he will immediately return?
Whichever, note the careful metalinguistic distinction of how the institu-
tion in Washington, DC, is named in his reply that he “went to a place in –
a – Washington called Georgetown” (compare his earlier, “a place called
New Rochelle” with its conspicuous metalinguistic hypertrophy). I very
much like Ms. C’s response here, a mere “Oh,” in line .
Note that Mr. A does, indeed, again return to the theme of East versus
Midwest, as he underlines the significance of his having done his bachelor’s
degree work in Washington, DC, the southern urban node in the north-
east corridor. It is consistent with his essential “easternerness,” as he notes
in lines –: “I don’t know . . . I’m véry sure I were an Easterner bórn
and bred / I gúess –”. (As it turns out, in all of Mr. A’s conversational data,
his ruminative self-analyses are uniformly framed with these metrical
markers, I don’t know and I guess. They measure off thoughts in a stance
of what is interactionally staged soliloquy, one might say, uttered to an
Audience as much as to an Addressee.) By contrast, “coming óut [out] hére
was really – it was really a change” (lines –). Again note the
combination of deictic usage here in this somewhat telescoped or blended
construction: the verb come- is usually motion from “there” to “here,” the
speaker communicating from “here,” the endpoint; the verb-plus-preposi-
tion expression come- oút, as from some delimited “there” location, is
semantically congruent, and generally occurs with a specification of where
one is coming out from, not where one has emerged to: “here.” It looks like
Mr. A wanted to say the equivalent of “come oút [(to) out] hére” actually,
recapitulating his earlier deictic usage about Chicago and the Midwest as
only a second-city “here” at the end of a path (line ).
It turns out (in the lines following , not presented in the transcript)
that despite following a younger brother to Chicago, who had earlier
matriculated as a student in the University of Chicago Graduate School of
Business, Mr. A was apparently not prepared for the “real. . .change” in his
life such a relocation entailed. With barely any prodding on Ms. C’s part, as
we might expect, he comes elaborately back to his discomfort in Chicago at
[the University of] Chicago for a good deal of the rest of the interaction. In
the course of the conversation involving Mr. A’s complaint piled on
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
Mr. A Ms. C
Student at Law School Student at the School of Social Service Administration
“Unknowledgeable” about SSA
Knowledgeable in detail about SSA
[turns out in fact to know about SSA]
Suffering graduate student Seemingly tolerant and sympathetic
“Easterner born and bred” – “New Yorker” South Dakotan who has spent time
[turns out to be from New Rochelle, a NYC suburb] in Ithaca, New York
Georgetown University undergraduate Valparaiso University undergraduate
Younger brother who went to University of Chicago
Business School
Dislikes City of Chicago Appreciates Chicago
[turns out not to have experienced much of the city] [and has experienced much of the city]
Figure . Comparison of Mr. A’s and Ms. C’s emergent identities and attitudes.
Copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced from Silverstein a, figure .
This figure first appeared in ELH, Vol. , No. , Summer , pages –. Published with
permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
complaint about the Law School, the City of Chicago, the Midwest, all the
while reporting that he has little experience of any of it, Ms. C does,
however, ultimately tell him in effect that he has not experienced enough
of the “out here” to have such opinions. (Just in case you wanted to know
the amusing note on which the transcript of this conversation ends.)
In any case, even by what I have called Phase III of the interaction, you
can see that we have not two communicating asocial cognitions merely
mutually informing each other about various personally interesting states
of the world. Rather, we have two rich and complicated social persons
created in-and-by talk who have, in the instance, “gotten to know” one
another as such. Figure . summarizes the now intersubjective way that
Mr. A and Ms. C face each other by the end of the conversation.
My point here, of course, is not to talk about the content of what Mr.
A and Ms. C have been discussing – banalities to be sure, as befits GTKY as a
genre – but to use this sample of their conversation to illustrate this
“interactional ballet,” this entextualization/contextualization dialectic, in
relation to its interactional textual outcome: mutual self/other positioning
in culturally comprehensible, and power-laden, social and attitudinal dimen-
sions. Mr. A and Ms. C’s conversation shows how, for instance, class and
gender as institutionalized forms work themselves out in seemingly informal,
improvisational engagements. This mutual self/other positioning emerges
alongside whatever other social acts the participants may be engaged in, if any.
Lecture : Context
Three points should be paused on and emphasized here: one, the mech-
anisms of entextualization/contextualization; second, the ritual-like, dynamic
figuration of interaction ritual (namely, that interaction ritual is, a fortiori,
ritual insofar as it is dynamic figuration mediated by the orderly “how” of
denotational information); and finally, that such mechanisms and what
and how they dynamically figurate are revelatory about the sociocultural
order.
Regarding the first point: Observe, the aspects of what Mr. A and Ms.
C say that seem to be key in entextualizing/contextualizing a denotational
text-in-context. Note all kinds of explicit metricalizations captured in the
transcript, from the alternating-turn metrical structure of dyadic interac-
tion to the resumptive parallelism of recurrent words and phrases, both
within a speaker’s turns-at-talk and across turn dyads. Such devices of
textual cohesion in essence suggest bounded chunks of interactional coher-
ence, much as syllable or stress measures (and in some systems, rhyme)
bound off the significant segments of poetry within which special tropic
coherence obtains. Note as well what is, in essence, a kind of virtual
metricalization suggested by the way particular denotata are projected
through accompanying deictics (operators like now, here, this or I).
These accompanying deictics conceptually “place” what is being talked
about, whether an entity or an event/state of affairs, in relation to the
developing orderliness of intersubjective facts about the ongoing inter-
action. Every bit of denotational content communicated in language is
dependent on one or more of such systems of deixis, such that when we
speak of something as being “there,” it entails the differential placement of
something else as “here,” even if only implicit in the relevant metrical-
ization segment of the denotational text. Note in the transcript that Mr.
A and Ms. C place various entities respectively as “here” and “there”
whether involving professional school, place of origin, undergraduate
institution, et cetera, creating a virtual metrical array (in “time” as well
as “space” by the use of tense forms) as a function of the paradigms of
deixis.
I have as well pointed out other indexical or pragmatic paradigms that
structure identity effects in this interaction, though this fact is not visible
in our standard orthographies for transcription. This is the phenomenon of
register that we will turn to in the next lecture: namely, the fact that for
speakers of any language there seem to be alternative ways of saying what
counts for them as more or less “the same thing.” Put otherwise, a register
consists of communicating denotational content in-and-by using one from
among a set of forms in a pragmatic paradigm such that some
“Getting to Know You”: Mr. A & Ms. C
nonreferential indexicality is put into play (i.e., presupposed or entailed):
for example, such that one’s identity is revealed as a user of it, or such that
the social characteristics of one’s interlocutor are indexed, or such that
something else about the context is rendered interactionally salient. The
vast amount of such sociolinguistic variability, as it is termed, though
systematic, goes by unawares – until we think about why we put some
message in precisely those phraseologies, those words, those morphological
forms, even those phonological shapes of the words (for the last, think of
the social indexicality of saying [aydiyáləĵiy] vs. [ɪ́ diyaləĵiy], or [àyrǽk] vs.
[ɪrάk]). But not simply a kind of social indexicality, the particular
shibboleths of registers are as well metricalizing highlights of the baseline
setting of whole segments of denotational text, thereby set off one from
another. (Recall that Ms. C accommodates lexically to the geographical
terminologies of Mr. A’s toponymic register, the “New Yorker” from New
Rochelle, for example, in a whole segment of this interaction.)
All these signaling phenomena – explicit metricalization (parallelistic
repetitions, discourse markers), implicit or deictically bound metricaliza-
tion, the metricalization or chunking around the landmark shibboleths of
registers, and other, concurrent indexical variation – give shape to a
denotational text, crosscutting, though intersecting, with what we think
of as “the” forms of language such as, for example, enshrined in our system
of inscriptional orthography.
But to what end, these mechanisms of entextualization/contextualiza-
tion? Here, to our second point, I want once more to suggest that what Mr.
A and Ms. C are doing is what we do in ritual, to suggest, in other words,
that the creation and maintenance and transformation of identities is what
interaction ritual, to resume Goffman’s term, is all about. Observe once
more that in full-blown public ritual a presumed-upon cosmic order – a
realm of intersubjective belief – is instantiated in the here-and-now of
constructed ritual context so that the spatio-temporal ordering of ritual
signs dynamically figurates the interactional textual end or purpose that is
potentially fulfilled in the ritual event. So also, in Mr. A and Ms. C’s
interaction, each of the entextualizing aspects of the denotational text seems
to play a role – sometimes direct, sometimes only indirectly contributory –
in relationally defining our participants. When Mr. A refers to the School of
Social Service Administration as “over there,” he is, from the denotational-
textual perspective, placing it in a conceptually distal point – the endpoint of
a path of indefinite length, in fact – from where he conceptually presumes
himself to be located. From the point of view of dynamic figuration, he is,
reciprocally, performatively placing himself at a conversational place-of-
Lecture : Context
remove from Ms. C’s organizational origin. He is, in this sense, figuratively
performing an identity-defining move in social space, as he creates the very
social-spatial framework in which this can be discerned. Similarly, his use of
“out here” for Chicago and environs, “out here” serving as a secondary
deictic point for someone whose primary orīgō is elsewhere, removed from
“here” and in fact identified in this interaction with “the East.”
In the same way, when hearing from Ms. C that she had lived in “New
York” the previous academic year, Mr. A’s immediate segue to inquiring if
it was in “The City,” plus Ms. C’s subsequent use of “Upstate” to describe
Ithaca, New York, smoothly coordinate to anchor both of their performed
or relevantly enacted identities – voicings, as Mikhail Bakhtin ()
termed them – precisely as Manhattanites associated with the landmark
in the nested geography of “the East” > New York State > New York City
> [Borough of] Manhattan [= New York County]. Place-name choice –
knowing what level in the natives’ meronomy (part–whole structure) to
name – is a highly enregistered shibboleth of identity-relevance, much like
organizational acronyms and pronunciation of abbreviations (at Harvard,
the undergraduates enroll in “[sάk] Sci” courses; at Chicago, in “[sowš]
Sci” ones). In communicating the information in this form, one performs
an interactionally effective tropic self-placement (sometimes a placement of
the interlocutor as well) in the “interaction order.”
Finally, now, we can return to yet another way that linguistic forms in
denotational text are like the body movements of pantomime (as we
suggested in the Introduction and Lecture ), creating – as we say – a
projected cultural framework in the interactional here-and-now. What
they create is a framework of systematic knowledge of the universe,
knowledge obtainable only by participating in such interactions, whether
such interactions are decidedly “social” or purportedly purely expository.
(Note how Ms. C breaks into expository communication to teach Mr.
A more than he wanted to know – or let on that he knew – about SSA.)
The point is: Culture cannot be seen, heard, or sensed directly. We
cannot study culture except by studying its effects on (and in and through)
things like discursive interaction (or interaction more generally, as with
other “cultural semiotics”). Mr. A and Ms. C come to define each other
cumulatively through the indexical power of deployment of this or that
little contributory piece of verbal signage, gradually yielding a fairly
coherent picture of who – that is, sociologically, what – they are in relation
to cultural norms and thus to each other. There is no announcement of
identities-in-culture; no one proclaims himself, for example, “I am an
intolerant and arrogant pretend New York City twit who, coasting
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
through Georgetown as an undergraduate, has the gall to complain about
the work involved in getting a law degree from the University of Chicago
Law School.” Such an identity is the endpoint of lots of linguistically
mediated social work that builds cumulatively in this context through
multiple, culture-invoking little verbal partials, metrically organized entex-
tualizing machinery that, invoking such cultural knowledge, dynamically
figurates the resulting social identities as the characters of the interactional
text, revealed in-and-by interaction. Interaction ritual after all!
Finding the “Facts” in American Courtroom Interaction
In the course of our discussion, we have noted the gradient ritualization of
discourse, running from the seemingly improvisational quality of conversa-
tion, as between Mr. A and Ms. C, to greeting rituals to full-tilt cultural rituals
such as the Eucharist, weddings, and the like. Part of what characterizes such a
gradient are the degrees to which the outcomes of such events are constrained
or open to contingency. The relatively more improvised forms are typically
more open to contingency. Ironically, however, some institutionalized forms
are tightly choreographed yet still serve to deliver outcomes that, in principle,
are contingent; they cannot be known in advance. American trials are of this
type. In comparison to the genre of GTKY, we turn now to an historical
example of courtroom interaction – strictly constrained as to procedure and the
roles of participants – to observe how the entextualization/contextualization
machinery of interaction ritual enables the manipulative drama of an attorney
strategically coercing a witness in a high-stakes event, full of conflicts of
interest. The dynamic figuration of the witness does the sociocultural (magi-
cal!) work of “finding” “facts” that seemingly enact, for the audience-jury, a
cosmic, moral order of truth and hence justice.
There is a sense in which the public representations (and PR) of the
legal profession – of which such television shows as Perry Mason of my
childhood (now in cable and web reruns) and all its successors are part and
parcel – associate trial lawyering with discovering and revealing “the truth”
of things before a jury, no matter how much lawyers – proverbially shrewd
Philadelphia types and otherwise – may have a bad reputation otherwise
for trickery and taking advantage. Indeed, the general schematic of the
Anglo-American adversarial trial is that through the Q-&-A of counsel’s
interrogation of witnesses of various kinds, “the facts” of the particular case
will be established, and the case can be decided in relation to some one or
more legal generalizations, one or more laws or regulations, or even one or
more guiding principles which the case to hand presumably instantiates or
Lecture : Context
exemplifies. So, it’s a matter of general principle(s) and specific instance(s),
and each side of a litigation argues a particular “theory of the case,” that is,
a particular narrative of how “the facts” of the matter instantiate guilt,
innocence, culpability, or liability of a party to the action under relevant
legal principles that therefore ought to be the framework for interpreting
“the facts.”
American concepts of law involve, we might say, a kind of folk-
positivism, encapsulated also in an older understanding of what science
is all about. In science, the term is “covering law,” a maximal and abstract
generalization under which, as the saying goes, myriad specific instantia-
tions fit as examples, under specific conditions, of what the covering law
describes. Both Galileo’s feather-dropped-from-the-bell-tower-in-Pisa and
the apple that purportedly hit Newton on the head instantiate specific
conditions of what we now recognize as the covering law of gravitation,
under which all bodies fall to earth; and this, in turn, is itself interpreted to
be a specific application of the covering laws of attraction of mass-bearing
bodies one to another, and of the equation, F = ma (that is, that the force
acting on an object is equal to the object’s mass times its acceleration).
Any narratable situation that comes to the law can be seen to conform
to, to instantiate in this sense, one or more of these abstract legal principles,
in essence becoming like a specific scientific case – note the term, “case
law” – illustrating the intersection of legal principles, any one of which the
specifics of the matter may uphold or violate, as the case may be. So, the
adversarial or “agonistic” trial generally brings two narratives of “the facts,”
the specifics of some situation or happening, framed by applicable general
covering law(s), into the courtroom. There, refereed by a judge, the sides
vie to convince a carefully selected jury of what “the facts” are and how
those facts are best interpreted as instances of upholding or violating such-
and-such general legalities, from which follows a legal outcome.
This is a lofty story designed to make us weep as we contemplate the
very majesty of litigation as like that of the empirical sciences. It is, indeed,
For instance, who of the s television audience can forget the late Johnnie Cochran’s
observation to the O. J. Simpson murder trial jury, “If the glove don’t fit / You must acquit!”
The glove – in the instance, blood-stained when retrieved by investigating police – was allegedly
worn by the murderer of Mr. Simpson’s wife and a male companion according to the prosecution’s
“theory of the case.” In the asymmetric burden of proof in such a criminal trial, the defense
demonstrated before the jury that Mr. Simpson’s hand fit into the glove only with difficulty,
handing the jury, as it were, a factual puzzle if they had been following the prosecution’s line of
narrative. (Mr. Simpson was, in fact, acquitted.)
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
what Perry Mason – the TV program – was made of. As Mr. A once
undoubtedly learned, it is still told in first-year law school classes, as
Elizabeth Mertz beautifully details in her book, The Language of Law
School (Mertz ). By contrast, we might study actual trial material in
an anthropological or sociological vein – that is, we might look at a trial as
a site of strategic interaction, with especially high stakes, within the bounds
of what we term “ritual proceduralism.” The trial is a ritualized procedure
for producing something commonly called “Truth” – and therefore, one
might believe, in impartially applying The Law, or “Justice.” The players
come together knowing how various segments of this coordinated Truth-
and-Justice activity ought to unfold, and the effectiveness of the unfolding
leaves room for strategic manipulation outside of the policed, monitored
bounds of the unfolding event. As students of social life, we know that,
however scripted in people’s minds, every performance of a ritual is unique
(as we saw in our discussion of greetings in Lecture ), precisely because of
all of the marvelous things that go on independently of what is stipulated
by the formal requirements of procedure. It is no different in the court-
room, where virtuoso performers of the ritual of Truth-and-Justice can
earn a pretty penny for the subtle and creative ways they operate within the
wiggle-room of otherwise stipulated procedure.
With all this in mind, let us turn to the work of a great courtroom artist,
a virtuoso performer at the top of his form, Roy Black. Mr. Black had been
retained as defense counsel by the Kennedy family – yes, the Hyannis Port
and Palm Beach Kennedys – in the June , Palm Beach County
criminal trial of Dr. William Kennedy Smith, accused of sexually assault-
ing – “raping” is the folk term, not the legal one – one Patricia Bowman at
the Kennedy compound in the pre-dawn hours of March . What we are
going to see is how defense counsel Black manipulates a witness on cross-
examination, creating her as a here-and-now present instantiation of pre-
cisely how she figures as a character in the defense’s “theory of the case” (as
opposed to the prosecution’s).
Ms. Bowman was the complainant in this criminal trial, the people of
the state of Florida the plaintiffs, and Dr. Smith the defendant. The
people’s “theory of the case” was that Dr. Smith played on his celebrity
to lure Ms. Bowman to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach where he
assaulted her in the wee hours of March , . The defense’s “theory
of the case” was that this was consensual sexual intercourse after which,
ashamed of a so-called “one night stand” (Dr. Smith did not ask for her
phone number, etc.) and in revenge as well as in order to seek the public
notoriety of a Kennedy scandal, Ms. Bowman enlisted the assistance of one
Lecture : Context
Anne Mercer, whom she rang up to drive her home, to plot and orches-
trate an accusation of sexual assault.
Gregory Matoesian has written extensively about this trial as an inter-
actional form in a brilliant book (Matoesian ) and several articles
(Matoesian , a, b, , , , ). In Figure .,
we have reworked Matoesian’s transcription (to show various parallelisms
in the text), as originally produced from a videotape and published in his
article, “Nailing Down an Answer: Participation and Power in Trial
Talk.” This phrase (“nailing down an answer”) is, as it turns out, a lawyer’s
term for a particular way that counsel can exert maximal control over a
recalcitrant interlocutor, generally presumed to be a witness for the oppos-
ing side. Here’s the schematic: A witness is not answering questions, is
evasive and vague, hostile to having to attest to certain facts that the lawyer
wants to establish as such for his or her side’s “theory of the case.” The
witness must be squashed, squelched in any independence of point of view
on the matter, since, critically, it is your theory of the case, your narrative of
the facts, that must win out and find convincing resonance with the jury.
In the instance, then, the witness has to be made to show such resistance
and the story, the narrated “facts,” have to seem to be coerced out of the
witness bit-by-bit, in stages, by playing up the resistance and/or hostility as
one moves, step-by-step, to establish the coherence of the narrative
you want.
There is more than “Truth” at issue in “nailing down an answer” as
courtroom drama. Since a witness has been sworn to “tell the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth” before not only judge and jury
but – in popular imagination – God almighty, any failure to do so, any
semblance of telling only partial truths, or even untruths, undermines the
character of a witness as a reliable font of – to use Stephen Colbert’s term –
“truthiness.” The character of the adversarial “theory of the case” must be
quickened – brought to life as flesh and blood – right before the eyes of the
jury, making an indexical icon of the agentive actor – the witness, in the
instance – as both participant in the here-and-now trial and then-and-there
chronotope (Bakhtin’s term for the space-time of a narratable world; see
Bakhtin, ) of previous events.
This is what is intuitively understood and operationalized in courtroom
“drama,” as such spectacles are termed, not without a certain ironic reason.
In the central procedure of such ritual searches for “Truth” and therefore
entailed jurisprudential “Justice,” a two-participant (Q;A) adjacency-pair
metricalization appears to be an information-gathering dialogue between
counsel and witness. Yet the communicative situation is more complex,
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
since, as in a theater, the dialogue is taking place before numerous kinds of
onlookers, twelve of whom in the American jury system are supposed to
pay sufficient attention so that they can determine for one or the other side
of an adversarial agōn, a competitive contest, by matching facts of a case as
established before them in an elaborate sequence of Q-&-As to the
stipulations of legal principle that a judge has determined to be the relevant
interpretative framework in the instance. So, everything in the counsel-
and-witness dialogue happens a few feet in front of its prime – if not
prime-time – audience. They are, note, paying attention to an interaction,
through the dialogic workings of which they are supposed to be evaluating
evidence that one or another of the adversarial sides deems relevant.
Relevant to what? To that side’s theory of the case, its construal of matters
that happened – or did not happen – that can be narrated in the form of a
story emplotting characters one in relation to another.
Hence, in this duplex or laminated communicative structure, no differ-
ent in essence from how an author and director communicate with a
theater-going public by staging characters talking and doing things with
one another, the erstwhile narrator – the counsel who has outlined his or
her side’s theory of the case in earlier segments of the ritual – steps into the
role of a character speaking to the witness inside the proverbial fourth
wall. This character is after “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth.” But a good lawyer knows that by showing that a character
in his or her narrative is now sitting on the witness stand in unbroken
indexical continuity, that is, that the witness is of a certain identity, with
certain interests and attitudes here-and-now before the “ladies and gentle-
men of the jury,” that is a theatrical – and hence legal – smash hit. And this
is what Mr. Black accomplishes in the segment that we will turn to in
a moment.
But first recall that the complainant, Ms. Bowman, according to the
defense, conspired with the close friend who fetched her by car, Anne
Mercer, to concoct a story of rape, from which she could salvage respect-
ability and even some notoriety among the hip and young of Palm Beach
(she is the step-daughter of the wealthy former chairman of General Tire
& Rubber Co.). As a friend of Ms. Bowman, Ms. Mercer’s interest in the
collusion was, first, to help the complainant get back at the cad – who
apparently called her by the name of an old girlfriend, enraging her – and
also to make a little money, since her “eyewitness” story was marketable in
the demi-monde of print and television tabloids. In fact, Ms. Mercer was,
indeed, offered $, for the story when it was fresh off the police
blotter later on the day of the original complaint. But she didn’t get all that
Lecture : Context
Time Interval 1 > Time Interval 2 > Time Interval 3 > Time Interval 4
Police report filed;
>
March 30 Ms. Mercer gives her
Incident of Sexual Tabloids offer Ms. story to the tabloid press
Encounter; Mercer cash for story; June Trial
she demurs > proceedings in Palm
Ms. Mercer fetches Ms. Beach County
Bowman from Kennedy > Depositions, affidavits, criminal court
compound etc. pre-trial
Grand jury meets to
deliberate criminal
indictment of Dr. Smith
Figure . Timeline of events in the William Kennedy Smith trial, .
money, settling eventually for a mere $, from a TV program,
A Current Affair – revelation of which resulted in a loud gasp from the
jury and others in the courtroom. So, take collusive mischief of accusation
with Ms. Bowman, pecuniary interest – think Mercer and the suggestive
“merce[r]nary” as an associated undertow – and, as became clear from
disparities in the record, an evolving set of facts-as-attested-to on the part
of Ms. Mercer, and you have the setting for this phase of the cross-
examination by Mr. Black.
There are several timescales involved in the defense’s theory of the case,
as illustrated in Figure .. First, time interval , March , wee hours:
the alleged rape, or consensual sexual encounter, followed by Ms. Mercer’s
coming to the Kennedy compound to fetch Ms. Bowman. Second, time
interval , after the police report and impending investigation become
public facts: Ms. Mercer being offered money to give her story, but for
some reason refusing, though when the indictment comes down from a
grand jury, the story is worth less, no longer being a celebrity “exclusive.”
What is the reason, according to Mr. Black’s narrative? Ms. Bowman has
been insisting on Ms. Mercer’s continued loyalty of friendship through
continued silence, because the indictment would in fact have otherwise
been compromised before a grand jury. Third, time interval , Ms.
Mercer’s public statement in the tabloid media. Fourth, current, trial time
in front of parties to the litigation and the judge and jury, when she is
confronted with this timeline by Mr. Black.
But let’s see the brilliant if nasty interactional poetry of Mr. Black at the
work of “nailing down an answer.” Everything critical involves recon-
structing with the witness: (a) communicative events involving the witness,
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
like her finding out about something, or her giving an interview or statement
or having a conversation; (b) strategic goals of the witness at one of the time
intervals, such as maximizing profits or collaborating with someone; (c)
affective mental states such as feelings and desires, like getting worried
and wanting (to make money); and (d) consciousness of mental represen-
tations, such as recalling or remembering. We can see how Mr. Black creates
an image of an individual who is just what his theory of the case describes.
Ms. Mercer performs, ultimately, on the witness stand what he claims her
to have been in the facts of the case here-and-now before the jury. Ms.
Mercer is made to figurate – to inhabit – a pictorial outline (an indexical
icon, as we termed it above) of herself as a character in Mr. Black’s version
of the story the trial is attempting to establish.
In briefest outline of the interactional material here, let us take a look at
the transcript in Figure ..
The transcript in Figure . is arranged in two columns, one for each
interacting individual: Mr. Black, who delivers the first part of two-part
question-and-response sequences, is on the left of the page; Ms. Mercer on
the right. There are numbers in parentheses, for example (.) in line ,
to indicate the number of seconds (to the decisecond) of silence, a kind of
interactional thud during which we await the next turn-at-talk. I have used
typeface and font style – plain, italic, bold, underlined italic, sans serif, et
cetera – as well as tabbing and boxed and circled text to cue us to some of
the kinds of repetitive things that go on in the dialogue; for example, Mr.
Black beginning with “Well” (at both lines and , and also at ,
, ) each time he has gotten an answer he wants the jury to
understand is evasive or equivocal from the point of view of his theory
of the case.
There is a kind of truth-squad prissiness about Mr. Black’s use of “isn’t
that correct” in , “isn’t that right” in , “isn’t it a fact that” in ,
“isn’t it true that” in , “was there not” in , et cetera. The whole
point here is to show Ms. Mercer as someone willing to bend, and where
possible to evade the truth if not “nailed down” by the step-by-step focus
on particular pieces of the narrative, especially those that reveal state-of-
mind and motive – even if she has already conceded the particular point in
her own language. The standard is unequivocal correct/incorrect or yes/no,
and seeking it forms part of Mr. Black’s technique here, so that any normal
conversational deviation from this, even a “yes” with appended explanation
or qualification is unacceptable to Mr. Black’s regime of exposing Ms.
Mercer for what she is to be shown to be according to his “theory of
the case.”
Lecture : Context
Figure . Transcript of Mr. Roy Black (left column) “nailing down an answer” from
Ms. Anne Mercer (right column).
Adapted from Matoesian
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
Figure . (cont.)
Lecture : Context
Figure . (cont.)
We can see this already in the opening sequence of the interactional
transcript. Mr. Black makes an opening statement reconstructing Ms.
Mercer’s discovery – how “[she] found out” – that the market value of
any public narrative she might offer the tabloid press was declining as the
time from the alleged rape event increased. The statement is doubly
framed within the rhetoric of factuality: “you found out, did you not?”
(line ) focusing on her as a narrative character – “the price started
dwindling. [I]sn’t that correct?” (line ) focusing on the objective
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
external reality. It is, of course, not clear if the correctness Mr. Black
appends here is supposed to apply to the facts about market price and/or to
her mental state of discovery. Ms. Mercer replies, it seems, to the situation
with her “statement’s” market value (line ). Note how Mr. Black
makes believe she has not answered the question, in essence repeating in
lines – precisely the same thing in parallel structure, this time
incorporating her word statement from : “The price for your statement
started going down in value [= price started dwindling], isn’t that right?”
Here, he addresses her with formal address, Civilian Title + Surname and
note how it results in her formal address of him as “Sir” in line . Here,
Ms. Mercer gives him the canonical formula of truthiness: “Yes that’s
correct,” paralleling his “isn’t that correct” and “isn’t that right” questions.
And then Mr. Black pushes on to establish the reconstructable mental
state of Ms. Mercer in lines –. “You began getting worried” about
the dwindling market value of “your statement,” appending again “isn’t
that right?” Here, Ms. Mercer demurs in line . And Mr. Black does one
of his let’s-start-this-again-to-get-at-the-facts moves; he uses the discourse
marker well (line ), which means that there is interactional trouble,
something germane to the interaction has not yet been brought out and
needs to be added. If market price was dwindling why wasn’t Ms. Mercer
“getting worried” if, like any rational actor in a market situation, one would
“want[]. . . to maximize your profits?” This is a key idea to put into the
jury’s heads: is there some explanation for Ms. Mercer’s seeming irratio-
nality as a market actor with information – her “statement” – to sell to the
tabloids? Look at her angry if. . .then reply in lines – as she is
goaded by Mr. Black on this point over two interchanges: a beautiful
crescendo parallelism to his phrase in line “to make as much money as
you could” – “to make more money” >> “to make the most money” –
followed by the parallelism “I would have taken” but “I did not take.”
“Well,” Mr. Black comes in with again in line , indicating that
something more needs to be brought in, in fact the denouement of this
part of his theory of the case: collusion with Patricia Bowman not only on
concocting an after-the-fact story of rape, but on timing of revelations
outside the criminal justice system: “[Y]ou had a deal with Patricia
Bowman you wouldn’t do it” (that is, until she gave permission), “isn’t
that right?” Here, Ms. Mercer does gestural head-work as she loudly and
angrily responds in lines –: “THAT IS NOT CORRECT SIR!”
At this point, Mr. Black rephrases “you had a deal with Patricia
Bowman” as “you and Miss Bowman ha[d] a conversation about” (line
) the timing of Ms. Mercer’s public interview appearance as a material
Lecture : Context
witness. After a full two seconds, note, in line , a gaping unfilled
interval in our culture’s experience of conversational real-time – one the
jury were experiencing at this point, no doubt, with bated breath – Ms.
Mercer uses an unfortunate stock phrase of the lawyer-coached miscreant,
“I don’t recall that Sir, no” (line ). (Note how things are still on the
formal plane of the pragmatic paradigm of address terms, with full names
like Patricia Bowman and Title + Surname like Miss Bowman and “Sir.”)
We are now in the thick of it. Mockingly, Mr. Black repeats her and his
question, “You do not recall having a conversation with Patricia Bowman?”
(line ) now framed again by the positive truth-valuational “is that correct,”
and on top of that a reminder to Ms. Mercer and to the jury that this is a piece
of testimony right here under oath in court: “is that your testimony here?”
(line ). Suddenly, Ms. Mercer has lost the train of thought: not recalling
having any conversation with Ms. Bowman? Or a conversation about some
specific matter (in fact, “whether or not [she] ought to do an interview,” as
Mr. Black had already asked in lines –); thus she asks, seeming to want
to evade the matter, “Concerning what, Sir?” – testimony here-and-now or
recall or doing an interview? If she is, in fact, confused about the multiple
layers of events all in play at this point, the trouble is, her reply in line
simply looks conversationally evasive. So Mr. Black nails it down in line
, “[a conversation] or [testimony] about whether or not you ought to give
an interview,” precisely parallel to his earlier question in lines –. At
this point, then, line , Ms. Mercer seems to recoup her memory: “I believe
I talked to her about that at one point, yes.” Note the framing, “I believe,”
“talked to/with,” and the vague “at one point.”
Here, Mr. Black returns with another discourse marker, that of inference
made public, so, plus the assertorial form did talk with in line (inciden-
tally, correcting Ms. Mercer’s phrase so as to make it synonymous with “have
a conversation with”): “So you did talk with her?” . . . half second . . . “Yes”
(line ). Mr. Black then continues with his theory of the case, reconstruct-
ing the content of the particular conversation he has been asserting since line
, that Ms. Bowman and Ms. Mercer “made a deal” about “cashing in on
[her] statement” (line ), again framed by his marker of narrative factual-
ity, “isn’t that right?” Just as in lines –, this yields a violent, visceral
kinesic gesture in lines and –, which shows Ms. Mercer has
finally caught the idea of collusion that Mr. Black is suggesting.
At this point, things become particularly heated, a true Perry Mason
moment. Every turn begins with the countering, let’s-take-that-again
discourse marker well or the marvelous “let’s hold it” in vernacular
assertion of power in line , as though Ms. Mercer were running around
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
wildly with the factuality of Mr. Black’s theory of the case. Note his switch
in line to calling Ms. Bowman “Patty” and “your friend Patty,” and he
doesn’t return to the Title + Surname Miss Bowman until line . It’s
great theatrics. And highly structured denotational text.
So Mr. Black now runs through all of the stages of coming to agree-
ment. “Well,” he starts in line , “you and Patty had a conversation,
didn’t you?” now postposing the full descriptor that identifies Ms.
Bowman as an in-group “friend.” In line , note the modal “might
have [Verb + prepositional phrase],” which is, of course, not the clean
affirmation or denial that all along Mr. Black has sought and Ms. Mercer
seemed to have been evading. She parallels his “have-a-conversation” with
“talk-about [something],” the something being the “it” of her response in
line . And what can we infer from prior denotational text as to the “it”
here? Clearly, her statement/interview, what has been at issue all along.
Mr. Black, not getting an affirmative in line , launches once more on
his walk-through segmenter, “Well. . .,” and, filling the pause he has left,
Ms. Mercer avers in highly suggestive terms that she and Ms. Bowman may
have talked about her statement/interview but such conversation was not to
“make any deals” [cf. line ], that is, to “collaborate” – or, as we would say
with negative loading, collude – on an enterprise, the very enterprise that is
the focus of this cross-examination, concocting a story of rape by a scion of
the Kennedy family and each getting satisfaction therefrom.
At this point, in line Mr. Black uses his strongest segment-marker, a
metapragmatic directive about the testimony itself: “let’s hold it,” and goes
back to the unsatisfactorily modalized statement in line that Ms.
Mercer and Ms. Bowman “might have talked about” the plan of action
involving gossip media. Note the metapragmatic quotation, “You say, ‘We
might have talked’,” leading into the demand for a yes–no statement:
“Isn’t it a fact that you did talk?” (lines –).
Three whole seconds elapse before Ms. Mercer offers her attempt at
concession in line : “Probably yes.” But this, too, is not good enough.
“Well,” Mr. Black begins again in a gesture of correction, “not probably.
Isn’t it true that you and Miss Bowman talked about you giving a
statement” (lines –; cf. “Isn’t it a fact that” in line ), the “it”
he fills in from line , note. Two-point-three excruciating conversational
seconds, and then in line , the now long-sought-after answer, “Yes.”
So now, going over the step-by-step of “having/making a deal” of lines
and , Mr. Black can continue in line with “Was there not. . .” –
paralleling “Isn’t it a fact that. . .” of line and “Isn’t it true that. . .” of line
– “. . .an agreement made [cf. make a deal] between the two of you” – an
Lecture : Context
agreement made, note, while “talk[ing] about it,” viz., the thing agreed
upon, that Ms. Mercer [= “you” of line ] “would wait awhile before
[she] gave [her] statement (to the tabloid media).” Having agreed that she
and Ms. Bowman “talked” or “had a conversation,” it comes as something of
a surprise that in line Ms. Mercer claims “I do not recall that, no.” What
she must therefore not recall is the denotational content or strategic interac-
tional purpose of the conversation, one would infer. Mr. Black lets that sink
in for almost ten full seconds before he ups the dramatic ante.
“You don’t reca:::ll having a conversation with Miss Bowman,” he begins
in line , now adding very specific detail, presumably from those papers
he was shuffling, indicating that there was evidence, prior testimony, et
cetera that underlies his dogged persistence at trying to get “the truth, the
whole truth and nothing but the truth” out of Ms. Mercer. The conversa-
tion was “where you said that you would wait at least thirty days till giving a
statement,” note making the “awhile” of line more precise as “at least
thirty days” in line and paralleling “before you gave your statement” of
line with “till giving a statement” in lines –. In line , Ms.
Mercer claims – chiasmus with line – “No, I do not remember that.”
In a brilliant theatricalization of exasperation, Mr. Black now mirrors
Ms. Mercer’s indignant head-shaking of disbelieving wonderment in lines
ff. Using a repeated synchronization of deictic baton hand gestures that
cut the air rhythmically with each stressed syllable of what he is saying,
Mr. Black repeats the framework of lines –, adding a specific
purposivity of the alleged collusion, namely, that the thirty-day waiting
period was so that charges would be filed in the case after a grand jury
hearing, something to Ms. Bowman’s strategic legal advantage but to Ms.
Mercer’s financial disadvantage in relation to the tabloid media. Notice, by
the way, the nice series of “gave a statement” (line ) > “giving a
statement” (lines –) > “to give a statement” (line ).
After four-point-two seconds, Ms. Mercer allows that “I might have said
(.) that I would wait. Yes” (line ). She might well have said that but
if, as she claimed in her earlier head-shaking anger, “What I do is what
I decide to do” (lines –), the purported conversation might well not
have been making a deal. Mr. Black latches onto the affirmative “Yes” of
line without any interval whatsoever, still using deictic batons:
“Because she requested it, isn’t that correct?” Suddenly recalling, Ms.
Mercer notes, “I believe so, yes.”
And not just a conversational adjacency pair-part verbally following
upon request, but a fulfillment thereof, its perlocutionary success in
Austinian “uptake”: “And so you waited before you gave a statement, isn’t
Finding the “Facts” in U.S. Courtroom Interaction
that right?” Mr. Black presses on. Finally, Ms. Mercer replies, “Yes” in
line .
***
In concluding our discussion, I want us to recall a point made in the
Introduction and in Lecture : no interaction is an island. That is, there is
an intrinsic interconnectedness between events of interaction as the very
basis of their unfolding. Indeed, notice the “about”ness of the interaction
between Mr. Black and Ms. Mercer: it is at once located as a Q-&-A
presuming upon a denotational narrative relationship to sayings and doings
in an earlier chronotope (narrative time-space), that of the purported
narratable events in the defense’s “theory of the case.” At the same time,
as we’ve argued, it is specifically designed to demonstrate the indexical-
iconic continuity of a(n iconic) character in the narrative who is (indexically)
here-and-now before you, the members of the jury, behaving in precisely the
way my “theory of the case” asserts she has done in the past in respect of her
role in the plan/plot of Ms. Bowman. Ms. Mercer is made to appear before
the jury as still colluding with Ms. Bowman before their very eyes: she
becomes – is dynamically figurated as – an indexical icon of the character
“Ms. Mercer” in the defense’s theory of the case. These kinds of continuity
across events of interaction – interdiscursivity as we term it in general, and
in the specific case of repeated denotational content, inter-(denotational-)
textuality – demonstrate that no discursive interaction – no social interac-
tion more generally – ever exists outside of a field of connection to other
interactions, past, concurrent, and future, with which the role incumbents
of any current interaction of interest are in implicit conversation.
“Language” and “culture” may be abstract, intensional terms that
denote the indexed normativities – the cosmic knowledge – upon which
a community of interactants presumes in each and every specific interac-
tion, but the extensional reality, the lived reality of language and culture
are in fact densely interconnected structures of interdiscursivity. From
such structures or, really, processes of interdiscursive alignment of events of
entextualization/contextualization one with another – all of such comings-
to-alignment constituting indexical semiotic events – emerge the particular
indexical loadings of forms as indexical codes, or registers, which are
deployable in particular interactions. Further, we must remember that –
whether looking at the predicaments and possibilities of Ms. Mercer’s and
Mr. Black’s or Ms. C’s and Mr. A’s exchanges – so much of identity work
is accomplished not simply in-and-by way of continuous utterance
Lecture : Context
contributions, but rather more indirectly through the ways in which
people talk about particular phenomena (e.g., places, as with Mr. A and
Ms. C in their discussions of “the East” and “out here”; or Mr. Black and
Ms. Mercer’s exchange about an earlier conversation, or, as we see in later
chapters, color, wine, or other denotational domains). In the next part of
the book, therefore, we turn to the enregisterment of such schemata of
knowledge of the world (denotational domains) that are presupposed upon
and which accumulate over interactional real-time (as in the cases dis-
cussed in this lecture). It is such forms of cultural knowledge that become
central to the revelatory machinery for telling each other who we are.
In the next two lectures we are interested in thinking not merely about
the details of some specific interaction, but about the indexical machinery
out of which such interactions are fashioned. How do such indexical codes
or systems (registers) come into being as the presumed-upon “property” of
social groups – in two senses: () how do such indexical systems identify
interactants’ membership in groups within a larger social formation, and
therefore become deployable by interactants to signal such membership?
and, () how do group interests come to fashion, influence, or even control
the indexicality of such semiotic material, endowing the signs themselves,
thus, with indexical (and as well iconic) value? We will now turn to these
questions, which outline the processes through which registers emerge and
take effect.
Enregisterment
Interdiscursivity/circulation underlying social indexicality and
dynamic conversational role alignment to/from social identities
(and emblems of identity) in the “voicing” (Bakhtin) of selves and
others, orders of indexicality, changed valorization of register,
institutional emanation.
So far, in these lectures, we have seen how an unfolding denotational text-
in-context figurates the identities and interactional textual projects of
particular participants, furthering their apparent goals in the interaction.
Our analysis of the transcript of Mr. A and Ms. C as well as that of Mr.
Black and Ms. Mercer in Lecture demonstrated how deictics (indexical
referentials) and social indexicals – as elements of pragmatic paradigms –
are centrally involved as they are metricalized into segmentations of
phases in discursive space-time. We also saw that these unique communi-
cative events, like all events, are interdiscursively connected in fields
of interactions.
We turn now, in this lecture and the next, to probing the interdiscursive
alignment of any single event not only to other events, but also to organi-
zational and institutional arrangements that are visible only at relatively
encompassing planes of analysis but are nevertheless central to any particular
event. Such a sign’s eye view brings into focus how interactional partic-
ipants in unique and fleeting events come to instantiate, to materialize,
identities – not as individuals, but as enactors of social categories and
social groups. We know this from our experience of living ourselves as
social categories and as members of the social groups of which societies
are enduringly made.
How, then, do enduring social arrangements come to be indexed by
semiotic material in any particular interactional moment? It is important
to note, here, Max Weber’s fundamental distinction, central to all serious
work in sociolinguistics: Categories are partitions of social space into kinds;
Lecture : Enregisterment
groups are aggregates of people with an intuition – perhaps consciousness –
of mutual belonging. Recall the notion of primary, secondary, . . ., n-ary
“reference groups,” as sociologists term them: the groups at various degrees
of centrality in one’s life as a member of which one identifies. Think of
conventional or institutionalized qualitative and perhaps quantitative
frameworks of social differentiation – those partitions and gradations of
social space into social categories – that are presupposed/entailed in-and-by
the specifics instantiated in some thickening context as it develops during
an interaction. Individuals inhabiting participant roles as sender–receiver–
referent–audience in interaction also come to be identified with, even
assigned to, positions in such social partitions and gradations in the course
of discursive interaction. How we talk about particular phenomena (or,
denotational domains, as discussed in Lecture and again in later lectures),
and with what non-denotational linguistic forms, indirectly reveals
“who” – as inhabitants of social categories and reference groups – we “are.”
In what follows, we examine how age, sex, socioeconomic position, and
other social categories are indexed within schemata of social differentiation
of a population. We further explore how we index our belonging to a
generation (which is not the same, note, as demographic cohort/age),
gender identity, class consciousness or class aspiration, ethnic affiliation,
profession, or any of those social groups in society that rest on a sense of
belonging, however centrally or peripherally. Yet how do groups or cate-
gories of people appropriate or get assigned particular indexicalities? Such
categories and groupings are, indeed, aspects of what we term institutional/
positional social identity and are always relevant to interactionally accom-
plished indexicality. What we want to see in this lecture is that all non-
denotational social indexicals – such as have been studied in variationist
sociolinguistic analysis – get their indexical value as moments in a dialectic
process in which an essentially ideological “ethno-metapragmatics” plays a
role. By ethno-metapragmatics, I mean the locally group-relevant, some-
times even verbally explicit, culturally embedded evaluation of how index-
icals work as they do (see Silverstein ). Such ethno-metapragmatic
knowledge – we might call it a folk consciousness – takes the form of
socially distributed, intuitive, and sometimes explicit knowledge of
registers, on which we focus attention in this lecture.
Registers and Languages
The register concept corresponds to and names, as a metalinguistic label,
the empirical fact that everywhere it has been investigated, the users of
Registers & Languages
language have intuitions about how forms go together (or don’t) over the
time course of making text in discourse; users intuit this just enough so
they can tell if something violates expectations. Register, thus, depends
upon and comprises such intuitions about the contextual variability of
language as denotational code. One version of this intuition appears in the
folk conceptualization linked to American English that there are many
“different (context-indicating) ways of (denotationally) saying ‘the same’
thing” or (illocutionarily) performing “the same” kind of social act by
speaking, where the forms used can differ at whatever plane and level of
analysis – pronunciation, vocabulary, turn-of-phrase. On this folk view,
register variance in American English is equally exemplified by each of the
following: He went to the eye-doctor versus He consulted his ophthal-
mologist; Sit down! versus Might I ask that you please be seated; and [fɔ:ᵊθ
flɔ:] versus [fɒɾθ flɔɾʹ], to invoke an example from Professor Labov’s (,
) pioneering work on New York City sociolinguistic variation.
The work of Reid (), Halliday, McIntosh, and Strevens () and
Halliday ([]) is the precedent in sociolinguistic analysis of the use of
the term register to mean different ways of “saying ‘the same thing.’” For these
authors, the term alludes to the pipe organ, wherein the different lengths and
diameters of a set of resonating tubes through which air is pumped – the
“pipes” – determine the pitch, that is, the frequency of the sound. The
amount of air determines the loudness, the amplitude of the noise. An
unobstructed pipe gives off a neutral whistle sound. But if you want to change
the timbral qualities – so that the sound mimics other kinds of noise-makers,
like bells, string instruments, deeply resonating instruments, a xylophone or
similar percussion instrument – you add various obstructions to the flow of air
out of the organ pipes; these are called the different timbral registers. Note that
pitch and loudness are the same across registers. In the same way, Reid and
Halliday suggest that we can communicate the same denotational content in
two or more ways by formulating the message in more than one register.
Yet this analysis, based on a folk view of language, is, characteristically,
inaccurate in many respects. You cannot really “say exactly the same thing”
in two registers very easily. In fact, in Saussurean terms this is impossible.
Imagine doing science without any technical terminology for key concep-
tual points of theory! As such, we need an alternative analysis that recog-
nizes the universal fact of intuition about register variation-by-context and
also explains how and why intuitions (or, ethno-metapragmatic folk
notions) about registers vary, thereby letting us ask what is, indeed, the
functional criterion of register: Why do alternative registers exist? How do
registers influence each other, so that they grow and extend their reach?
Lecture : Enregisterment
To more technically specify our earlier definition, linguistic register,
I suggest, is best understood as an evaluative measure in respect of a stretch
of discourse – a verbal text, as it were, as entextualized – the intuitively
understood coherence of which rests precisely along the dimension of
being appropriate to and indicative-of the particular interactional contexts
in which it has occurred or could occur. It is the coherence and congruence –
or, at least, non-incoherence – of context-signaling indexicalities across the
stretch of discourse that makes a text register-conforming or register-violating.
(This pragmatic coherence is distinct from logical coherence, note, just
as both are distinct from grammatical conformity-to-parsable system-
sentencehood. Each of these are distinguishable levels of analysis.
Denotational text is made up of text-sentences and their fragments, recall,
real socio-spatio-temporal objects that occur in discursive-interactional
context.) We feel this register coherence of appropriateness to and effec-
tiveness in context – and we react to its violation – whether such appro-
priateness-to/effectiveness-in context is defined by who is doing the
communicating, to whom the communication is directed or before whom
it occurs, or any other way we can characterize a context as a social site for
use of the language code.
Such isolable differences of usable linguistic form constitute for the users
a (sometimes gradient, sometimes discrete) set of alternative indexical
signs, signs pointing to normatively distinct contextual conditions. These
are differences of form along a dimension of cultural meaning constituting
what we defined in Lecture as a pragmatic paradigm (Figure .). As we
noted, speakers have intuitions – sometimes even explicit normative
stipulations (as in, e.g., style manuals) – of how elements of several such
paradigmatically differentiated indexes can appropriately – congruently or
non-incoherently – co-occur across textual stretches. They also have dis-
tinct ideas about what should not and ought to be excluded from textual
(co-)occurrence altogether – save for producing (bringing about or entail-
ing) special effects by sudden violation that calls attention to itself (and
inevitably to the social dynamics of the communicative situation). An old
and mildly sexist joke illustrates this well, the one about the debutante
arriving for the cotillion who, getting out of the limousine arranged for the
evening – compare the plot of Cinderella – yells out, “Oh, shit! I just
stepped in some doggie-do!” Expletives tend to be register – if not also
The notion that registers are different ways of “saying the same thing” is thus an ethno-
metapragmatic interpretation of systematic context-signaling indexicalities; the latter are distinct
from “saying the same thing” denotationally.
Registers & Languages
The existence of pragmatic or indexical paradigms, forms that contrast by the particular context they
index or point to:
( form1 )
( form2 )
( . )
( . )
( . )
(formn )
The intuition of congruent co-occurrence in discourse, where certain paradigmatic forms seem to set
expectations about the discourse unfolding over a stretch of verbal (in this case) behavior, in short
over an indexically cohesive text:
ParadigmA ParadigmB ParadigmC ParadigmD ...
(formi) ≈ (formk) ≈ (formm) ≈ (formp) . . .
The folk understanding [= “ethno-metapragmatics”] of the social meaning or value of the register
shibboleths and thence of the register itself within a language community:
Register shibboleth (formp) Speaker has social characteristic X
Figure . Simplest approximation of enregisterment, schematically.
gender – benders. Note how the first, off-color expression is a “response
cry” (Goffman ) that conventionally performs momentary affect; the
cutesy-register denotational phrase doggie-do is part of a stereotyped
debutante-ish or perhaps childish way of denoting nasty or unpleasant
things (R. Lakoff ). This congruence or non-congruence of
indexicality – pointing to similar or different social characteristics of people
in the context – lands speakers in the same or different register and
partition of social space. Such principles of textual compatibility define
for the users a denotational-textual register of their language just as they
delineate boundaries of sociolinguistic difference.
Registers are in essence “languages”: ways to say what you want to say
about the world that are indexically particular to a context because they are
indexically diagnostic of that context, whether in positive or negative
stipulation. To be sure, “languages” in this sense are sociocultural objects,
no matter what is claimed by the mystical pseudo-biology or armchair
psychology of much linguistic theory. Languages are manifest only insofar
as they are immanent in events of denotational communication. Recall the
components of the communicative event, discussed in Lecture , in which
an internally parsable message indexically presumes upon a code or gram-
mar, among other aspects of the context. (While much cultural semiosis
Lecture : Enregisterment
exists beyond language, note the specific focus on denotation that is the
hallmark of the cultural objects properly to be called languages.) As
indexically presupposed and behaviorally manifest norms, then, languages
are best thought of as fuzzy-boundaried envelopes of denotational code. It
is with reference to denotational code (that is, referring and modally
predicating; “saying ‘something’,” in ethno-metapragmatic folk vocabu-
lary) that speakers conceptualize what it is they are talking about – or
representing in the world – and on what basis their interlocutors are, to
whatever degree, understanding them. This is what we mean by the notion
that users of a “language” constitute a language community by virtue of
orienting to norms of form and denotational content, however inflected
for particular contexts (Silverstein ). For folk consciousness, a lan-
guage in this sense is an ensemble, a logical union for each of its users of all its
context-appropriate and -effective registers. So, if one performs the set-
theoretic union of all the elements of all registers in a community, this
constitutes the inclusive envelope of what speakers’ ethno-metapragmatic
view defines as the community’s “language.”
Not everyone in the language community controls equally all the
registers that intersect in the population’s knowledge; we frequently rec-
ognize many registers and can even decode an indexical value – what’s this
particular usage revealing about social context? – for many of them – think
of technical registers like this one! – even if we cannot produce enregistered
text ourselves that passes muster as register-coherent. Knowledge of regis-
ters in a language community is socially distributed – in the same way as
are, as we will see in later lectures, other schemata of knowledge. For
example, educational institutions – University of Chicago, for instance –
try to inculcate in the young reverence for standard register. I dutifully
copyedit students’ and colleagues’ work according to academic-expository
register ideals. We will return in the next lecture to the construction of
standards and the anxieties so produced. However, as the examples in this
lecture will show, other social organizations and institutions also inculcate
with varying degrees of success a variety of disciplinary, technical registers
and socially specific registers.
In Lecture we will see examples of the difference between a language community as defined here,
and a speech community. A speech community is a community by virtue of norms of indexical
practice, no matter how many denotational codes are involved. As we will see, what is ethno-
metapragmatically (in folk view) seen as a “language” by speakers in their roles as members of a
language community may be enregistered (constitute part of a register structure) in a speech
community that encompasses those who speak several such denotational codes.
Registers & Languages
Moreover, as students of the social life of language, we know that such
register structures are most saliently organized around register shibbo-
leths, which are the most conspicuous anchors of being “in register,” like
the honorifics that will be discussed in the following section. Such register
structures are crosscut by much indexical variance that is not yet enregis-
tered – and thus, in a certain sense, escape native users’ metapragmatic
intuition or radar – but which we can observe nonetheless to be systematic
and not merely random. Every language is shot through with non-
denotational indexical variance, just as every language, for its users, is an
envelope of enregisterment. Register shibboleths thus serve as stipulative
anchors, as salient pillars of co-occurrence in specific contexts for other,
less salient areas of denotational-textual form. Language users may pay less
explicit attention to non-shibboleths, but all the while they systematically
use them in regular contextualizing ways that we can study from corpora of
language sorted on the basis of context of usage. Register shibboleths also
provide unconscious intuitions of indexical – context-indicating –
coherence in discourse. These contexts may be defined along any of the
usual sociolinguistic dimensions describing who communicates with
what forms to whom, about whom or what, where, and under what
institutional conditions.
As we proceed to empirical examples of enregisterment, let us keep some
key points in mind about the social fact of registers. First, there is an
intuition – presumptively universal – of the existence of context-congruent
registers. Certain pragmatic paradigmatic forms, pointing to context, seem
to set expectations about the discourse unfolding over a stretch of expres-
sive (usually verbal) behavior. Second, such intuition is always inflected by
culturally embedded interpretations of register variance, based on local folk
consciousness, on ethno-metapragmatic principles or models always
related to perduring institutional conditions. Third, metapragmatic reflec-
tion focuses upon some pragmatic forms, enhancing them into shibbo-
leths. That is, this mode of folk consciousness organizes such variability
around register shibboleths. While shibboleths are a key feature of the
organization of registers, however, they are always only a part – metaprag-
matically salient to folk consciousness, to be sure – of a more complex,
variegated semiotic whole. The “social meaning” or “value” of register
shibboleths, and thus the register within a language community, is pro-
jected from such partial folk models. One upshot of this fact is that one
can use a shibboleth in highly performative ways: The mere use invokes
the expected context or relationship in seemingly automatic ways (which is
to say, relatively independently of their register [non]conforming co-text).
Lecture : Enregisterment
Fourth, as we will see, people form new combinations with register
regularities; they play with register features. There opens up not merely
the potential of performativity with highly salient register shibboleths, but
also the possibility of revalorization of registers in multiple orders of
indexicality (Silverstein ), which are always implied in the open-
ended, growing, never static schemata – the folk models – of register
phenomena. Fifth, and finally, we will see that enregisterment is the spread
(circulation) of a register structure (a cultural model) in a population. That
spread is a matter of the power of institutional forms to give indexical
meaning/value to enregistered signs and thereby propagate them with
propulsive emanation.
These five principles are logically independent, but in the empirical
cases we know they are mutually bound up one with another. How this
works is best clarified by illustrating the regularities of enregisterment
cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. Let us consider the now-classic
case of registers of honorification.
Registers of “Honorification” and Orders of Indexicality
Everywhere, registers of “honorification” are ways of communicating so as
to perform an act of deference to the Receiver of the message, to the
message’s Audience, and/or to the Referent being communicated about in
the message. All these kinds of systems (receiver-, audience-, or referent-
focal honorification) and their overlaps are attested, just as all of them tend
to focus ideological attention on, and thus make register shibboleths of,
subtle distinctions among deictics of (“second” or “third”) person (in
French shall I say tu or vous?), personal proper names (as in American
English: Professor Silverstein or Mikey?) and other address terms derived
from status nominals (Pop vs. Father; Doc vs. Dr. Smith), as well as verbs
predicating transfers of things, including messages – hence, metapragmatic
verbs like promise and request – as well as “donatory” (Martin :)
verbs like give to, transfer to, proffer, bestow upon, and the like. However,
much more is involved in using what people evaluate as well-formed
honorific discourse. (How many people fluently use, but couldn’t con-
sciously put their finger on, the intuitively clear distinction I cited earlier,
“Sit down!” – in what we term the zero-inflection imperative – versus
“Might you please be seated?” – with reverently modalized agentless
passive form? No shibboleths, here, note!)
“Honorification“ & Orders of Indexicality
Consider the case of honorification in European languages in more
detail. As noted, in European languages, indexes of “honorification” have
indeed been saliently enregistered around second-person personal deictic
usage, form of terms of address, and certain formulae for “mands,”
requests, and orders; though, as we also noted and will see more of in
a moment, such register phenomena include many indexically loaded
variants within pragmatic paradigms concurrently operating at many dif-
ferent planes of language, so long as they compatibly co-occur with the
more salient shibboleths. It was Roger Brown and Albert Gilman who
created the field of research in address terms. In the same volume of
as Jakobson’s “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” which
published the proceedings of the Bloomington, Indiana, conference on
style held in , Brown and Gilman presented “The Pronouns of
Power and Solidarity,” a paper that models pronoun use as individual
subjective (cognitive) performance rather than a sociocultural matter. In
effect, their paper calls out for a theory of register, register shibboleth, and
indexicality, yet these were terms and concepts they neither used nor
knew.
Brown and Gilman interviewed many Europeans, asking them who says
“T” or “V” (French, tu or vous; Spanish tu or vos, or later, usted; etc.) to
whom – again, committing the ethno-metapragmatic error, as discussed in
Lecture , of trying to define speech acts as essentially agentive moves
made by a Sender to a Receiver. Here, in-and-by using “T” as opposed to
“V” when denoting the Addressee – that is, when the roles of Addressee
and Referent are filled by the same individual (note the indexical denota-
tion as well as the social indexicality) – there is a pragmatic paradigm, an
indexical contrast, of what seems to be indexed in-and-by the use of the
one or the other. Brown and Gilman model the social relation of the
two individuals as either one of a “power” relationship – A has power over
B if and only if A has some sort of control over B – which is asymmetric,
or one of a “solidarity” relationship – A and B are solidary if and only
if A and B share some characteristic – which is symmetric. (Recall that
these dimensions of social relations have already been discussed in Lecture
, with reference to “mands.”) Now, it would be nice if use of “T” so
neatly indexed power of Speaker over Addressee and use of “V” indexed
solidarity between Speaker and Addressee. But things don’t really work
that way.
Over fifty years of research were launched by this paper, the whole
sociolinguistic field of “politeness studies” via studying terms of address.
Lecture : Enregisterment
Scholars have tried breaking down the power and solidarity relationships
into sets of status types: older kin versus younger kin; employer versus
employee; noble versus commoner; higher-status occupational identity
versus lower-status one; et cetera. Scholars have also noted that different
institutional situations are associated with “T” usage versus “V” usage: in
the American version, we call our colleagues by first name in direct address
but by Title+Surname or Surname in organizational meetings and in print.
Still, how these forms operate as part of an indexical analysis – as opposed
to how they constitute ethno-metapragmatic register shibboleths – is not
clear from such work.
In fact, there are three situations of use that can only be seen – Brown
and Gilman’s chart shows this (see Figure .) – if we look at these
patterns of use as adjacency pair-parts. Figure .a reveals symmetric
T;T (between “inferiors”) and V;V (between “superiors”); and in the
middle of .a, symmetric T (between those “equal and solidary”) and
symmetric V (between those “equal and not solidary”). Asymmetric T;V is
the third pattern, suggested by the vertical arrows pointing up and down at
the side of the boxed chart (T from “superiors” to “inferiors,” who respond
with V; or in the reverse order, V from “inferiors” to “superiors” who
respond with T). In Figure .b – honorification under pressure to
change – asymmetric T;V also appears in the upper-left and the lower-
right sectors. These three patterns suggest a closer look that reveals the real
dynamic figuration here is actually “closeness” and “distance” rather than a
straightforward matter of power asymmetries or solidarities.
To see this, let us go back to denotation, as it occurs in actual commu-
nicative events, and to which terms may be substituted for each other. We
are interested in the various (pro)nouns with which a speaker designates an
addressee. Figure . is a chart presenting an approximation of denota-
tional categories of surface noun phrase types (headed phrasal projections)
as they are universally (cross-linguistically) available for referring to entities
(see Silverstein b, , ). Note that columns are labeled with
traditional grammatical terms, like “third-person dual anaphor” (column
I); rows are labeled with crosscutting denotational features, for example,
row k (+/ animate), Boolean combinations of which model the structure
of relationships of the column-categories. Across the top are descriptive
terms that define the array as a nested series of sets with greater and greater
inclusiveness of denotata.
Observe that in such purely denotational terms, if factoring out as much
social indexicality as one can, Brown and Gilman nevertheless show us a
“Honorification“ & Orders of Indexicality
Figure . The two-dimensional semantic (a) in equilibrium and (b) under tension.
Reproduced from Brown and Gilman [], figure . Sebeok, Thomas A., ed., Style in Language,
p. , Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.
distinctive pattern. Namely, a single speaker who would self-denote as
first-person singular (column C), when referring to an individual who
“literally” – note the folk presumption – would denote the addressee as
second-person singular (column F), instead uses a form like the French
second-person plural (column H) or – as in Italian – the third-person
demonstrative singular (column N), or even – as in the indigenous Native
American language Yokuts – the second-person dual (column G). In
doing this, the speaker has performed an act of formal distantiation in
the denotational plane that, I am suggesting, figurates social distantiation –
that is, speaking across some kind of social divide which may overlap
with, and even be construed as, power difference but not necessarily be
reduced to it.
Lecture : Enregisterment
Figure . Speech-event-focused view of noun phrase categories.
Adapted from Michael Silverstein, “Case Marking and the Nature of Language,” Australian Journal of
Linguistics Vol. , No. , Table , p. , copyright © The Australian Linguistic Society,
reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Australian
Linguistic Society.
Similarly, if we think of the “V” usage as a deflection of denotation from
the neutral categorical form of “direct”ness, then note that symmetric T;T
represents mirror-image non-deflection, non-distantiation from the neu-
tral hic et nunc of interpersonal role inhabitance by the two participants in
the communication event. V;V, by contrast, represents mirror-image
mutual distantiation. The asymmetric usages T;V and V;T show one
“Honorification“ & Orders of Indexicality
participant figuratively distantiated by his or her interactional partner, the
other not. From an interactional perspective, then, so-called T/V systems
play upon the differentiation of “distanced” versus “not-distanced” alters as
interactional partners, the actual basis for such distantiation being quite
various in sociological terms. The topological logic of such binary systems
follows precisely that of binary deictics like English now – here – this (these)
versus then – there – that (those) (as discussed in Lecture ), in that the
interactional alter is figuratively placed at a remove from the presumed
intimate region close to ego, here through the figurative mechanism of
using a personal deictic at a remove from the one that would “literally”
code a single interactional alter as referent: the “second-person
singular” form.
Thus, V;V situations are situations in which there is some significant
social divide. One (ethno-)metapragmatic interpretation is that of formal-
ity and public-communication (“publicity” being the state of something
being among a public, as Habermas would say), that is, the extreme status-
conscious situation of communicating-at-a-distance one from another.
T;T situations, by contrast, are situations of intimacy and in-group-ness
of all kinds, fewer or de-emphasized social divides, whether status-derived
and perduring, or momentary, such as being stuck in an elevator for several
hours or, as Brown and Gilman point out, having survived a harrowing
trip up a mountain together.
What about the asymmetrical T;V and V;T usages? Brown and Gilman
accept their subjects’ subjectivities on this score. Following the explana-
tions offered by subjects, they gloss these as “speaking down from superior
power to inferior” followed by “speaking up from inferior power to
superior,” and the other ordering as the reverse. That is, a speaker’s usage
of T or V is seen by participants as index of recognition of a particular
quality of interpersonal social relationship between Speaker and Addressee,
one that Brown and Gilman dub “power” and “solidarity.” However,
I think instead that the “power” dimension emerges as an ethno-
metapragmatic intuition making explicit that status-inferiors must always
perform distance to a status-superior, and status-superiors can presume
upon such asymmetry to the extent they do not emphasize it: noblesse
oblige.
To see why this is so, we must analyze the second pair-part as the crucial
one, in fact as part of a performative act, and ask about it as “uptake”: the
second pair-part, in each instance, is the one that indexes (re)establishment
or recognition of perhaps already existing social distance – difference – or
Lecture : Enregisterment
the neglect of it. We must ask: What will the erstwhile Addressee do in a
second adjacency pair-part so as to ratify or contest (or whatever) the
erstwhile Speaker’s little performative act? First of all, you can see that,
from the analytic point of view, an interpersonal social relationship is the
contextual condition being indexed, so we need to see what kinds of
schemata (categories) of social differentiation are associated with what
kinds of usage. There are lots of bases of “power,” just as there are many
reasons why one would feel “solidary” with someone else. Secondly, only
as adjacency pair-parts do the three possibilities of usage emerge: T;T,
V;V, T;V/V;T (two symmetrical, one asymmetric); but in Brown and
Gilman’s binary paradigm – T versus V in someone’s turn-at-talk – there
are too few choices to capture this. Thirdly, the ethno-metapragmatic
(folk) view is that the agentive Speaker is merely registering a prior context
that, paradoxically, is made salient in the here-and-now precisely by this
little ritual act (working as all ritual operates!). What is going on here if
“power” and “solidarity” are merely folk notions, rather than a fully
adequate model of how the social indexicality actually operates?
Let us note that, like J. L. Austin stubbing his denotationalist toe on
explicit primary performative (EPP) utterances, Brown and Gilman hap-
pened upon honorific register shibboleths of great salience in European ethno-
metapragmatics of agentive “etiquette,” the personal deictic paradigms for
referring to one’s interlocutory Addressee and, at the same time, for setting
the tone of the social relationship between Speaker and Addressee. There is
a methodological parallel here as well. Just as folk metapragmatic
consciousness is focused on EPPs, while performativity is actually accom-
plished through a more global interactional textuality, Brown and Gilman
focus on register shibboleths while ignoring the more global interactional
texts-in-context relative to which any such effect of “honorification” is
figurated and enacted. Thus, in studying registers, we see that folk con-
sciousness is focused on register shibboleths, yet the accomplishment of
being-in-register – that is, performatively setting the tone of the social
Indeed, if one were to take a more Gricean approach, one might see the “indirectness” in using a
“V”-form as a trigger for an implicature intentionally laid into the utterance-act by the intent of the
sender. And in each one of the exemplary cases, it would be a convention of conversation that to
denote a single interlocutory individual with a non-transparently coded personal deictic form must
mean something else. But what, precisely? As with so many of such attempts at explanation, the story
here, told in agentive speaker-centric terms, can at most be retrodictive, because, again, the critical
data for understanding what unifies all of these T/V systems are not the denotational sentence-forms
(or their parsable fragments) transmitted by a single sender in a single utterance act of a turn-at-
communication.
“Honorification“ & Orders of Indexicality
relation – involves as well the coherence among other factors, pragmatic
paradigms, and hence textuality.
From this perspective, thus, Brown and Gilman’s “power” and “solidar-
ity” “semantics” – as they term such dimensions of differentiating “kinds of”
addressees as abstract referents – are really social psychological attempts to
essentialize – to give an essential content, located “in” the referent, as it
were – this very general topology of interlocutory distantiation along some
of the recurrently experienced social dimensions of comparability and non-
comparability of people who come to inhabit such interlocutory roles. The
folk concepts of “power” or of “solidarity” as such, from which one pre-
sumes Brown and Gilman attempted to refine out the homophonous
technical terms, have nothing inherently to do with the way T/V systems
operate; what is at work is the figurative indexical equation of distance of
formal deflection (from expectable form in which reference to addressee is
made) with interlocutory alter’s distance from interlocutory ego.
So, to construct an adequate model for studying such a phenomenon as
honorification, one must analyze it as a dialectic between patterns of use, on
the one hand and, on the other hand, what the natives are experiencing via
an ethno-metapragmatic model. Brown and Gilman have reduced the
dialectic to only one of its moments: the metapragmatic folk model in
which V = “power” and T = “solidarity.” Yet, as we have seen, the total
situation is quite different. We can summarize it like this: For denoting a
single Addressee, one would expect a T-like grammatical form. As we have
seen, every V-like grammatical form substituted for a T-like form, no matter
what language we are dealing with, deflects or “distances” the Addressee
tropically from the expected form and hence from where the Speaker’s
denotational category would land, on our chart of denotational category-
types. And again note the precise parallel to a topology – here a tropological
topology! – of “here” and “there”; and as it happens, the Japanese ethno-
metapragmatic theory for the honorification terms is “inside” uchi – “out-
side” soto, with the imaginary wall of enclosure of one or both of the
participants noted as the ethno-metapragmatic metaphor.
The trope of distance is universal, and can be ratified in a second
adjacency pair-part or not, as the case may be; or, it can be instituted in
a second adjacency pair-part. It is the same effect as responding to a
friendly “Hi, there!” with a frosty and contrastively emphatic subject and
verb in assertorial do-supported form, “How do you do?” (Note how
greeting routines always function to set up the conditions under which
any further interaction can occur.) Note how, in contrast for instance to
the Japanese folk interpretation, the Euro-American ethno-metapragmatic
Lecture : Enregisterment
model draws together intuitions of “formality” (recall your French or
Spanish or German teacher?) perhaps because in circumstances of public
usage, the mutual V;V is where one starts if one knows nothing of one’s
interlocutor, or of “informality,” perhaps as appropriate to “intimates,”
even transient ones, where one starts with T;T. Further, the ethno-
metapragmatic model seems to see the entire system as focused on honor-
ification of Addressee, paying deference where deference is due, keeping
one’s distance by distancing Addressee. We cannot forget that in the
functional plane of denotation – the purposive speaker’s view – the
personal deictic refers to the Addressee, coloring all intuitions about what
T-ing and V-ing must be about, in the folk mind (i.e., in ethno-metaprag-
matics). Importantly, power and solidarity turn out to be summaries of
tropically aligned structures of social relations, brought together as tropes
by a kind of analogical or diagrammatic logic precisely as in any ritual
structure: status-higher [interlocutory alter]: status-lower [interlocutory
alter] :: unfamiliar [int. alt.] : familiar [int. alt.], instantiated in any number
of realms in addition to personal deictic usage.
Now, here is the significance and irony of the dialectical way this
operates: Those expecting to receive more V relative to interactional others
in particular contexts also tend strategically to maximize the use of V, in
essence turning the T/V opposition into an index of Speaker distinction-in-
society. Here, note the shift from Addressee-focal to Speaker-focal social
indexing. Thus, the use of T or V is not only an index of the specific
relationship, but now also indexical of different institutionally defined
social categories or reference groups, and focused on the speaker (see,
e.g., Janet Morford’s [] study of French T/V usage among the so-
called “egalitarian” “generation of ’,” which bears this out). We will
come back to discussions of this process in more detail later. So there is an
emergent second order of indexicality here! V is as V does. Be reluctant to
T;T and thereby index your own V-worthiness.
We see this second-order indexicality with stunning clarity in so-called
speech-level phenomena that have very rich ethno-metapragmatics in
Japanese, Javanese, Thai, Tibetan, and related languages. We see it as well
in so-called diglossic language communities with a functionally split deno-
tational norm, separated into a script-and-graphic – hence also lectorial –
“H” (so-called high) form and a conversational vernacular “L” (so-called
See Lecture on function and function.
See Lecture for more explication of the dialectic relationship between linguistic ideology/metapragmatics
and second-order indexicality.
“Honorification“ & Orders of Indexicality
low) form. In Javanese, for example, honorification is enregistered around
the density of special lexical items (its register shibboleths), usage of which
constitutes a performance of deference-to-addressee and/or deference-to-
referent. The number of such indexically special lexical items within
contrastive pragmatic paradigms of indexical value differs as a function of
the particular area of denotation one is communicating about in-and-by
the use of a member of that set. Many Javanese sets, for example, have only
two members; second-person deixis seems to include at least five, and
perhaps more, contrastive forms. So, from this perspective, registers are
gradient affairs, and the co-occurrence patterns of some shibboleths have risen
to consciousness and explicit normativity and thus have acquired as well
conventional ethno-metapragmatic names (see Errington ; Silverstein
, ).
The ethno-metapragmatic model of Javanese speech levels that Clifford
Geertz () noted in talking with prijaji consultants, the old royal court
elites, and from reading native manuals of usage, is a linear concept of lexical
registers of more and more “refinement” (‘alus-ness is the Javanese ethno-
metapragmatic term), the opposite of basic Javanese “Ngoko,” which is
“unrefined” or “coarse” (kasar). Note the essentialization involved: in this
system of honorification, those whose inner souls are ‘alus (bespeaking
deference entitlement, to be sure) must be addressed with a level of ‘alus
lexicon appropriate to that refinement (see Figure .). Geertz catches the
basic binary of Ngoko:Krama, and the halfway house of Madja, ‘middle’ for
those with limited ability in Krama. But he is hard-pressed to explain the
profusion of elements in certain kinds of usage that seems to complicate
matters since the very same lexical elements seem to occur both in Ngoko,
“raising” it somehow, and in Krama, “raising” it even more. The ethno-
metapragmatic idea is that one adjusts one’s level of usage to the needs of the
interlocutor – the Addressee, that is – along the kasar to ‘alus scale, according
to the ‘alus-ness or kasar-hood of the interlocutor’s batin, or ‘ineffable inner
essence.’
The process becomes clearer when we analyze usage as the enregister-
ment of indexicality. There are three-and-a-half indexical systems for
deference-paying, each marked variant opposed to Ngoko in its own
functional way (that is, indexical function, as revealed by analysis).
Note that some syntactic constructions use lexical forms that have not
only a Ngoko:Krama indexical variance [Speaker deference-to-Addressee],
but a Ngoko:Krama Inngil [Speaker deference-to-Referent] and/or a
Ngoko:Krama Andhap [Speaker estimate that Agentive Subject Referent
normatively pays deference to Patientive Recipient/Benefactee] variance
Figure . Registers (so-called speech levels) in Javanese etiquette system: urban, peasant, and prijaji.
Reproduced from Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java (, The Free Press), pages –; courtesy of the MIT Center for International Studies.
Figure . (cont.)
Lecture : Enregisterment
possible as well. Hence, there are, for any area of denotation, anywhere
from one to five different forms, depending on how that area of denotation
is or is not swept up into these various indexicalities.
For some examples, like the ones that Geertz or Errington used, several
of these systems can operate simultaneously (as illustrated in Figure .),
focusing everything, as it were, on the honorification of the Addressee.
These many degrees of honorification constitute a folk theory and become
an indexical marker of exactly where in this cline of paying due honorific
respect to your interlocutor you are locating your contribution.
But ‘alus is as ‘alus does: The more you can subtly perform these
indexical systems, the more you index yourself as deserving of them
yourself as interlocutory partner! Here again is second-order indexicality.
Indeed, note the ironic reversal of precisely who is the focus of the system,
in relation to ethno-metapragmatic ideology, for at the level of second-
order indexicality the focus (implicitly) switches to the Speaker.
Voicing and Emblems of Identity
The key point about such enregistered forms, like the ones we have just
surveyed, as well as register shibboleths of standard registers and their
negations – to which we will return in the next lecture – is that they
become emblems of identity of their characteristic users within differen-
tiated social orders, that is, within the conventions of a language commu-
nity. They become naturalized iconic indexicals of stereotypical categories
of persons (see Agha :–). We fashion – or, if you will, we
“style” – ourselves as identifiable social types (recall the Weberian notion
of partitions of social space into kinds or types) through the control of a
repertoire of registers and especially of their shibboleths. Such emblems of
identity, deployable as such in deliberate self-fashioning usage, and
endowed with all this naturalizing ideological infusion, are the indexical
foci of now intentionally performable identities – the Judith Butler kind of
(stereotyped) identities – that is, identities indexically entailed in-and-by
the use of certain language forms. “Oh! This person speaks like a . . .” – fill
in whatever identity you want. When, some twenty-five years back,
I spoke to the guy in charge of the fish counter at my local supermarket
in basic academic standard, he immediately asked me, “You a professor or
sometin’?” And, until his unforeseen death a couple of years ago, he always
introduced me to other personnel as “the professor,” and addressed me as
such, an identity I have not been able to escape even when moving halfway
across town. Language use creates the image. This is the very paragon of
Voicing & Emblems of Identity
Figure . Register alternatives (speech styles) for a sentence in Javanese.
Reprinted from J. Joseph Errington, “On the Nature of the Sociolinguistic Sign: Describing the
Javanese Speech Levels,” Semiotic Mediation, edited by E. Mertz and R. Parmentier (, Academic
Press, Inc), p. . Copyright © , with permission from Elsevier.
Lecture : Enregisterment
performativity, the performativity of identities in-and-by the use of par-
ticular enregistered forms, where the effect requires only that certain salient
shibboleths of identity-conferring register be displayed to the interpreting
consciousness for the rest to be interpreted in conformance to the salient.
With all this in mind, let us turn now to the question of how “identi-
ties” in this sense actually manifest in discursive interaction, given
enregisterment dialectically intersecting indexicality. Contrary to much
sociolinguistic work (and certain folk theories), identities are not merely
demographic variables structured into categories of “macro”-social struc-
ture that are directly and transparently manifest in-and-by the utterance of
certain indexicals, even ones that are register shibboleths. Every time I say
such-and-such form, can I therefore be located in social space? While folk
consciousness would say Yes, the answer is No. One does not simply
become a type of person by uttering a shibboleth, even if shibboleths are
deployed in events within which identities are figurated, and thus enacted,
under conditions of entextualization. Hastings and Manning (),
invoking Goffman () and Bakhtin (:–), develop the ana-
lytic machinery with which to see the difference between a naïve notion of
“indexing identity” and a much more sophisticated understanding of
“‘voicing’ identity” through the workings of the very dialectic of conven-
tional indexicality and enregisterment we have just established.
As Hastings and Manning point out, there is a Goffmanian “figure” (a
characterological image of personhood) potentially present – certainly in
so-called “first-person” discourse about the “I” interacting with others –
that becomes very much central to how we can “voice” ourselves to
interlocutory others (Addressees, Audiences) in relation to an idea of
how a such-and-such-kind-of-person would, and in so doing create a
biographically unique self relationally figurated in respect of these stereo-
types. How any one or more of Goffman’s partials of the speaker partic-
ipant role – author (formulator of the message), animator (conveyor of the
message), principal (party dependent upon the success, truth, etc. of the
message), what Goffman called the production format – merge with a
kind of recognizable figure is the key here, as they point out.
It all depends on the interdiscursive transposability by delocutionary
(citational) metapragmatics of what Bakhtin () called heteroglossia
(raznorechiye), which emblematically populates the world of normativity
and the worlds of experience and imagination. Hastings and Manning cite
Sapir’s pioneering () “Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka,” which
was on the reading list of this course when they respectively took it, in
which people with non-normative physical bodies are indexically mocked
Voicing & Emblems of Identity
by consonant changes or by inserting extra syllables – think of the “Op
language” of children – into whatever one either puts in their mouths as
utterances or, more interestingly, when denoting them and their doings
(cf. referent honorification as in Javanese; here it’s referent degradation).
Not just voicing another, voicing one’s own identity-in-play – and even
understanding and aligning or disaligning with someone else’s identity-
claims or disclaimers in interaction – depends integrally on metapragmatic
knowledge, even intuition, that connects this current and actualizing
interactional text with some authorizing and genred interactional text
located elsewhere in socio-space-time. It is as though we are thinking/
saying, “This is how a (social category or group-member descriptor)
communicates.” We can note an apparent “circulation” of identifying
indexical forms in this way, “emanating” from certain privileged sites in
social space-time; as we will see, in effect these are ritual sites that set
indexical value, allowing the connection of sites of interaction in structures
of interdiscursivity. Such connections allow us to align with or disalign
from particular sociological (even characterological!) figures, as well as
shadowy presences in the current interaction which we can, by degrees,
seem to inhabit or keep at distance as we attempt to perform registers, or at
least the shibboleths, that saliently allude to them (depending on ability
and familiarity).
In this process, the alignment of the effectuated or indexically entailed
“me” and the presentationally communicating “I” is achieved and com-
municated. More precisely, the “I” in this formulation is the presupposed
speaker as author and/or animator. The “me” is the “performed” cultural
ethno-metapragmatic ideal of how a persona of such-and-such identity
communicates. It is the particular Bakhtinian voicing of the “I” by the
“me” (and note the direction of agency and patienthood!) that is commu-
nicated. This occurs only to the extent that the narrator or sender (the
communicating “I,” recall) situates him- or herself with respect to a
normative universe of positionalities (a.k.a. cultural norms) where the
“me” lives – the now only implicitly “narrated” universe. He or she does
so, as we have been saying, by uttering things recognizable and locatable by
interlocutory parties in a social space of possibilities of identity. Hence the
importance of register shibboleths and enregisterment in general.
Identities recognizable and locatable by whom, one might ask. By any
socioculturally competent member of the language – or really, the speech –
community, recruitable to the roles of Sender and/or narrational Addressee,
and who can respond appropriately to the complex indexicalities involved in
Bakhtinian heteroglossia, which we term the enregisterment of indexicality.
Lecture : Enregisterment
Yet, let us emphasize that people are differently invested in the way
register shibboleths and thence registers ought to inform their usage and
the usage of others. People’s ideas of what are, in fact, the registers with
respect to which they produce and interpret usage may themselves differ as a
function of where people are located in social structures; people of different
social condition are differently mobilized to structures of enregisterment. To
be sure, the institutional condition of (state-led) standardization informing
the envelope of enregisterment is increasingly common in the world, and we
return to examine it in greater detail in the next lecture. But you don’t have
to be a government or para-state organization to exercise the power to
enregister elements of what people come to think of as their personal – even
individual – style. Even very local-scale languages with small numbers of
users have registers such as those used in rituals of certain kinds, and
honorific or taboo registers, gender registers, age-grade registers, and so on.
Now, what is reflexively true of language in this way is also true of every
other code of culture. The cultural meaning of every type of sign in its social
context emerges in this way via enregisterment: Cultural stuff is shot
through with meanings endowed by register structures. That is why, when
we “do things” with words or with any other kind of meaningful cultural
stuff, such acts define what the social context is, and who – recall, what social
kind of person – is acting in that context. But if what is true of language is
true of the semiotics of culture more generally, language is, it must be
underscored, the leading medium through which all the other cultural codes
come to be enregistered; language – that is, discourse – always has the
potential to give ideologically conforming shape to the enregistered config-
uration of meaning and value of every other cultural code.
Investigating Registers: Signification, Circulation, Emanation
Thus, registers are cultural phenomena. As I have argued elsewhere
(Silverstein ), registers, like all cultural phenomena, exist as assem-
blages with three aspects: (a) indexical signification at various sites of social
semiosis, as detailed in our first three lectures; (b) interdiscursivity, or
more broadly, intersemiotic circulation across sites that, in effect, cite one
I here use the term signification in a broader sense than that associated with Saussure’s term, which
we discuss in Lecture . My usage includes Saussure’s sense of signification as a special case but
expands it to include indexical values of various sorts (denotational stereotypy, social indexicality,
text-in-context entextualizations, as discussed in this and other chapters). In this and the next lecture,
we use signification as a shorthand for locally experienceable indexical value. Similarly, for the terms
meaning and value.
Registers: Signification, Circulation, Emanation
another insofar as they invoke the same ethno-metapragmatics, as we have
discussed in this chapter; and (c) propulsive emanation of such networked
intersemiosis from in effect central sites of value-creating ritual, often a
regime of multiple centers and peripheries of signifying value always,
inevitably in flux.
Although traditions of sociolinguistic study have been among the most
assiduous in attempting to empirically investigate register phenomena,
they have not, until recently, understood registers as cultural phenomena,
as we have argued they are. Variationist sociolinguistics was originally
developed by measuring senders’ overall performance of language corre-
lated as a function of their demographic characteristics, their so-called
“macro-sociological” classifiability into categories like “age,” “race/ethnic-
ity,” “socioeconomic status,” and so forth, and what we might term the
task demands of the context of production. Variation, moreover, quickly
became identified with degree of difference in what speakers utter mea-
sured from an ethno-metapragmatically valorized standard register, toward
which form, in certain areas of the space of variability, they could be
shown to move in their production under certain standard-inducing task
demands, such as reading aloud from a printed page (as opposed to
conversing with intimates, unaware of recording). It quickly became clear
that variability does not depend only on the existence of standard register
as an anchor-point, and that simple demographic characterizations of
speakers were inadequate as the independent variables of any explanatory
scheme. It is a long story, but suffice it to say that “third-wave variation-
ism,” as it is termed by Professor Penelope Eckert (), has been trying
to come to grips with these facts by studying not merely aggregate
performance measures per subject and per population, but more carefully
contextualized performance measures where a single individual may dis-
play characteristic modes of indexical self-presentation under different
interactional conditions, that is, in different communicative contexts.
One idea, in the history of this field, has been that there is a mode of folk consciousness (much as
what we have discussed as ethno-metapragmatics) of “superposed” (Gumperz ) indexical
variability that posits the existence of distinct, indexically contrastive ways of speaking that differ
as to their appropriateness to and effectiveness in conceptualized contexts of use. In concert with the
argument of this lecture, then, studying a register in this approach means studying a language fixed by
some contextual indexicality. So far so good. However, in this approach, registers were seen to create
what some scholars term “metaphorical” ways of talking about the world. Yet, as we will see in the
next lecture, at any given moment of history, what is understood by users of a language to be
“metaphorical” and what “literal” is, in fact, contingent on the register structure of a language
community.
Lecture : Enregisterment
Third-wave variationism, that is, has been discovering the semiotics of
indexicality. It grasps that registers are the way non-denotational
indexicality functions within the universe of a group’s culture, and – as
this lecture has argued – the concept of register allows us to examine how
people become agentive actors with respect to that indexicality, however
much – as we have been arguing in this lecture – because of their “limits of
awareness” (Silverstein a), they see that indexicality through the lens
of denotational form/function and thus arrive at the ethno-metapragmatic
interpretation that registers are alternative ways of “saying the same thing.”
The important methodological point here is that once one approaches
sociolinguistic variability via enregisterment, and as a cultural phenome-
non, it becomes apparent that so-called linguistic variables cannot be
studied except as members of pragmatic paradigms. Such pragmatic para-
digms are, as we have said, organized along dimensions of contrast stipu-
lated by ethno-metapragmatic understandings, perhaps even partially
revealed by explicit metapragmatic discourse. And, as we have further said,
certain elements of diverse pragmatic paradigms are felt to be compatible
one with another, such that they tend to co-occur in actual discourse,
producing the effect of constituting, and confirming our intuition of, a
distinct register. Furthermore, people experience linguistic variability in
this enregistered mode, save for certain register shibboleths that have
become so stereotyped as to be performable with indexical value as
performatives, the production of which serves to create identity.
With this understanding, here are research steps for investigating a
register:
() Find out where it is used; obviously, the people connected with
certain sites of social practice will be peak register users. (Think of
academic disciplinary registers, like my lingo here-and-now.)
() Find out what the discursive genres (i.e., normative, recognizable
schemata for discursive interaction, a textual form-type or template
for how to engage in entextualization) are in which a register char-
acteristically occurs. Sometimes these will be citational uses, embed-
ding characterization, as in Dickens as analyzed by Bakhtin ().
() To analyze the textual structure of the discursive genre, it is necessary
to parse numerous examples of normative or norm-near entextualiza-
tions-in-context so as to discern the shibboleths and other formal
features that signal that one is “in register” (like being “in key” or “in
tune” in music). Note the importance of pragmatic or indexical
paradigms: Why does someone use such-and-such form instead of
Registers: Signification, Circulation, Emanation
one we might expect at a certain place? (Recall Mr. A’s elaborate
place- and institution-name routines in Lecture ; or see the example
of Fijian talanoa later in this lecture.)
() Follow the intertextualities (interdiscursivity) into different kinds of
contexts (by topic, by speaker, by situation, etc.); as it turns out, the
fluent production of these kinds of texts often has a top-and-center
social site of production from which enregisterment emanates. Ritual
centers tend to be sources for emanation, as we will see in the Fijian
example below. In another case, my studies of what I’ve dubbed
oinoglossia “wine talk,” which we will discuss in the next lecture, show
that those in the wine industry, professional connoisseurs, avocational
connoisseurs, males over females, so those with pretensions to class
position over others, are the loci of value production. As we will see,
the genre of the wine “tasting note” is the ritual center of emanation
for a whole mode of contemporary English.
() Observe how lexically focused registers like oinoglossia are especially
aggressive in creating pragmatic metaphors. Such icons, that is,
diagrams of social identities consubstantial with the forms that index
them, become the basis for the conceptualization of enregisterment
and interdiscursive pragmatic metaphorization, as we will see in
detail in the next lecture and as is also hinted at in the example of
distinctions among men in Fijian politics in this lecture.
() Finally, it is important to remember that registers are always caught
in the processes of enregisterment and disenregisterment. In enregis-
terment they form as ways of speaking (Whorf’s [()] “fash-
ions of speaking”) around incorporated indexicals and thus become
by-degrees coherently register-like. Registers are constantly being
created in this way. During the early s a Chomskyan linguistic
register came into existence based on how logicians did what they
called logical syntax, indexing one’s identity as within the fold as a
function of how one used certain terms and expressions and treated
examples in a certain way. When George Lakoff, in his paper on
generative semantics – called, appropriately enough, “On Generative
Semantics” ([]) – made a spoof on Noam’s own way of
talking about his own “standard” theory in Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (), Noam was not only opposed to the theory; he was
annoyed at the spoof, which he did not quite understand as a playful
uchi (‘in-group’) joke. In disenregisterment, by contrast, the forms in
a register move toward that which is normative and unmarked across
registers, to the union-of-all-registers having common status in a
Lecture : Enregisterment
language. The forms lose context-specific indexical value, much like
the former trademark products Kleenex, Frigidaire, Xerox becoming
common nouns, losing their indexicality within regimes of name-
control that necessitated the little “™” sign and the legal protection
bestowed by government. When learnèd Latinate forms of subordi-
nate clause structures calqued into English became mere literary
standard, they lost their indexical value of indicating the Latin
learning of their users. In terms of meanings or senses of words and
fixed lexemic expressions, such disenregisterment is perceived as a
term becoming common, a metaphor becoming literalized.
The strategy of investigation outlined here allows us to see that what is
meaningful – that is, indexically significant – at some site of sociality exists
in a network of intersemiotic relations that brings about an imaginary of
chronotopic movement, or “circulation” of forms and/or meanings
(Silverstein a); and such circulation is not random, but emanates
from certain central sites as nodes of network connectivity. Moreover,
various such circulating emanations may intersect at particular sites. So it is
with denotational codes or languages. The very envelope of enregisterment
that defines the inclusiveness of contextualized language-in-use may well –
in fact, inevitably does – vary as a function of the geographical spread of
the community of users, and multiple local variant norms of a certain
stability emerge – let us call them local standards of enregisterment – in each
of the various islands defining the overall archipelago of a language.
Emanating from each of these is a value-conferring signification to partic-
ular register alternants, the force of which spreads such signification
though it intersects at certain sites and competes with the signification
interdiscursively emerging from elsewhere.
Registers-in-Action in Indo-Fijian Factionalism
To illustrate these processes and their interlinkage, it is most revealing to
examine how registers work in action as cultural phenomena. Don
Brenneis (, , a, b, , , ) provides us with
material that is extremely useful for conceptualizing the political realm of
Hindi-speaking Fiji and the role of registers in it. The registers are called
jangli bat “jungle talk” and shudh Hindi “sweet Hindi” in the Fijian Hindi
of the village Brenneis calls Bhatgaon. Bhatgaon is populated by descen-
dants of people recruited to overseas indentured labor in the once-English
colony. Brenneis () terms it an “occasionally egalitarian community,”
Registers-in-Action in Indo-Fijian Factionalism
because a mutual respect for independence is coupled with few mecha-
nisms for direct, coercive political control. In such an environment, it is
interesting that conflicts of interests do, in fact, get resolved by a kind of
oscillating or dialectical mechanism of what we might call a negative and a
positive ritual form of political action.
The positive ritual site is easy to discern: it is the panchayat, or council of
formal presentation of grievances for one or another side of disputes, of
clashing interests, of construals of issues that find themselves in radical
conflict. The panchayat is a formally organized oratorical occasion con-
vened by those called bada admi, the “big men,” at which formal speeches
on behalf of interests are delivered, in the rhetorically fashioned register of
shudh Hindi, which is, as Brenneis reports, “the language of religion,
oratory and public events.” Everything here leads us to understand the
panchayat as an orderly “poetic” of community politics, at which oratorical
eloquence is supposed to work its effective magic by figurating the resolution
of consensus and cooled dissensus. Poetic eloquence is locally expected to be
appropriate to this use.
But how do political conflicts ripen, as it were, to the point where they
must be savored through oratorical eloquence in this positive, highly
valued ritual site? There is another kind of event, negatively valued – in
fact, a kind of anti-ritual form in which and through which issues are
defined in a way by gaining adherents to a side. Brenneis describes this
kind of event, the talanoa or men’s “gossip session,” in a charming
discussion of “grog and gossip” in Bhatgaon (Brenneis b). Small
groups of related non-“big” men gather in early evening in someone’s belo,
a thatch-roofed sitting house on someone’s property, and “have a few,” as
we would say in our culture. They drink yaqona, locally termed “grog,” the
mildly narcotic drink that Polynesians term kava in their ceremonial life.
Pleasantly relaxed, though not drunk in any sense as the drinking proceeds,
such a men’s group addresses local issues – news of the day or week, as it
were – in a multi-party conversation. (Talking politics in a neighborhood
bar should come to mind as the nearest urban equivalent in contemporary
America.)
Now, none of this would be remarkable beyond the sociality of the
occasion, except that the form – the “poetics,” if you will – of the
conversational activity and the medium in which it occurs, draw our
interest. Talanoa, male gossip, is rendered in the extreme negative opposite
register of Fijian Hindi from the one used in the panchayat, the ritual
occasion of resolution of issues. Called jangli bat, such enregistered speech is
specifically negatively viewed in the community – a kind of embarrassment
Lecture : Enregisterment
Panchayat and Talanoa Compared
Panchayat Talanoa
Located at ceremonial center Takes place in host’s private den
Oratorical high-register Hindi Jangli bat devalued slang Hindi
Big men participate and control Non-big men participate
Resolves faction by status appeal Makes potential faction interest
Enhances reputations Potentially damages reputations
Conflictual past > irenic future [ ] past > (?) conflictual future
Figure . Aspects of panchayat and talanoa as positive and negative ritual forms.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-thing-ness of Culture,” Signs and Society
Vol. , No. (), figure . Published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of Semiosis
Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Copyright © Semiosis Research
Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; used by permission.
of vernacular masculinity. As opposed to the officially prized shudh Hindi of
the speechmaker, valued for “display[ing] a good knowledge of standard Fiji
Hindi, a large Sanskritic vocabulary, and a knack for apposite parables,”
jangli bat and its use in talanoa have a clear negative cachet: “men who excel
in it are much appreciated” even though – or should we say because? – it
“focus[es] on stigmatized subjects, using a[n officially] low prestige variety of
Hindi” – “at the same time a source of shame and of rural pride” (Brenneis
b:–). Real men get down!
To be sure, the two registers are associated with different social types –
the “big men” who use shudh Hindi in contrast to their younger and less
politically powerful relatives who are associated with jangli bat. And these
registers are heard as similar to – metaphors of – the stereotyped charac-
teristics of the normative speakers of each. Yet this kind of direct indexi-
cality is not the full story. The two registers occur in two opposed ritual
forms, each a site of social semiosis (see Figure .), each with its mode of
genred talk; and, as we will see, the two genres, registers, and (anti-)ritual
sites show potent indexical iconicity via interdiscursive – circulatory –
entanglements, one with the other.
In the course of their conversation over grog, men move in and out of
episodes of talanoa. It is scandal, potentially embarrassing, and to the
detriment of someone or some interests, that forms the content of such
talk. Who wants to have been responsible for telling such tales? Indeed, in
a surface egalitarian community, pointed and explicit accusation against
Registers-in-Action in Indo-Fijian Factionalism
particular others would be very unwise, even in an intimate group of
friends and relatives. So, what we find in the transcripts of talanoa sessions
that Brenneis has provided is this: First, there is a low degree of explicit,
orderly, and complete descriptive information, the kind we say we value in
expository communication. Half-propositions, suggestive allusions, and so
forth, abound in the denotational text of talanoa (Figure .). Claims
made about doings and sayings, but not attributed to anyone as agent or
actor, are the dominant content. We call this property the depleted
referentiality of gossip discourse.
Note, on the one hand, how this depletion figurates plausible deniability
for whoever is uttering it, dishing the dirt, as it were. Note, on the other
hand, more importantly, that this means the addressees of such discourse
must already be considerably “in the know” about the scandalous doings
and happenings. See the adjacency pairs .–. on Brenneis’s (b:)
transcript, as well as .–., reproduced here as Figure .. The speakers,
HN and DD, are matrilateral parallel cousins and close friends, reviewing
scandalous events of the night before causing Fijian police to be called to
the community. And further note how in line ., DD gives the time as
“nine o’clock,” immediately confirmed by HN, and then DD says that the
two persons they are talking about were “totally drunk,” again confirmed
and elaborated by HN. In ., DD reports a crowd of thirty people,
confirmed and with precision incremented by HN as thirty-two in ..
DD and HN are contributing detail upon detail about the incident, but
from all their talk an outsider could not reconstruct a complete narrative.
For example, whom are they talking about as the drunken instigators of all
this hullabaloo?
There is, thus, a threshold of cultural knowledge that is presupposed as an
“opportunity cost” of participation: A good ritual player, even as addressee, is
someone who dominates the news. As Brenneis observes, “The most striking
feature of these [talanoa] transcripts is how difficult it would be to recon-
struct the underlying events on the basis of the talanoa texts themselves. . . .
[G]enerally participants in talanoa sessions must come to them with some
understanding of what is being discussed” (Brenneis b:).
So, if these sessions are not really informative, what are they? Here, a
second aspect of the form of conversation emerges. Talanoa is marked by
“rhythmic and rapid delivery,” the discourse “divide[d] . . . into syntactic
and rhythmic chunks” of stress units “giving a pulsing feel to the talanoa as
a whole. . . . Assonance and alliteration are quite marked, and exaggerated
intonation contours and volume variation frequently occur” (Brenneis
:). As well, “[r]epetition and near repetition of words and phrases
Lecture : Enregisterment
Figure . Partial transcript of a talanoa session in Bhatgaon, part .
Reproduced from Donald Brenneis, “Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and Substance in Fiji Indian
Conversation,” American Ethnologist Vol. , No. (, University of California Press), p. .
Copyright © American Ethnological Society; used by permission.
Registers-in-Action in Indo-Fijian Factionalism
are common, as are plays with word order” (Brenneis :) and lots
of reduplicative forms (e.g., polis-ulis = “police”), exaggerating a tendency
of jangli Hindi. The language is, in short, a poetry like our American
English rap or like a word-jazz game, in which, even across speaking turns,
people have to jump into the rhythm of the talk, like children have to
jump out of and into the rhythm of the turning rope, exercising a facility
for artistically shaping their own contribution to it without getting fouled
up by stepping on the rope, as it were, or by getting hit by it. It requires
some skill.
The time-marker of the verbal beat of this rhythmic delivery is the
linguistic form bole, structurally (grammatically) the third-person singular
present of the verb “to say”: thus, “he/she says.” In talanoa this form occurs
so often it no longer actually means “he/she says”; it has become what from
the perspective of textual organization we have called a discourse marker,
punctuating breath-group and other segments of utterance as do like, ya
know, ain’ it and so forth in vernacular American English. “[F]requently
stressed and lengthened vis-à-vis the rest of the text” – which is rapidly
delivered in oral performance – it is a kind of phrasal measuring device that
occurs not only in the middle of turns-at-talk, but especially at the
beginnings and ends of turns, when its utterance shows that the floor
has now become available for another speaker to jump in. This is shown
well in ., .–, and .– in Figure .. From the perspective of
its meaning, bole is what we term a quotative particle; we might translate it
“they sáy, [pause] (that. . .)” – extra stress and perhaps rising-falling into-
nation on say-, with generalized they that has no actual denotational
antecedent – or “one héárs [pause] (that . . .),” putting the onus for the
stench being uttered about someone on the generalized community, as
though, indeed, Kant’s (cf. Habermas :–) “public opinion” has
informed us of the bad tidings.
So, it is rhythmically co-constructed stylized gab or talk that is occurring
in talanoa, not a good, complete, orderly co-constructed story, but a co-
construction of what is not said, a co-construction of what is mutually
presupposable and hence not in need of actual elaboration. That is the
discourse form, whatever the empirical actuality of some participant’s
knowing or not knowing. To participate you must be able to indicate by
your own co-construction that you already know; to participate is to
register a mutual alignment with the “voicing” of the guy who has already
spoken, taking up the story-to-hand from the perspective emerging in the
intersubjective space of co-construction. To hear the story in what is being
said, you must already know the story, and you should be able to throw in
Lecture : Enregisterment
Figure . Partial transcript of a talanoa session in Bhatgaon, part .
Reproduced from Donald Brenneis, “Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and Substance in Fiji Indian
Conversation,” American Ethnologist Vol. , No. (, University of California Press), p. .
Copyright © American Ethnological Society; used by permission.
Registers-in-Action in Indo-Fijian Factionalism
your own little contribution to the emerging skeleton of a story-line to
ratify your right to hear more. One is never actually the Goffmanian
() author of the details, moreover; one is merely the animator of
them in the instance, relaying what, by silent assent in the gossip group,
must clearly have been on everyone’s lips in prior conversation that is at
least formally indexed by the quotative particle: “I’m not telling you this,
but . . .!”
The poetics of participation is, in short, a dynamic figuration, a trope, a
metaphor – a diagrammatic icon – of the participants’ likeness-of-align-
ment to the way some scandal is being narratively formulated with an
intersubjective voice of negative evaluation. One’s collusion in it – to use
the negative word for collaboration – in fashioning an emergently group-
based account with negative evaluational stance indexically counts as
creative co-participation in the very coming into being of a potential
political faction in respect of some issue or situation that will likely face
the community as a whole or some significant interests in it. Talanoa is,
thus, the negative ritual among small groups of men where political
interests about particular issues come into being, necessitating, as they
persist and ripen – or fester, to use a disease image – the eventual
constitution of a panchayat, the ritual event for airing the social wound
and cleansing it in the poetic elegance of “sweet” Hindi.
We can see that in a culturally specific way, the talanoa participants are
engaged in indexical signification. Like the conversation of Mr. A and Ms.
C discussed in Lecture , such talanoa is a situated social practice whereby
social statuses and positionalities – identities – are made “real” for self
and for co-present others. For it is the relatively disprivileged youngish
men of Bhatgaon who do the spectacular work of mutual alignment in the
interactional text of talanoa. Not register shibboleths alone, but genre and
enregistered textual structure together indexically invoke the (presupposed)
cultural knowledge (i.e., what not to say) that gives interactional conse-
quentiality to what they say, how they say it, and who – as social category
and group belonging – they are.
At the same time, there are circulatory effects: the apparent transfer of
signification across events of discursive interaction in social process –
gossip! This happens through the mechanisms of interdiscursivity – com-
municative events creatively referencing other communicative events,
whether prior or subsequent (see Bauman ; Agha ). The most
characteristic kind of cultural circulation is for an account of Event One to
be woven into Event Two, for an account of Event Two to be woven into
Event Three, and so on (“Tom reported that Dick said that Harry was
Lecture : Enregisterment
thinking about. . .”). In such a socio-spatio-temporal sequence moving
across sites of communicative transmission, each prior event becomes the
object signaled about, as well as a source for signification in the event that
frames it. The interaction in talanoa, always about preceding events, is
clearly of this kind.
Moreover, the nodes in such chains of connectivity may be regimented
by social structures of many different kinds. We never communicate with
others purely as disembodied and asocial cognitions, our relative position-
alities as social selves are essentially involved – statuses in systems of
categories in sociological parlance – as are our group interests – in the
politico-economic and more frankly political sense. In Brenneis’s ethno-
graphic example, even “occasionally egalitarian” politics is factional poli-
tics, the spectral coming-into-being of which causes official anxiety and the
search for remedies, often by convening the panchayat. Talanoa and
panchayat are thus related in interdiscursive – that is circulatory – relation,
each prospectively and/or retrospectively potentially inciting the other.
What about the third aspect of cultural and sociolinguistic process:
emanation? Circulation of forms and/or meanings is not random but
emanates from ritual nodes of value production and network connectivity,
such circulating emanations intersecting in particular sites simultaneously
caught, as it were, in their semiotic field of force. Brenneis’s material is
useful for conceptualizing the nature of emanation in the realm of
community-level politics, as the ritual events in question (those of the
panchayat and those of the talanoa) emanate opposed values. For lurking
right beneath the surface of this village community – acephalous (no head-
person in the government apparatus), egalitarian (presumptively non-
status-differentiated), and household-based (extended families dwelling in
compounds) – are processes that both depend on social differentiation and
constantly reorder such social differentiations; that enhance reputations
and damage them; and, most strikingly, create factions and resolve them
by appeal to status.
Talanoa may be officially negatively valued and hence denied as part of
the political process – in Western societies, note the widespread idea that
“men don’t gossip,” for example – but it is the very first engine-stroke in
the reciprocating system that is the mechanism in place for the politics of
Bhatgaon and other such communities. Talanoa as an event is a ritual
microcosm and thus a (value-laden) metaphor of the larger social form of
political factionalism, which can come into being as young men are drawn
into co-constructing a far-from-disinterested account of events with strong
community involvement and potentially multiple interests. Elder men,
Registers-in-Action in Indo-Fijian Factionalism
and especially heads of households are recognized as the prime political
actors, with their very visible and deferred-to statuses always nervously at
stake, notwithstanding the ideology of equality. Young men affiliate with
the older men as kinds of political clients, especially via kinship relations
(as in supporting one’s nuclear and extended family). Official political acts,
such as panchayat, the form of dispute resolution, reveal these status
asymmetries, of course, because the whole procedure is an attempt to
soothe ruffled and damaged status claims, not to probe truth and falsity.
But as we see, unofficial but pervasive talanoa always has the potential to
be directed to ruffling and damaging those claims. The talanoa form, in an
interdiscursive chain of interlocking performances, is a locus of what we
might term the cumulation of detail into a factional “charter myth” about
potentially rival or counterposed others and values, sometimes denoted
only by association with a big man, who may be named, all in the voice of
mere ratification of thoughts and views of those anonymous others whom
one alludes to and cites in the course of making (up) the narrative.
As Brenneis (personal communication; quoted in Silverstein :–)
noted for me about Bhatgaon:
Egalitarian politics in Bhatgaon at least is shaped in large part by the
anticipatory fear of factional politics (or parti-walla kam, as it is locally
known). My consultants saw factions (partis) as ongoing and problematic in
those villages where they had flourished (and at a few times in the Bhatgaon
past). It was, I think, one of the reasons that a goal in conflict was not so
much to recruit adherents as to find third-party audiences who could
provide the events in which a conflict would not so much be resolved as
the commensurate social worth and reputation of its parties (in our sense)
publicly displayed and vindicated. In any case, in local commentary, parti-
walla kam is very much something to be avoided. . . . Factionalism was
always a possibility but, during my own fieldwork at least, not an ongoing
feature of local social organization (it rather, I would say, haunted the social
scene through the fact of its possibility).
We can now grasp the communicational infrastructure of this potentiality
in its circulatory and emanatory manifestations. Registers – jangli bat and
shudh Hindi – operate as contextually coherent textuality and as emblems
of identity, gaining social significance within this infrastructure as an
aspect of consequential social action.
***
I hope that you are beginning to see, via the examples in this lecture, how
it is that discursive activity of various sorts – the structure of textuality in
Lecture : Enregisterment
fleeting events – comes to index groupness and categories of identity in
perduring society. We can understand the functional criterion of register
and explain why alternative registers exist.
A sign’s eye view starts with the universal fact that users of language
perceive there to be contextual variability in language as denotational code.
That is, forms contrast according to the particular context they index or
point to, making pragmatic paradigms. These set expectations of congru-
ence – or at least non-incoherence – in discourse over a stretch of verbal or
other expressive behavior, in short, over an indexically cohesive text.
People experience linguistic variability in this enregistered mode, with
special salience for certain register shibboleths, which can be lexical,
phono-grammatical, or matters of other expressive systems. The social
meaning or value of the register depends on the folk understanding
(ethno-metapragmatics) of the shibboleths with respect to a culturally
normative universe of positionalities and stereotypes within a language
community. As a result, highly salient register shibboleths become emblems
of identity and through a dialectic can be revalorized in folk models, via
multiple orders of indexicality, in what is an open-ended yet ideologically
driven semiotic process. Although folk awareness focuses on the shibboleths,
the register is a textual structure, just as folk awareness focuses on explicit
primary performatives, even though the consequentiality of discursive action
is accomplished through the dynamic unfolding of textual structure, the
poetics of entextualization, as we saw above in Lecture . Furthermore, there
is an apparent “circulation” of identifying indexical forms across interactions,
seeming to “emanate” from certain privileged ritual sites in social space-time
that set indexical value, enabling the (inter-)connections across institution-
alized sites of interaction in structures of interdiscursivity.
Voicing identity in interaction, then, is not a matter of demographics
and correlations of linguistic variables with social categories. Rather, it
depends on the interdiscursive transposability of heteroglossia – in our
terms, the enregisterment of indexicality – that emblematically populates
the world of normativity, in experience and in imagination. Voicing one’s
own identity in an interaction and aligning or disaligning with someone
else’s identity-claims depend on ethno-metapragmatic knowledge that
connects any current interactional text-a-building with some (ritually)
authorizing interactional text located elsewhere in socio-space-time. Such
connections allow us to align or disalign with co-participants, but also to
inhabit or distantiate from particular sociological figures/stereotypes as
shadowy presences in the current interaction.
Registers-in-Action in Indo-Fijian Factionalism
Having set out the conceptual fundamentals of enregisterment here, we
turn in the next lecture to examine more closely what was only briefly
mentioned so far: the mechanisms of emanation. To see this, we will work
through a number of examples of enregisterment, primary of which are
language standardization and prestige comestibles. Standardization is an
“ideological” fact and, as we will see, it is semiotically ordered in the same
way as the value-conferring cultures of capitalist consumption, both pro-
viding a propulsive force (emanation) to linguistic and other signs, trans-
forming people’s intuitions and perceptions both of language and its users
by organizing how cultural texts – cohesively arrayed material signs – are
produced and interpreted.
Variation
Language communities and speech communities. How processes of
enregisterment in standardization and similar value-conferring ideo-
logical regimes rest on naturalizing and essentializing ideological
projects effecting the “superposition” (Gumperz ) of indexicality;
indexical inoculation; emanation and cultures of standardization
in capitalist consumption.
Signification, circulation, and emanation are the three rubrics through
which we analyzed enregisterment as a cultural process in the previous
lecture. Recall that signification is the organization and interpretation of
indexicality in the textuality of events, out of which registers emerge.
Circulation is a metaphor for processes of interdiscursivity that move across
events of communication, bringing registers together in various ways,
forming myriad relationships across communicative events. The motive
force of such dynamic connections among events is propulsive emanation,
driven by processes of ideologically informed metapragmatics – templates
or schemata for interpreting enregistered indexicality – as they emerge
from and spread across institutional sites of value-creating ritual action.
In this lecture, we are interested in further exploring emanation by
looking at the relationship among (enregistered) indexicality, ideology, and
metapragmatics that underpins the dialectic exemplified in Lecture .
Here, we are interested in showing how the ideologically driven revaloriza-
tion of signs (linguistic and otherwise) creates orders of indexicality. And
further, how institutions and organizations exercise the power to enregister
signs, giving them semiotic (especially indexical) values that can emanate
from those institutions to other social sites. To do so, we consider a
number of cases of emanation: language standardization within nation-
state formations; indexical inoculation in feminist consciousness raising;
language shift in plurilingual (non-standardized) speech communities; and,
finally, prestige comestibles in late capitalist consumption. These examples
constitute far-reaching illustrations of the work of emanation, the dialectics
Overview of the Dialectics of Indexicality
Figure . Event-contextual semiotic of indexicality.
Republished with permission of Elsevier Science & Technology Journals from Michael Silverstein,
“Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life,” Language & Communication Vol.
(), figure . Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center. Copyright ©
Elsevier Ltd.
of (orders of ) indexicality, and their implications for expertise and the
voicing of identity. But first, I want to provide a more general character-
ization of the semiotic process that is at issue in each of the examples.
Overview of the Dialectics of Indexicality
Starting with (indexical) signification, it is important to recall that an index is
indeterminate in contextualizing capacity without implying some functional
metapragmatic, some “interpretant,” as Peirce termed it, that is a determining
convention. The relationship between ideologically informed ethno-
metapragmatics and the workings of indexes is what we have been terming
a dialectic, an asymmetric back-and-forth of forces shaping potential
signification in context. This can best be conceptualized by explicating
Figure ., which is intended as a momentary snapshot diagram from “the
sign’s eye point of view” of indexical presupposition mapped into indexical
entailment in-and-by the occurrence of some message-fraction.
Lecture : Variation
In Figure ., the lower rectangle notes that a cumulatively coherent
(or, at least, non-incoherent) denotational text emerges in its context as a
function, minimally, of the following (working from the bottom of the
diagram): (a) grammatico-semantic structural principles by which any text-
sentence can be parsed according to a system of grammar; (b) the opera-
tional scope and projectability of deictics (which are not separately named
in the diagram), as they coordinate grammatico-semantic and
denotational-textual structure, along with other components of denota-
tional meaning of words and expressions beyond the grammatico-semantic
(see below), that contribute to the referring-and-modally-predicating char-
acter of denotational text; and finally (c) the metricalized structuredness,
or poetic structure, of the emergent signal (including its text-sentence
parsing). All of these factors organize the denotational material beyond
the grammatico-semantic “literal” meanings of the text into denotational
figurations or tropes. A vertical axis projects upward in the diagram to
highlight our focus on a particular local interval of discursive-interactional
real-time in the emergence of such a denotational text-in-context, the
“moment”-interval over which an isolable indexical sign-vehicle is being
produced, here labeled as t.
The upper portion of Figure . diagrams the semiotic processes by
which in-and-at the moment of emergence of such an indexical sign, that
sign presumes upon – indexically presupposes – such textuality and con-
textuality as have been established up to that moment, as indicated by a
solid arrow (to the left of t) pointing to the text unfolded up to that point.
Now, we noted above the necessity for some meta-indexical interpretant
to regiment the entailments of indexical signs for their contexts: in the
figure the broken arrow pointing to the entailed context (to the right of t)
is therefore not straightforward; such entailment depends on – hence, in
the figure, loops back to – that necessary metapragmatic component of
indexical function. The diagram illustrates, moreover, that the intuitive
metapragmatic understanding of the language user is in turn shaped by
explicit ascriptions of cause-and-effect relations of linguistic signs, such
ascription being in essence “ideological,” that is, non-randomly distributed
over the population of language users in potentially non-disinterested ways
and to the ends of particular social projects identifiable with social groups
and interests. Both the metapragmatic “unconscious” and the discourse of
Here, it is important to note that it is through the ways that entextualizations figurate tropic
meanings that, through processes of enregisterment, result in registers of speech over socio-
historical time.
Overview of the Dialectics of Indexicality
metapragmatic consciousness are ideologically informed in this sense, in
large measure a function of: an individual’s biography in society; his or her
membership in and alignment with certain categories differentiated in
social process; and various primary, secondary. . . and n-ary reference
groups toward which he or she is oriented.
The asymmetry of indexical presupposition and indexical entailment,
thus, rests on the asymmetric bidirectionality of the indexical–meta-
indexical (“pragmatic”–“metapragmatic”) relationship, in which denota-
tional textuality and its particular formally segmentable units lurk. For
example, as has now long been a heuristically reliable guide, metapragmatic
consciousness and hence linguistic ideology, as we can term language-
focused ideologies of indexicality, ascriptively and interpretatively tend to
focus on segments that emerge to denotational and even grammatico-
semantic parsing (Silverstein , a). This seems to be the case even
where the functionality ascribed to such indexicals is not denotational as
such. The very units of denotational-textual form seem to be the anchors
of consciousness of contextual – that is, indexical – variation in language,
especially lexical units, words, and expressions, which constitute the iden-
tifiable linear flow of discourse rendered into textual structure.
So, to understand some signal that works indexically by convention,
there is the logical direction of index-to-metapragmatic interpretant; but
that metapragmatic interpretant may be – as Susan Gal () points out –
at the same time rhematizing, or semiotic “downshifting” (Parmentier );
that is, essentializing and naturalizing in the manner of seeing an
iconism (a likeness of signal and that which it signals) underlying and
motivating the indexicality. Thus, the direction of metapragmatic inter-
pretant-to-index may superimpose something quite other, creating in effect
what I’ve termed a second-order indexicality that supervenes on the first order
coming from the other direction. So, we launch indexicals on the basis of
presupposition, and they do cultural work, as it were, in entailing a
consequential contextual configuration, only as washed in the inevitable
goo of ideological interest underlying our metapragmatics. Recall the so-
called T/V phenomena and honorific lexical registers discussed in Lecture
: While the first-order indexicality is presumably focused on the
Addressee, the Referent (or whatever), the second-order indexicality, is,
ironically, focused on the Speaker or Sender by the essentialization that
‘alus is as ‘alus does.
Recall the fuller discussion of indexical presupposition and entailment in Lecture .
Lecture : Variation
Language users always conceptualize contextual variability in ethno-
metapragmatic (ideological) terms, proposing folk theories that “explain”
variation at whatever plane and level of analysis the isolable formal differ-
ences occur. Linguistic ideologies can be said to underlie our metapragmatic
(un)conscious, our sense of register and of pragmatic paradigms. They are,
in short, socially distributed cultural models of the experienceable realities
of language structure and use (or function) that have an impact on the
immediate metapragmatic orientation of participants in discursive interac-
tion. As sociologists and anthropologists, we gather evidence for the
ideological structure – as we would for any cultural material – by triangu-
lating across three kinds of evidence: () observable usage, which can be
scored by user as well as by any other descriptive contextual variable,
especially as such usage in one context can be seen in structures of
interdiscursivity leading back to relatively authoritative, ritual(ized) usage
in institutionally central contexts from which the (cultural) motive force
for usage seems to emanate; () metapragmatic discourse, metalanguage,
and other kinds of reactive responses to language-in-use that reveal explicit
evaluative dimensions and coherences of linguistic variability, such as
named registers and motivational and other explications of why someone
uses/does not use particular forms in context; and () analogical structures
of evaluation implicit in the ways that language use may be considered an
aspect of some larger cultural realm, or parallel to some other kind of
behavioral form, for example, modes of ideological “naturalization” of
language’s indexical value in terms of value-laden essences: consider “vul-
gar” language bespeaking a “vulgar” soul, or “slow Southern drawl”
bespeaking “slow-wittedness,” and the like.
Recall from the last lecture that we are worrying about the tension
between the inevitable variance or dispersion around means of token forms
of social behaviors like linguistic material that constitute registers, and the
possibility of agentive deployment of such variance as a resource for self- and
other-identification – as emblems with second-order indexicality – in events
of social coordination. Physical variance of signals, or sign-vehicles, is an
inevitable fact of life; but the question is: How does there arise or emerge an
organization of such variance into actual valorized indexical conventions,
that is, structures of enregisterment? And what are the semiotic processes
producing conventional – sociocultural – indexicality in social groups like
language communities for which we can find evidence?
As we discussed in the previous lecture, a language community or
linguistic community is a group demonstrating allegiance to a denotational
norm, however much members of the group know that there is contextual
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
variation – which they understand via enregisterment. In contrast, a
speech community is a community by virtue of norms of indexical
practice, no matter how many denotational codes are involved.
People’s ideas about registers differ as a function of the kind of social
structures they inhabit. To be sure, local-scale languages with small num-
bers of users have registers that distinguish rituals and statuses of various
kinds, as we will see when we discuss an example of a plurilingual speech
community in Papua New Guinea studied by Don Kulick. In larger-scale
polities, a wide range of organizations can exercise the power to enregister
linguistic elements. But it is the nation-state form of political organiza-
tion – increasingly widespread in the industrial West and its vast colonial
and post-colonial reach – that has heavily invested in the enregisterment of
standard languages particularly. Massively undergirded by a political econ-
omy of social stratification, the institutional condition of standardization
is now increasingly common in the world, and so it is with standard
registers that we first begin.
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
For any linguist in America, there’s always that cringe-worthy moment,
that can’t-I-find-a-rock-to-crawl-under feeling for those of us whose work
centers on language when we are out and about being social. Inevitably,
someone will ask “What do you do for a living?” And when offered the
reply that one is a professor, and of matters linguistic at that, with a high
degree of predictability comes the response, “Oh, I better watch what I say
then!” or “I better watch the way I talk to you!” Language scientists,
linguists, are inevitably confused with the diction enforcer, the grammar
police, the alphabet soup Nazi. No amount of explanation will do that our
deep – and, I can assure you, non-judgmental! – interest is in the variety of
language in its sociocultural context, and in culturally significant difference
arising from the way language is used to social purpose. Nope. Laypersons
in our kind of language community associate anyone interested in lan-
guage – even in language as socioculturally contextualized – with what is in
their experience perhaps the most salient characteristic of their own – of
our – language: the fact of standardization.
Standardization is a very particular condition of language, a kind of
enregisterment within a particular ideological formation. But contrary to
popular belief, it is hardly essential to the nature of language. While every
language, like every culture, is a value system with underlying norms of
how to do things, however in flux, only some languages have undergone
Lecture : Variation
standardization. English, like all its European counterparts, has indeed
undergone standardization, in fact, multiple standardizations as it has
spread globally.
Like all cases of enregisterment, standardization is a sociolinguistic fact
that involves the meta-semiotic engagement of indexical variance by the
very users of denotational code. It is thus an “ideological” fact, and like all
ideological facts, it varies over a population as a function of people’s very
different investment in institutional sites and events of communication. As
such, standardization as a cultural condition pervades and transforms
people’s consciousness of their own language. It becomes a lens through
which they perceive, process, and evaluate the ubiquitous and inevitable
situational variability of how language is actually used. To those within the
language community, the standard seems like a fixed and non-situational
way of using language to communicate about, to represent the universe of
experience and imagination, a form of language spoken or written “from
nowhere” – that is, from anywhere and everywhere within the sociological
envelope of the language community. Standard is what one should be
using. Period. Although we all know that for some folks – like all of
us? – and for some situations – like most! – dat ain’ də way we talk. My
nervous conversational partners know this and are somewhat embarrassed
to think they will be using non-standard to a language maven. For many
language users in a standard regime, the prescriptions have come to define
what a “language” is all about. For many, without a graphically manifest
standard register with all the paraphernalia and practices of enforcement, a
denotational code envelope just does not seem to be a real, full “language.”
Such may be “dialects” or “jargons,” perhaps, but not “languages,” a
remark I constantly get when I tell people that I study the indigenous
languages of North America and of Aboriginal Australia.
Here, then, in Figure ., is a pictorial representation of how the culture
of standard construes it as “the voice from nowhere.” Remember, this is a
cultural model, the natives’ point of view. It is a conic, multidimensional
radial topology of variation of verbal behaviors in the language commu-
nity, in which any noticeable deviation from standard points to or indexes
some identifiable ascribed social characteristics of speakers, of their
addressees, or, in short, of anything characterizing the situation in which
forms of the non-standard occur. Such deviations from standard are, in
People are even skeptical of the possibility that I created phonologically adequate segmental
alphabets in native North America and Australia and taught native speakers to use them, since
these are only “dialects”!
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
Figure . Representation of how culture of standard construes variation.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Standards, Styles, and Signs of the Social Self,” Journal of the
Anthropological Society of Oxford Vol. (), figure . This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons (CC BY); copyright © Michael Silverstein.
general, thought of in negative terms – what I label as degrees of “down-
and-out”-ness (for comic, as well as conic, effect). And when the conical
model of standardization and divergence from it is concretized as a
representation of a political economy of social stratification, speakers
inevitably locate themselves in class fractions by the degree to which their
language use approximates or fails to approximate standard usage.
You may recall the old saying, “Speak so that I may know who (that is,
of course, sociologically speaking, what social kind) you are!” And you may
recall George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, transduced into Lerner &
Loewe’s Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, in which the flower-seller
Eliza Doolittle is passed off as a countess by the linguistics Professor
Henry Higgins by changing her London Cockney phonetics into the
phonetics of British Standard, called “RP” (Received Pronunciation), and
by substituting standard syntax and phraseology for vernacular forms. Plus,
the sartorial makeover, of course, to which we will return. Shaw and the
upwardly (and inwardly) mobile acutely understand the stakes of the
cultural cone of standardization.
Note the advertising for this musical (Figure .a). I love the way the
Broadway production has the angelic Shaw ultimately pulling the strings
on Julie Andrews’s Eliza; the film poster – replacing Andrews with the
visually striking Audrey Hepburn fronting for the musically impressive
Marnie Nixon – is much less sophisticated (Figure .b). But, in keeping
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Advertising for (a) the musical My Fair Lady and (b) its movie adaptation.
(a) © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org). (b) © Courtesy of CBS
Broadcasting Inc. Photo: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.
with my theme – matters of style and iconism, to which we will return –
note the unmistakable stylistic transformation in going from Broadway to
Hollywood in both graphic and iconographic styles.
The cone of standardization, as I said, is a cultural model of variation in
a language community like ours – an ethno-metapragmatic or ideological
model, as we called it above, that makes sense to the natives. And its
strength – its force as an effective cultural standard influencing people –
has, like all ideological formations, a characteristic social distribution
within the population. People who use language within a standardized
language community reveal differential allegiance to the standard and to
the whole conical model to which those most in its thrall are anxiously
oriented. This was elegantly demonstrated more than a half-century ago by
William Labov’s studies of urban American English, principally in New
York City and in Philadelphia, where statistical curves plotted of rates of
observed standard and non-standard usage tell an interesting story about
cultural ideology more generally. Labov documented usage in the early
s with speakers of New York City English, in one urban
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
Figure . Amex advertising brochure from –, Reagan era.
neighborhood. Overall, his data showed a gradient pattern of differentia-
tion. The higher the speaker’s group in socioeconomic “class,” and the
more constrained the interview situation for any class, the more standard
variants speakers used.
Put another way, standardization of languages is the creation of a stan-
dard register gradiently available to those within a language community,
those presuming themselves to share a denotational norm (“qui ont le
sentiment et la volonté de parler la même langue,” as Saussure’s prize
student and successor, Antoine Meillet, put it). Even within standard there
are paraphernalia to ratchet up the anxieties about verbal behavior, such as
this flyer (Figure .) that arrived in my American Express bill circa or
– the Reagan era in the United States, host to the emergence of anxious
corporate yuppiedom (during which I collected literally hundreds of such
items in a year-long study of “monoglot standard” in America [Silverstein
()]). You will note not only the specific vocabulary – with French
and Latin phrases as well as quasi-technical-mathematical terms and Graeco-
Latinate derivatives – but the metadiscourse that accompanies so as to create
anxieties of deficiency before the particular educated standard of “well-
informed people.” How many of these vocabulary items do you know, the
brochure asks, emphasizing – as do, of course, standardized tests for admis-
sion to higher education, like the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) or GRE
(Graduate Record Examination) – the gradient nature of educated standard,
something one can possess by degrees (certainly the credential of the
University of Chicago!). And note this New Yorker magazine cartoon,
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Arnie Levin cartoon (New Yorker, ) contrasting two pronunciations of the
everyday round, red vegetable.
Arnie Levin/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; used with permission.
by Arnie Levin (Figure .) with the less and more pricey kinds of round,
red everyday vegetables, the labels of which turn on the pragmatic paradigm
of the stressed syllabic vowel, [ɛ́y] versus [ɑ́ˑ], as in tom[ɛ́y]to versus tom[ɑ́ˑ]
to, the latter with its class-ascendant snootiness.
All this exemplifies a classic fact about ideologically permeated cultural
forms, language included. At any given socio-historical moment there is a
collection of salient linguistic prescriptions and proscriptions, of “do”s and
“don’t”s, in other words, that serve as what we term standard register
shibboleths to which adherence is demanded as one is, or aspires to be, at
the conic top-and-center in local ideological perspective. Yet we know that
the actual contents of the collection of shibboleths change over time, an
inevitable conclusion we arrive at from studying the printed record of long-
term standardized communities, or as we know even from interacting with
our grandparents and other elders, who deplore our inattention to former
shibboleths no longer salient! (“I shall go to school” but “You will go to
school,” the standard of my mother’s day in the s. “With whom do
you wish to speak?” of that time versus our acceptable “Who do you want
to talk to?”) We should see that ideas of correctness of form and usage as
“standard” are temporally bound though at all times institutionalized; and
which institutional forms inculcate, monitor, and police people’s adher-
ence to standard sometimes shift as well, as the social organization of
standardizing authority and its paraphernalia transform over time.
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
Yet standardization also has recurrent common properties as a social
process. Fierce standardization achieves a truly pervasive and ubiquitous
orientation of large percentages of language users to the correctness of
standard register and the gradient – if sociologically colorful and indica-
tive – incorrectness of any linguistic production that falls short, thus
marking its user as someone coming from a disprivileged – or at least
identity-laden – “somewhere.” That is, standardization superimposes on
people’s language a set of prescriptions and proscriptions and enforces them
by offering standard through schools, grammar columns in newspapers,
copy-editors, dictionaries, and so on. It demands standard, from anyone
who wants to have entry into certain places of power and prestige, all in the
name of an idea of “neutral” yet perfect language. In this way, standard-
ization creates anxiety in people about hitting standard register in their talk
as well as writing when they think it counts, or someone powerful is
listening or reading.
The project of language standardization has been embraced by govern-
ments of the modernist nation-state, and is among the techniques of
forging such a state, insofar as it involves projecting a language community
(as standardized) into a maximal polity in the Enlightenment order of
things. This is what I have termed, after the writer Washington Irving, the
project of “logocracy” – government mediated by language practices – such
as we live under in the United States and other nation-states of the Euro-
American “North” (Silverstein ). The cultural politics of standardiza-
tion has long been also a class-focused project of political economic
centrality to modern mass social formations, thereby creating fringe or
marginal members and excluding those who resisted membership or had
divided loyalties (see Silverstein b, [], b, , ).
The fiercer that identifiable equation of language community and max-
imal polity, the more under siege are vernaculars within a nation-state’s
borders as well as other language communities, whether indigenous or
immigrant, whether their languages have been standardized elsewhere or
not. This has long been the case in the United States. Think of Spanish
within the US borders, standardized for most first-language speakers in
either Mexico City or San Juan, but de-valued nonetheless in our fiercely
monoglot logocracy. More broadly, consider the complex patterns of the
many speech communities in the United States which rest upon immigrant
languages, as they have become absorbed into a wider speech community in
which denotationally defined languages become enregistered.
Frequently, it is the ability to gracefully interpolate what at first looks to
be material from one or another of these denotational codes that really
Lecture : Variation
marks people as competent members of the speech community, as opposed
to being able to speak a standard or standardized register of a particular
denotational code. Note how powerful are educational organizations, in
this regard, as agents of nation-state projects, drawing the peripheral
young, already perfectly fluent speakers of one or more vernaculars, into
anxieties of enregisterment before a state-sponsored standard register of
one language, that is declared to be the entrance ticket to socioeconomic
and social mobility. Before, happy-go-lucky, perhaps even polyglot kid;
after, anxiety-riven asymmetric bilingual, who intuitively understands the
lessons of the cone of stratification around the state’s language standard.
Fierce standardization of English in the United States makes the situation
of many immigrants and indigenous people, as we know, quite vulnerable,
because they are excluded from both language communities.
With these points in mind, let us look more closely at Labov’s study
and his data from New York City in the s, when the Lower East Side,
that long-ago immigrant neighborhood of tenements and ethnicity in
Manhattan, was beginning to gentrify in earnest. The distribution of post-
vocalic <r> in NYC is pictured in Figure ., showing a regular pattern
with gradations of increasing usage. Postvocalic <r> is what Labov termed a
“sociolinguistic marker,” because there is not only difference in its frequency
of appearance in individuals categorized by some demographic-social cate-
gory, but as well within-subject difference of frequency according to task
demand. He contrasts this with difference correlated merely with demo-
graphic categories, which are his “indicators” (cf. “index”) – and with
intentionally performable modeling – his “stereotypes.” We will more
adequately place this material by thinking about this cline in terms
of enregisterment.
The scale on the ordinate, the y-axis, derives from percent of standard-
like performance of syllables with an /r/ following a vowel in standard
pronunciation – note the examples of such forms at the bottom, guard,
car, beer, beard – where the local New York City vernacular notoriously
lacks it (guard rhyming, in effect, with god, cod [without the final ‑d],
while beer rhymes with be a, be a followed by a word with initial [d-], etc.).
Thus, the post-World War II standard “He [sɒ́ɾd] high above the [fɒɾθ
flɔ́ɾ]” contrasts with the local non-innovating vernacular non-standard “He
[sɔ:ͧd] high above the [fɔ:ͧθ flɔ:].” Labov’s data show the high degree of
enregisterment of the indexical paradigmatic distinction /Vr/ : /V/ as a
salient register shibboleth. The curves in the plot of rates of production of
postvocalic [r] separate the speakers in Labov’s sample by an independent
demographic measure of socioeconomic class category, from what Labov
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
Figure . Distribution of postvocalic <r> in New York City, Lower East Side by
socioeconomic class (SEC) of speaker and contextual style.
Reprinted from William Labov, “The Study of Language in Its Social Context,” in Advances in the
Sociology of Language, vol. , edited by J. Fishman (, Mouton de Gruyter), figure . Copyright ©
Mouton & Co.; used with permission.
terms the “Lower Working Class” at the visual bottom to the “Upper
Middle Class,” number , at the top.
Running horizontally along the abscissa, the x-axis, are contexts of
speaking. These are arranged in increasing order of the way that the task
demands of producing speech seem to call speakers’ reflexive attention to
speaking. Plotted on the extreme left, at A, are measures of people’s usage
when they were recorded unawares and unbeknownst to them in intimate,
in-group conversation – something our human subjects Institutional
Review Board will probably no longer let us do. Next, at B, is the context
defined by a one-on-one interview inquiring about language and about the
interviewee’s perception of his or her linguistic usage as well as the usage of
Lecture : Variation
others. The next position on the abscissa, at C, is when the speaker is asked
to read a passage from a page of print (a passage with lots of words where
standard would require postvocalic [r]-pronunciation, in fact, though the
speaker is not informed of this). Then, in context D, the interviewee is
asked to read aloud slowly lists of printed words, interspersed among them
target words to test particular pronunciations of this variably standardized
sort. And finally, at Dʹ, the so-called minimal graphic pairs test: Look at
the two words and then pronounce them aloud. These are examples like
<sawed>, the past tense of saw-, and <soared>, the past tense of soar-,
that are visually differentiable only in the middle letters.
The results of contextual differentiation are plotted separately for each
of the socioeconomic (demographic) groups of speakers. First, note that
the most horizontal curves, the ones with low slopes of change across these
tasks, occur at the bottom and at the top of the scales. The folks at the
bottom are comparatively unaffected by the different task demands of
speaking, maintaining, with a slight but indeed noticeable increase, a fairly
non-standard pronunciation throughout. They are not, as we can see, very
much mobilized to, nor apparently behaviorally motivated by, cultural
concepts of standard speech. In fact, in subsequent work in comparably
urban locations in the British Isles and elsewhere, it was demonstrated that
working-class speakers have allegiance to, and are behaviorally motivated
in their usage to, speak distinctive and local working-class non-standard
forms, misinterpreted by sociolinguists as bearing “negative prestige.”
Culturally, of course, the “prestige” of being a non-cosmopolitan local is
anything but “negative”! It is being genuine or “authentic” to your primary
reference group.
The Upper Middle Class folks in category at the top produce relatively
standard speech in all of these contexts of performance, perhaps a bit more
carefully standard in usage when graphic minimal pairs are given them.
The interest lies in the middle groups, all of whom, as we can see, are
relatively as non-standard as the lowermost group in their spontaneous in-
group conversational usage. However, as soon as the folks that Labov
terms the aspiring, upwardly mobile Lower Middle Class are presented
with something to read aloud, their standard-cone-anxiety manifests in the
sudden jump in their standard-like pronunciation. When we look at this
“Covert [or negative] prestige” (Trudgill ) is a ridiculous coinage expressing the surprise that
sometimes people spoke, and wanted to speak, in highly non-standard ways. No wonder it was
encountered in Norwich among those for whom affiliations with local social structures permeated
people’s primary reference groups. This is a finding, one might add, not only in Norwich, but
earlier – though unnamed – in Martha’s Vineyard (Labov ).
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
group’s performance in the word-list and graphic minimal pair conditions,
D and Dʹ, their attempts at standardization far exceed that of the Upper
Middle Class, which sets a kind of benchmark of usage for the whole
population in such regimes of standardization. The anxious Lower Middle
Class speakers “hypercorrect” – as Labov (:ff.) terms it – by
producing too much of what is culturally evaluated as “a good thing,” that
is, standard-like postvocalic [r]s – so much so that they put [r]s in, as it
turns out, where they don’t belong according to the rules by which one
converts visual into spoken language, as when one looks at print and
pronounces its forms aloud. I see this as standard anxiety of a hair-trigger
acuity, and Labov confirmed this with numerous correlated attitudinal
measures of what he terms “linguistic insecurity” before standard register.
His Lower Middle Class interviewees were maximally influenced by the
ideological culture of standardization, maximally anxious about fulfilling
its dictates and sharp in monitoring and criticizing the performance of
others. Many could not even recognize themselves when listening to
recordings of their own spontaneous usage in contexts A and B played
back for them to review.
Labov thought it is the degree to which people are paying attention to
their speech that accounts for the cline, for the gradual rise – distinctive by
demographic group – of the percentage of postvocalic <r> pronounced by
speakers. But we can easily see that it is the degree to which people feel
compelled to index allegiance to standard register, inculcated through
graphic practices. There is a long history of the association of standardiza-
tion, in Euro-American and, thence, in more recent colonial and post-
colonial contexts, with inscriptional techniques of writing and printing and
the graphic-to-phonic/phonic-to-graphic transduction called reading and
writing. Recall that Bloomfield () spoke of folk concepts of “lan-
guage” and “dialect,” that is, standard and non-standard registers, in folk
terms of “literate” and “illiterate” speech. No one wants to be revealed as
“illiterate” in this sense, certainly not those who showed most movement
in rates of standard pronunciation in Labov’s exercises.
And indeed, this is just as we would expect for any ideologically driven
stratification where some behavioral characteristic is considered the neu-
tral, top-and-center standard, considered to be the universal social solvent
in institutions of the public sphere, and anchored by massive inculcation
especially in educational institutions that themselves are differentially
successful among distinct segments and sectors of the population.
Indeed, the so-called “upper-middle-class” professionals – lawyers, physi-
cians, professors, corporate middle-management – who earn their living
Lecture : Variation
and the esteem of their consociates through verbal skills centered on
standard, are privileged to speak this register ideologically endowed with
indexical neutrality as it indexically screams out their positionality, while
those speaking otherwise can be negatively located in social space along
one or another axis of differentiation, as “speaking like a . . .” indexed by
these very forms. The matter here is the sharpness and degree of shift from
non-standard toward standard, which is the index of one’s position within
this sociolinguistics of orientation to and anxiety before standard register.
But absent a fixed or publicly institutionalized register model of this
(standardized, conical) sort, establishing of baseline norms for phonology
depend on having worked out a phonologico-phonetic model relative to
which phonetic variation and its significance can be measured within a
sometimes complex envelope of enregisterment, competing register forma-
tions emanating from different “ritual”-like value-setting sites intersecting
in the usage of individuals defined by category and group memberships.
Every anthropological linguistic fieldworker has had this experience, of
encountering variance even in elicitation (let alone connected spoken
performance) of lexical forms, of sometimes subtle – and sometimes not
so subtle (e.g., [vέys] : [vɑ́ˑz] for English orthographic <vase>; cf. Labov
:n) – segmental substitutions, characteristic phonetic overlaps,
among other phenomena, not to mention phonological indexicalities like
augmentative–diminutive systems we may not at first suspect exist. No less
a figure than Bloomfield, with his obsessive concern for inductive opera-
tionalism, was much disturbed by this in working on Menomini, but
finally realized that postulating the structure of the phonology as the
necessary model for asserting the community norm was a prerequisite
to understanding variance, overlap, and so on (Bloomfield :;
Bloomfield [–]:–; Goddard , esp. –). It
is perhaps no wonder that one can count on the fingers of one hand the
attempts to do serious variationist phonetic analysis in the absence of a
standardized register or its equivalent, as for example indicated by orthog-
raphy or other socially licensed authority. Or complementarily, one can
note the lack of a serious, locally relevant autonomous phonological – or
grammatical – analysis, which would serve as a prerequisite to doing
variationist correlations.
The category of socioeconomic class itself – as Labov defines it –
emerges as an envelope of phonological enregisterment in his New York
See Dorian on the character of sociolinguistic variation in local, non-standardized languages
such as the East Sutherland Scottish Gaelic she has been studying for circa sixty years.
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
White Working-Class Registers in Lower East Side English:
Three vocalic nuclei in opposition, /ah / : /i h/ : /u h/, for words orthographically
like
park : clear, Clare : poor, pour
(recall as well the absence of a syllable-coda rhotic in all of these)
Upper-Middle-Class Register in Lower East Side (and more general NYC)
English:
Six vocalic nuclei in opposition, /ah/ : /ih/ : /eh/ : /æh/ : /uh/ : /oh/, for words
orthographically like
park : clear : Clare : clar[ity] : poor : pour
(recall as well the presence of a syllable-coda rhotic in all of these)
Figure . Registers in New York City, Lower East Side.
After Labov
City work. Each socioeconomic class Labov investigated controls not one
but an envelope of non-standard-to-standard registers which become the
stylistic sociolectal repertoire within which their usage varies across
contexts that differentially demand production of standard. Figure .
shows how vernacular working-class tense vowels show a three-point
phonological system, [ɪə] – [ʊə] – [ɑə], a vocalic register that gradually
expands in significant phonological units towards the six-vowel space of
the upper-middle class, whose vowel registers remain more or less the same
across all the various standard-inducing tasks. Note that the Lower Middle
Class shoots past the Upper Middle Class and “hypercorrects” by adding
more distinctions than the latter group make. Compare the results of
postvocalic <r> in our earlier Figure ., insofar as the “hypercorrect”
frequencies reflect putting in postvocalic [r] even where orthography does
not indicate one, as in the stressed first syllable of <lawyer>, frequently
leaving it out at word-end, in the unstressed syllable.
Indeed, one of the most striking demonstrations of enregisterment is in
what became a stillborn part of Labov’s dissertation (:–), based
on his Lower East Side survey. After reviewing the various correlations in
overall performance profiles on a more or less variable-by-variable basis,
Lecture : Variation
Figure .a Structures of New York City vowel systems by style and class. Third-order
structure of NYC vowel system: stylistic variation.
Reproduced from William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, nd edition
(, Cambridge University Press), figure . Copyright © ; used with permission. Also see
Labov :.
Labov synthesizes his results in the final chapter – making reference to
Martinet, by the way – with a striking set of reconstructions of what we
can understand are covariations between class and ethnic differentiation
within vocalic registers strongly associated with the twentieth century’s
dynamics of class stratification. He is able to diagram an interpretation of
the crystal-structure-like envelope of register variation in performance as a set
of planar targets of phonological differentiation that speakers seem to be
attempting to hit, as it were, in their identity-indexing usage. His diagrams
are reproduced here as Figures .a and b. What this reveals is that working-
class white ethnics – principally Jews and Italians at the time – seem to have
a three-vowel “ingliding” enregistered system, /ah/ : /ih/ : /uh/. Upper-
middle-class professionals, by contrast, index their identity by a correspond-
ing five- or, actually, six-vowel vocalic register. The details can be studied in
the original work, but what is important to note is that the statistical
measures needed are not per-subject overall scores of one phonological
Standardization as a Cultural Condition
Figure .b Structures of New York City vowel systems by style and class. Fourth-order
structure of NYC vowel system: stylistic variation for four class groups.
Reproduced from William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, nd edition
(, Cambridge University Press), figure .. Copyright © ; used with permission. Also see
Labov :.
variable at a time – a methodological blunder still, alas, common among
variationist studies – but scores of production over stretches of functionally
coherent speech of co-occurring values of the paradigmatic members constituting
such identity-indexing registers. Such scores of production reveal the stylistic
silhouette, as it were, which a speaker is attempting, oriented to self-
expression through such indexically significant projection – what Labov
himself, prefiguring Pierre Bourdieu (:–), terms “articulatory
gesture . . . phonological posture” (:).
So, standards are cultural forms, configurations of linguistic culture, locat-
able in time; indeed, they are organized around ever-changing and socio-
historically specific prescriptions for one among a range of variants and pro-
scriptions of certain others that nevertheless generally persist within overall
community usage. They are used by those who do not speak “well,” or – as we
say – whose speech is not “up to standard.” Yet, at all times the standard forms
have ever been ideologically justified, that is, metapragmatically rationalized
by interests that support them in terms of myriad ascribed virtues, essential
properties such as truthfulness, transparency to “reality,” beauty, cognitive and
expressive power, communicative efficiency, among others, that come to be
Lecture : Variation
identified as the virtues of the very forms of standard themselves as well, in a certain
logic of iconic consubstantiality – the technical term, recall, is rhematized –
identified as and with the virtues of the very people who can display them
properly (recall, ‘alus is as ‘alus does). By contrast, the opposite vices, needless
to say, come to be identified with non-standard forms and, by similar
indexically based iconic association, with the users of non-standard linguistic
forms, who, on the basis of language are understood by those anxiously
oriented to the top-and-center to be, by contrast, stupid, muddled vis-à-vis
“reality,” brutish, unaesthetic, uneducable, and so forth. I’m sure that you
have seen such ideologically driven pronouncements in print, and have heard
them in broadcast and web media – and perhaps even in various face-to-face
situations such as the social gatherings with which I began this section: a
person’s deficiency in or – heaven forfend! – total lack of standard English
bespeaks, it is an index of, that individual’s lack of something essential for
success, for citizenship, for being, in short, right with the modern world. And,
in a regime of standardization, that may indeed at least be the outcome, if not
the cause.
Indexical Inoculation in Standardized Regimes
How can one intervene in such a regime of standardization and provide
alternative centers of emanation? It requires indexical inoculation, as
I term it, of which a wonderful case is the advent of Second-Wave
Feminist linguistic consciousness raising among speakers of European
languages. Indexical inoculation, more generally, is the mechanism of
“circulation” of enregistered value-differentiating shibboleths. It is the
process of summoning members of a cultural community to understand
and even to use new register effects. Note, it depends on precisely the
mechanisms discussed so far: the referential – not semantic – essentializa-
tion of a standard linguistic form in a field of older standard and non-
standard. In the case of Second-Wave Feminism more particularly, a
positioned ideological analysis of denotational structure – principally
lexicon – intersects with intuitively felt indexical diagrams that tradition-
ally disprivileged women. The result is the creation of a new register,
“non-sexist language,” and the relegation of “sexist language” to a de-
valued position, at least among privileged elites in the Western industrial-
ized world. Observe that indexical inoculation works to produce new kinds
of pragmatic paradigms with second-order indexical effect – signaling “pro-
equity” speakers as distinct from others – those others who are thus
inevitably construed as “anti-equity” because of the way pragmatic or
Indexical Inoculation in Standardized Regimes
“epicene” he/him/his – newly inoculated with negative indexical value >
( Long-in-usage vernacular non-standard,
( newly licensed: they/them/their
(
( [neutralizes number as
( well as gender]
REGISTER DIFFERENTIATED{
( Hyper-precise academic-professional: he or she /
( him or her / his or her
(
( [enumerates both sex-
( reference possibilities]
Figure . Ideologically driven change in the anaphoric/cataphoric paradigm.
indexical oppositions work. The new indexicality compels one, as a user of
language, to perform one’s political positionality through the shibboleths
of a new enregisterment of usage, which were the foci of explicit ethno-
metapragmatic regimentation.
Let us follow how this change – this explicit ethno-metapragmatic
regimentation – occurred. About forty years ago, one of the central foci
of feminist activism about usage in English and other European languages
was the epicene pronoun for resumptive reference (anaphora or cataphora,
as the syntactic construction determines) to single humans denoted by, for
example, nouns of (frequently habitual) agency and other status terms
(teacher-, doctor-, etc.), where the denotatum is characterized in terms of
social action (Figure .). The older, school-enforced norm was to use the
anaphor he/him/his (in its various case manifestations); my college- and
graduate-school-aged students have by now been liberated unremarkably
to use they/them/their, neutralizing number as well as grammatical gender
(a usage though long condemned as non-standard and un- or ill-educated),
and my colleagues and I use the academic register disjunctive, he or she/
him or her/his or her (or just recast the construction to obviate the need,
among other strategies).
It was prescriptivist standardizers, we should note, who had cast epicene
they out of standard English and railed against it for centuries to no avail, as
Ann Bodine showed (). It is, in fact, the only third-person gender-
indifferent anaphoric form in English, automatically solving the problem
of restricted denotation by collapsing the category of number if used as an
Lecture : Variation
anaphor for a single referent, genericness still perhaps suggesting plurality-
of-kind. Thus, it has been part of the language all along, though proscribed
by standardizing ideology; that is, until its proscription was relaxed by the
political generation, both women and men, that brought personal style to
the center of political alignment. In a sense, then, the use of they/them/their
emerged in the s as the wearing of verbal blue jeans, and has become,
like blue jeans for our current undergraduate students – which are
unmarked “clothes,” to be sure – simply the regular form used in written
as well as spoken prose. At least before the relatively recent reflexive
attention to “preferred pronouns,” he or she was the persnickety, denota-
tionally precise form, a higher register of usage voicing a kind of
expository-prose precision. By the early s, the percentage of uses of
*he as an epicene among standard using academics was vanishingly small,
by Ann Pauwels’ Australian sample, for instance, . percent of all
instances (however, ten times more frequent in men’s, as opposed to
women’s usage). Having myself read some fifty lengthy undergraduate
term papers for a course on “Language, Voice, and Gender” in Spring
Quarter, , I can report having found one instance of epicene he – in
one student’s paper – but I’m sure she didn’t mean it.
Another central focus of feminist activism was occupational and other
status terms affixally differentiated as well by sex of denotatum (Figure .),
such as actor-/actress-, sculptor-/sculptress-, where the sex characteristic
coded in the feminine noun form was viewed as an otiose excrescence.
The use of sex-indicating adjectival modifiers for the marked status incum-
bent – lady plumber, male nurse, et cetera – also reproduces the systematic
grammatico-semantic asymmetry in the gender category binary, offensive to
aspirations of sex-neutral opportunity, of course. Thus, some neutral term
was sought or proposed. Waitron- is my favorite, proposed in all serious-
ness – perhaps by a Star Trek fan – to replace the pair waiter-/waitress-, but
fortunately the linguistically attuned as well as politically well-inclined have
adopted server-, a fine noun of habitual agency now widely in service, as
they have done with flight attendant- to replace [steward-]/stewardess- as
men entered the main cabin precincts of the airline industry, the era of the
ocean liner’s “stewards” being long over.
Finally, Second-Wave Feminism focused on terms of address, in two
respects. The first was based on the native speaker’s intuitive knowledge of
the norms of usage (see Brown and Ford ). Here, it was noted, the
cline of usage of forms of personal proper names runs from Nickname to
First Name to Civil Title + Surname (with further possibilities in
Occupational Status Title + Surname), for example Mike or Mick >
Indexical Inoculation in Standardized Regimes
server, not waiter vs. waitress – sex of role incumbent irrelevant
lady plumber vs. plumber )
) – sex of role incumbent irrelevant
male nurse vs. nurse )
( Miss )
Ms. vs. ( ) – marital status of person irrelevant; cf. Mr.
( Mrs. )
Figure . Inoculation of status term differentiated by sex of denotatum.
Michael > Mr. Silverstein (and even Dr. Silverstein or Professor
Silverstein). There are two distinct dimensions in the Brown and Ford
scheme (extended from Brown and Gilman [], which we dis-
cussed at length in the previous lecture): so-called “power” – which as we
saw is actually relative deference entitlement accruing to speaker and to
addressee – and “solidarity” – which is degree of (with)in-group-ness, as the
original authors note.
However, recall from our discussion of address terms in Lecture , that
any single given usage is, under most circumstances, indexically ambiguous.
The use of a nickname in addressing someone is, for example, generally
taken as a performance of the speaker’s feelings of warm in-group-ness
toward the addressee so named, but it may actually be a performance of
the speaker’s estimation of an addressee’s relative deference dis-entitlement,
almost a form of interactional mockery of someone to his or her face.
Similarly, the use of the bare first name (“given name,” “Christian name”)
has similar ambiguities of indexical meaning, and in many contexts strikes
an addressee as a speaker’s faux display of an intimacy that, rather, is a mode
of taking liberties with, of disregarding, the degree of deference entitlement
that the addressee considers just. The classic examples cited in much of the
feminist literature involve official personnel in professional service encoun-
ters such as doctor’s or dentist’s office visits, where patients invariably used
to be addressed by first name. Hospitals and geriatric establishments are
particularly demeaning of the personal “dignity” – that is, deference entitle-
ment – of people medically afflicted, of aged people and others who are all
Lecture : Variation
tropically figurated, it was objected, as deferentially lesser beings in the role
of addressee than the first-naming, care-providing speaker who thus speaks
ex cathedra from a position as a licensed status-superior (rather than inti-
mate). These kinds of usage were considered to be all the more potently
demeaning to women as addressees.
The second objectionable norm, spanning both direct address and wider
referring, involves the Civil Title + Surname construction (Figure .).
Why, people questioned, were men denoted by the formula Mr. Smith,
notwithstanding they were unmarried or married, while women were
denoted either as Miss Smith, if unmarried, and Mrs. Smith, if married?
(Of course, historically, there was a term for young, unmarried men,
Master Smith, still, in fact, in use around me on occasion when I was
growing up, but I suspect the civil title Master- caused offense along the
denotational dimension evidenced in the dichotomous pair master- vs.
slave-. So, the civil-titular distinction for males disappeared, also through
indexical inoculation, in favor of a single term, the one not risking
offensiveness.) What was proposed as a term to correspond to the denota-
tional range of Mr. was, of course, Ms., pronounced generally as [mɪz] or
[məz], graphically combining the first and last alphabet letters of the two
female titles. The contrast with the form Miss constitutes, to be sure, a
new phonological minimal pair: [mɪs] vs. [mɪz], and it is here, too, that the
indexical innovation was most salient.
In fact, as the wider language community grudgingly took note of the
metapragmatically inoculated indexicality, it was widely the case that the
innovating form Ms. replaced the earlier form Miss, but was still used in
opposition to Mrs.! For many years, that was the usage in the self-styled
more prestigious of my city’s newspapers, the Chicago Tribune: unmarried
women of whatever age have become Ms., while married women have
remained Mrs. outside of rarefied segments and sectors of the English-
speaking populace, renewing the formal opposition, as we say in historical
linguistics, and managing to stay very narrowly within the confines of a
heteronormative order of legitimated sexuality of then-permissible mar-
riage, establishing domestic, reproductive, and economic groupings.
Marital relations, to be sure, were a central watershed of tension as well
as concern, one of a number of dimensions of identity in which male–
female status and role disparities were being analyzed and socio-historically
located in the political economy of the West. One must indeed remember
that “the personal” is “the political” – and the converse.
Thus, for terms like Ms. and, indeed, as we will see, the term gender
too, it is in many cases not so much the social order that has changed, but
Indexical Inoculation in Standardized Regimes
merely denotational language in certain precincts of use. To be sure,
“gender” is a very old term in linguistics – meaning a kind of grammatical
category or noun class – but its use for humans was long discouraged by
standardizers, though it was indeed used in that way, if jocularly, as early as
the eighteenth century. And notwithstanding robust debate in feminist
circles and at official UN conferences about the relationship between
categories of “sex” and “gender” and proper use of the terms (Scott
), a more mundane and familiar process is ongoing in popular usage.
You may have noticed that when airlines are getting passenger information
as one books tickets online, and in banks when applying for a home
mortgage, one is asked about one’s “gender,” with generally one of two
boxes to be checked, “male” or “female.” At an earlier point in my life – for
example on the certificate registering my birth, an image of which was
recently sent to me by a family member – I would have been classified as of
the male “sex.” I am not certain of the case of officialdom elsewhere and in
languages other than English, but as a linguist I could not help but observe
that this is an example of Kuryłowicz’s Fourth Law of so-called analogy,
where an innovating form, like a new lexeme, replaces an older one,
whether morphologically related (as in his examples) or not. There is a
restriction of the old form’s former field of distribution – indeed, some-
times ousting it from the language – and in effect, then, from its meaning,
the newer form generally taking over most if not all such denotational
capacity, as in Miss and Ms. at the Chicago Tribune. The Kuryłowiczan
chestnut in English is the form brothers, a paradigmatically regular plural
with suffix /‑z/ (brother- + ‑s), ousting the inherited brethren as the
unmarked plural, and thereby restricting the meaning of the older form
to denote aggregates of members of certain religious corporate groups.
Our example, gender, is similarly being used in various sites for precisely
what the older form sex denoted, the earlier binary paradigm of identifying
people by anatomical and/or physiological endowment that, it was pre-
sumed, was one’s destiny. In increasing regions of common parlance,
“gender,” so called, means, as a characteristic or property, what sex used
to. And the term sex has for some become at least pointedly – as they say –
“suggestive,” restricted to that realm of behavior about which one used to
joke on government and similar forms, that the choice should rather be
“yes” or “no” than “male” or “female.” Generally speaking, one now “has
sex” only as an experience, less usual is to “have a sex” as a property, in
general parlance – except, perhaps, in the phrase same-sex marriage,
though the bearing of the compounded term ‑sex here may well show
the lurking allusion to the cultural concept of sexual relations. In many
Lecture : Variation
cases, the term sex- has become quasi-tabooed and only its derivatives,
sexual- (cf. sexual orientation-), and sexuality- are now in wide currency.
How to understand the significance of this linguistic change? As a
standardized denotational fact, one term may be replacing the other in
popular usage. As a pragmatic fact, however, the gender/sex pair works like
the other feminist-inspired innovations we have just analyzed. That is, if
gender innovatively contrasts with sex, however rarely, as part of a prag-
matic paradigm, then as with gender-neutral they, its use conveys a higher-
order indexicality of the speaker as positioned: perhaps as relatively young
or as aligned with modes of social life the users of the term gender are
presupposed, by ethno-metapragmatic regimentation, to favor.
Now, as I understood the ethno-metapragmatic analysis leading to the
phenomenon of indexical inoculation, Second-Wave Feminists with good
reason reflexively experienced the multiple dimensions of asymmetry of
social practice in everyday life, a situation in which the opposition of
male and female as an ascription of identity lines up with gradient (more
vs. less; higher vs. lower; total vs. part) and privative (yes vs. no; in vs.
out; dominant vs. recessive) differences in a whole range of matters of
sociality. There were wages and salaries. There were burdens of domestic
organization. There was admissibility to places of power and control, not
to speak of professional sports teams’ locker rooms. The range of insti-
tutional sites and social domains where such asymmetries exist(ed) is
wide. And to call attention to these asymmetries, emergent in each
society as a social fact of its own local type, indexical inoculation of the
denotational code constitutes a kind of – to use the term – “consciousness
raising.” It is through this reflexive lens that one can begin to take account of
one’s condition as a being-in-society as having not merely “sex,” but this
complex, multidimensional socially emergent condition called “gender,” a con-
dition linked to sex but made complex by its intersection with multiple
other dimensions of social institutionality. It is, its proponents prescribed,
something that all people need to come reflexively to understand about
themselves in a consciousness mobilized or “raised” – there is the moral-
ethical positioning of the matter – to reformist action. There is a social
therapeutic goal, perhaps semiotically born of a combination of naïve
Whorfianism and/or Enlightenment beliefs that one rationalizes society
by rationalizing language, that is: if semantic differences are erased so too
We will return in Lectures and to discuss popular Whorfianism as a perduring cultural fact in the
West and the influence of Enlightenment’s instrumentalization of denotational language to find
Scientific Truth.
Indexical Inoculation in Standardized Regimes
will the social inequalities they denoted. Also related are latter-day psycho-
therapeutic techniques, in which naming a besetting problem is at least the
first step to solving it – think of the twelve-step vulgarization of group
psychotherapy-cum-Christian redemptive discourse.
Not wishing to contravene the importance and dare I say profound
truth of this line of feminist thinking, it is nevertheless important to
distinguish indexical inoculation via the creation of a “non-sexist” register
from the analytic logic of the “birth of ‘gender’” in sociolinguistic studies
in order to insist, as I did in (Silverstein b), and as Elinor Ochs
did in , that in social formations, “gender” is never directly indexed
as a presupposable given of the social context so much as emergent in
socio-historically particular intersections of relational role recruitments
that ultimately rest on local understandings of differences of sex – whatever
these differences involve in the way of essentializations or naturalizations.
So the point is, that from an analytic point of view, to “index gender” is
always already at least what we term a “second-order” phenomenon of
discernable register shibboleths and congruent behavior that is emergent,
labile, and ever subject to superpositional (Gumperz ) performativity –
“acting like a man” when in physical pain, or “throwing like a girl” in
sports, or “telling the story like an old lady” as I was apparently heard to do
by an elderly and chiefly male Kiksht-speaking consultant. (From whom
did he think I had, in fact, learned how to tell myth narratives, but
senior women who kindly agreed to serve as linguistic and cultural
consultants?)
The two phenomena, “non-sexist language” and supposedly “indexing
gender,” are distinct. Insofar as the various Second-Wave Feminist-induced
transformations of cultivated registers of standard English do, indeed, serve
as indexical inoculations, people become conscious of aspects of the social
order of differentiation. As speakers perforce must signal their political
stance with respect to that evolving order and its changes, such emanations
have created consequential, but not total, transformations of the social
order.
There are, of course, speech communities that lack a culture of standard
and in which gender-indexical inoculation is not occurring. Nevertheless,
differences of expressive form that index speakers’ sex difference as a
second-order phenomenon (a.k.a. gender) – as based on locally understood
cultural principles and intersecting with other relational role recruitments,
genres, and rhematizations – may be entangled with linguistic and societal
processes and changes of wide-ranging kinds, for instance, as we will see in
our next example, Christian modernity and language abandonment.
Lecture : Variation
Language Replacement in a Plurilingual Speech Community
In Gapun village in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where language replace-
ment has been followed now for some twenty-five years by my colleague
Don Kulick, two denotational codes or languages have become enregis-
tered as alternatives, with cultural meaning associating one of them with
men, and the other one with women (Figure .). Kulick’s work dem-
onstrates powerfully that the matter of emanation and the dialectic of
indexicality operate even in plurilingual speech communities, and that the
replacement of one of the languages in Gapun is linked to culturally
defined differences between men and women. Observe that in Gapun
there is a contrast of genres of entextualization-in-context: kros or ‘angry
talk,’ and oratory in ‘men’s house talk.’ Gapuners’ ethno-metapragmatic
ideology assigns one of two languages to each genre, which thereby
effectively become polar opposites in the community: for kros-es, Taiap,
the language identified with this village (even though there are numerous
other languages spoken and understood by virtue of cross-ethnic exoga-
mous in-marriage); and for meetings in the men’s house, Tok Pisin,
the language of Christian missionization and the language of the PNG
nation-state. Note the parallel to Bhatgaon discussed in the previous
lecture: there too, although the linguistic forms at issue were within the
envelope of a single denotational code, two generative sites of politics at
the local level were contrasted, and age and gender were at issue.
In Gapun, the ethno-theory of communication is Addressee-focal.
Knowledge about others is dangerous, something to be avoided. Therefore,
Figure . Contrastive features of two local political genres in Gapun village.
Reproduced from Don Kulick, “Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a
Papua New Guinean Village,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by B. Schieffelin,
K. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity (, Oxford University Press), table .; Copyright © by
Oxford University Press, Inc. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through
PLSclear.
Language Replacement in a Plurilingual Community
the ethic of Speakerhood is not to impose oneself on others as Addressees and
Audiences; to do so violates norms of proper comportment, indexing that one
has too much hed ‘egotism’ (what we, proper Freudians, would describe as id
uncontrolled by socialization of the superego). As Kulick (:–) notes,
“[t]he concept of hed in Gapun signifies egoism, selfishness, and maverick
individualism. It denotes emotional bristliness and defiant, antisocial behav-
ior, and it is roundly condemned in village rhetoric.” Children have lots of hed
before they come to save ‘respectfulness’ through proper socialization, just as
women have a propensity to hed as opposed to essentially savvy grown men.
To deliver oneself of a kros, therefore, an invective- and obscenity-laced
response-provoking (thus dialogic) outburst hurled from the interior of a
house at others in or around other houses, is the epitome of violation of these
values. An individual krosed as an Addressee is drenched, saturated with
unmistakable knowledge about the affect of someone losing – and loosing –
her hed whether or not one wants to be so inundated. Figure . presents
Sake, a proper “meri bilong kros,” a ‘woman given to kros-ing’ letting her
neighbor Erapo have it. The underlined portions, actually the majority of the
matrix of entextualization, are in Taiap, the Papuan language properly
ascribed to the village of Gapun. Not everything is in Taiap, but nonetheless
villagers understand the integral relationship between Taiap as a register in
this plurilingual speech community and the discourse genre of krosing. And,
importantly, they associate in this way Taiap with femaleness and with
displays of hed.
One must always look for the sociological dimensions of people’s lives
in which cultural ideologies reflexively explain things to those existing in a
particular social formation. Kulick’s original fieldwork from which this
report comes, at the end of the s and beginning of the s, was at a
time of rapid social change. Christian missionization had decidedly shifted
the balance from traditional ways to ones more or less universally super-
imposed on small-scale societies all over the world, a kind of Christian
conceptual lens for how such societies should work. In Gapun, it involved
heightening the notion of the patripotestal nuclear family, organized
around a male head of household, a men’s council of such heads of
households in the village, meeting in the men’s house for collective
decision-making, and so forth. Gapun had been matrilateral and uxorilocal
Editors’ note: The quotation in Figure . of Gapuner women intentionally insulting each other,
taken from Kulick’s ethnography, was part of Silverstein’s lecture. We recognize and regret that it
might seem offensive to some readers. The editors believe that the ethnographic fidelity of the
quotation is crucial in showing the intensity of the insults and hence to advancing the argument of
the chapter.
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Gapun woman (Sake) delivering a kros to a neighboring woman (Erapo).
Words that are underlined are vernacular Taiap; words not underlined are Tok Pisin.
Reproduced from Don Kulick, “Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a
Papua New Guinean Village,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by B. Schieffelin,
K. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity (, Oxford University Press), p. ; Copyright © by Oxford
University Press, Inc. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear.
in social organization, uterine lines of descent through women and their
brothers being at the center of political economy, men taking up residence
in their wives’ houses. When Kulick writes of the “angry women of
Gapun,” one might say with justification that Christian missionization
and its transfer of power to the – Christian male – people ought, in fact, to
cause anger, to reveal women’s hed in the face of men having arrogated to
themselves the dignity of non-mutually interfering save in the essentially
ceremonial genres of men’s house oratory. Figures . and . present
examples of how anger is talked about among men, strikingly contrasting
with the kros attributed to women.
So here is the second-order indexical irony: In this deeply ideological,
ethno-metapragmatic interpretative regime, kros-ing in Taiap (whatever
the mixture of actual languages used) becomes a second-order performance
of femaleness, by an individual (rhematically) interpreted as “naturally”
prone to burning kroses, as it were, while by contrast participating in men’s
house oratory in Tok Pisin becomes a classic (rhematically interpreted)
performance of maleness, by an individual able to engage in serial
Language Replacement in a Plurilingual Community
Figure . Men in Gapun expressing anger.
Reproduced from Don Kulick, “Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a
Papua New Guinean Village,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by B. Schieffelin,
K. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity (, Oxford University Press), p. ; Copyright © by Oxford
University Press, Inc. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear.
monologue in the ideally low-key politics of Christian modernity.
Interestingly, men even strategically orchestrate or authorize kroses in
which their wives or other female relatives (recalling matrilaterality)
become the talking heds, as it were; thus, men play strategic roles in a
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Men in Gapun reflecting on how (not) to express anger.
Reproduced from Don Kulick, “Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a
Papua New Guinean Village,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by B. Schieffelin,
K. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity (, Oxford University Press), p. ; Copyright © by Oxford
University Press, Inc. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear.
politics that disavows such outbursts. Recall the parallels to the talanoa. In
both cases, the second-order signaling accomplished by register difference
becomes an interdiscursive (circulatory) connection among socially institu-
tionalized (ritualized) events, here of kroses and oratory, from which indexical
value emanates. It is also from these sites that emblems of identities emanate,
here making the contrast between shibboleths of Taiap-speaking and of Tok
Pisin-speaking into an interdiscursively mobile cultural contrast between
women and men.
Now, given all this second-order construction/construal of ideological
perspective, the two contingently and historically co-occurring languages,
Taiap and Tok Pisin, are locally seen in a framework of the cultural absolutes
of gendered “human nature.” Being thus rendered intelligible, the contingen-
cies become certainties: Taiap has been disappearing under indexically effec-
tuated devaluation, along with matrilaterality and uxorilocality. As Kulick
reminds us, “language ideologies seem never to be solely about language –
they are always about entangled clusters of phenomena, and they encompass
and are bound up with aspects of culture like gender, and expression, and being
‘civilized’” (:; also see Woolard ). Indeed, as we see, it is language
as an indexical system that is at the center of ideological struggles, even where,
as is certainly the case for the modern West, the focus on language seems to be
only denotational. But it is never only that.
Enregisterment of Non-Linguistic Codes under Conditions
of Late Capitalism
We have seen that enregisterment – whether emanating via standardization
or regimented in other non-standardized ways – is central to the work of
Non-Linguistic Enregisterment in Late Capitalism
culture. So, for our final set of examples, let us turn to the state of cultural
existence under late, super-ripe capitalism, to consider organizations or
networks of organizations directed at this or that aspect of consumerist
consumption, what goes under the vernacular term “lifestyle” (where we
cannot but note the form style lurking). Think, in other words, not about
the nation-state but about the myriad social formations – also often
standardizing, in fact – with claims upon our reflexive sense of the
enregisterment of our style through our relations to commodities.
As the linguistic examples so far demonstrate, enregisterment, the spread
of a register structure in a population, is a matter of the power of institu-
tional forms to give indexical meaning and value to, in this instance,
language signs, transforming people’s intuitions and perceptions both of
language and of its users by organizing how cultural texts – cohesively
arrayed material signs – are produced and interpreted. What is reflexively
true of linguistic “style” (i.e., speech registers) is also true of every other code
of culture. Cultural meaning of everything in its social context emerges via
enregisterment. The fact that cultural materials are shot through with
meanings endowed by register structures enables consequential social action
with such cultural stuff – linguistic or otherwise – to define the meanings of
social context and what category of person is acting in that context. And
language is, in fact, the leading medium through which cultural codes are
enregistered, since discourse has the potential to give ideological oomph and
shape to every other cultural code.
Think of fashion, focused on wearable as well as meaningful sartorial
objects. Here, a way of talking about clothes – what Roland Barthes ()
called the “rhetoric” of fashion – in every form of media, comprises the
structuring verbal glosses that make sense of good and bad examples as
instances of fashion come to our attention. Before (“Oh, this is problematic!”)
and after (“Wow! What a change!”) makeover pictures from shows like Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy demonstrate this well. In Figure ., sartorial texts are
equivalent piece-by-piece as coverings for bodily regions but differ dramati-
cally as to the coherent overall text they comprise. Some pieces are perhaps
shibboleths (black leather jacket vs. faded blue jean jacket? long vs. short hair?)
that gain a second-order indexicality when interpreted through ethno-
metapragmatic (ideological) presumptions, and signal a particular category
of person. Best-Dressed Awards (“Here’s how to do it”) and Worst-Dressed
Awards (“Here’s how not to do it”) are given out by folks specialized in how to
fashion(!) indexically coherent enregistered texts of the self.
But where do these (ideological) judgments and templates come from?
The discourse about style emanates from a sometimes self-authorizing
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Before and after for clothing makeovers (stills from Queer Eye for the Straight
Guy).
social location, but one, if successful, that is increasingly legitimate because
it declares its authoritative status to a willing public of interlocutory others.
The evaluative descriptions of such fashion discourse make salient to those
increasingly under the sway of their enregistering potential the visible
elements of contrast of silhouette, color, drape, weave, in a composite
outfit or ensemble – “Don’t wear brown shoes with a black belt!” – just the
same way that norms of “correct” and “incorrect” apply to how one reads
aloud those minimal graphic pairs that Labov presented to people in his
interviews. The contrastive elements are enregistered with distinct values
along particular dimensions by the way language calls attention to signif-
icant difference, thus making it all the more salient.
Similarly, think of comestibles, like coffee. So concerned were the
corporate folk at Starbucks about the total contextualization of their
products in relation to those who drink them that they licensed a certain
persnickety attitude on the part of the vendors, the baristas and other retail
faces of the corporation, who insist on having would-be customers use the
corporate-specific formulae in ordering their drinks when they belly up to
the coffee bar. In short, they have created a site of emanation for talking
about and evaluating coffee. Paul Manning () has written brilliantly
about Starbucks’ barista register and its realization in the stylized genre of
Non-Linguistic Enregisterment in Late Capitalism
Figure . Starbucks corporate instructions for how to order Starbucks coffee.
Adapted from Paul Manning, “Barista Rants about Stupid Customers at Starbucks: What Imaginary
Conversations Can Teach Us about Real Ones,” Language & Communication Vol. (),
pages –. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center. Copyright © Elsevier
Ltd.
the drink order (Figure .). Though note in this material excerpted from
the corporation’s own guide to ordering that, of course, there is supposedly
and officially no “right” and “wrong” way to order; it’s just that “barista
talk” – that is, the actually preferred and normative register and construc-
tional genre – seems to impose itself as the verbal currency in such
establishments. And this verbal currency is, again, one that constructs
the commodities for purchase at a Starbucks location as a whole paradigm
of complex objects of substances primary and secondary, shapes, sizes, and
so on, as it purports to be the most accurate description, or construal,
of them.
Thus, customers’ violations at the coffee bar – neglecting to articulate
trippingly the proper formula – stimulate barista rants on the corporate
website (see Figure . for one of my favorites). These rants demonstrate
the venomous condescension toward those who apparently pretend to the
value of the Starbucks experience by trying to buy there, but are thought by
the service personnel, as a result of this neglect, to be distinctly unfit to
consume Starbucks liquids, since they have not yet learned or – can you
imagine? – resist learning the rarefied uniqueness of genre and register for
ordering them. There is a sociology of distance-from-the-authorizing-center
involved, reminiscent of the cultural image of the standardizing cone, and to
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Barista rant about incompetent/resistant customer order.
Reproduced from Paul Manning, “Barista Rants about Stupid Customers at Starbucks: What
Imaginary Conversations Can Teach Us about Real Ones,” Language & Communication Vol.
(), pages –. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center. Copyright ©
Elsevier Ltd.
which we will return in considering wine talk. That sociology distinctly
reinforces what we term consumptive class (see Bourdieu ), the key kind
of class distinction in late capitalism, the one that drives people’s anxieties of
identity manifest in the Starbucks example by the second-order indexicals of
Wine Talk as Standardizing Cultural Value
verbal enregisterment insofar as this indexes the conceptual framing of their
general approach to consumption.
But the mechanism of self-definition by virtue of projective construal of
objects – how you order coffee is who (i.e., is an emblem/second-order
index of the kind of person) you are – is certainly not limited to prestige-
(or at least class-)conferring coffee. It is everywhere and encompasses
everything in the contemporary world. It is no different in sartorial self-
presentation or other matters – especially those in, on, and around the
body – where anxieties of self-presentation can be generated. This is
perhaps nowhere more apparent than in wine talk. Through the example
of wine, we will see the ways in which emanation is organized into a
regime of multiple centers and peripheries – polar coordinated geometries –
from which value emanates, but which are always, inevitably in flux.
Within such a complexly dimensionalized semiotic, sites of interaction
can be recognized as nodes of signifying practice indexically revealing
knowledge and values (and therefore identities) that people instantiate
and contest in the production of genred events.
Wine Talk as Standardizing Cultural Value
As an anthropologist, in our discussion so far I have been concerned with
how, in modern life, people approach commodities such as clothing and
comestibles as a function of normative cultural schemes that direct their
perception of the qualities culture makes salient, qualities by which they
classify, categorize, and come to judge the good from the bad – the things
they ingest, they wear, drive, or make use of in other ways in their daily
lives. As a linguist, I am concerned with the forms and meanings of words
and expressions by which people communicate with one another, in this
instance about their experiences as users and judges of commodities. In
such communication, even the same word-form can be associated with
many different conceptual schemes depending on degrees of socially
recognized expertise; think of what we term the “technical meanings” of
otherwise ordinary words, like lattice, or bouquet, and contrastively think
of words known only among those with certain “technical knowledge,”
such as muon or climat.
In effect, then, using a word or expression in a certain way in an event of
communication frequently does double classificatory work. A word used in
a certain descriptive way categorizes or classifies things-in-the-denotable-
world (whether “real” or fictive/imagined/theorized), to be sure; as we have
Lecture : Variation
also been showing, it indexes – makes immanently relevant in the com-
municative here-and-now – one or more schemata of what we will call
below qualia (i.e., phenomenally realized, embodied qualities), of which
the distinctive value is differentially signaled by some particular word or
expression (see Chumley and Harkness ). But additionally, the par-
ticular differential application of the word at the same time reveals – it
indexes – the social identity, the category of person, who would stereo-
typically invoke such a use of the word, aligning or figurating (“voicing”)
the user with respect to that category. This is an example of what, as we
have been exploring in this lecture, is a dialectically duplex indexical register
effect built into the use of such linguistic variety. In what follows, I will
return to this bivalent quality of words and expressions as also to the
nonverbal semiotics that mediate classifications of things and persons; for
the strength and institutional entrenchment of such a lexical-register effect
along with its associated nonverbal signs turns out to be key to under-
standing the observable spread or emanation of wine talk, or what I have
called oinoglossia (e.g., Silverstein , , , ).
I introduce the kind of phenomenon I am talking about starting with
the following swatch or sample of what for us, people with a certain wide
experience of English prose, is an unmistakable textual genre:
First tasted in . Surprisingly soft and lovely on the palate even in the
mid-s but the nose curiously waxy and dumb, developing its charac-
teristic hot, earthy/pebbly bouquet only latterly. Ripe, soft, lovely texture,
but not as demonstrably or obtrusively a ’ as the other first growths. Fine,
gentlemanly, understated. (Broadbent []:)
This is demonstrably and obtrusively a wine-tasting note – in fact, one of
the thousands published in by Sir Michael Broadbent ([]),
whose evaluations set prices for Christie’s auction house for many years.
English speakers outside of the social fields where such discourse is the
norm can recognize the special quality, the “fine, gentlemanly, under-
stated” quality of this kind of language, but, as is characteristic of technical
and other kinds of registers, only a much smaller number can actually
produce equivalent prose in the register that would make sense to the
professional and serious avocational insiders of wine connoisseurship.
As a kind of text, the well-formed wine-tasting note is highly structured.
Its narrative line follows what connoisseurs understand to be the event-
Notice the parallel with standard language regime, in which you are – sociologically speaking – how
you name/pronounce anything at all.
Wine Talk as Standardizing Cultural Value
Figure . Phases of the aesthetic encounter with wine.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus,”
Current Anthropology Vol. , No. (), figure . Published by the University of Chicago Press.
Copyright © by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; used by
permission.
dimensions of aesthetic experience and evaluation that serially or tempo-
rally structure one’s perceptual encounter with the obscure object of
oenological desire.
As shown in Figure ., the aesthetic encounter with wine is itself
conceptualized as a phased space-time of dimensionalities to be focused on
in serial order. Along each dimension of perception, the qualia that
characterize the current object of evaluation can be denoted by using
one or more from among a taxonomy of contrasting descriptors for that
perceptual field, whether ready-to-mind simple words from the expert’s
lexicon or more complex phraseological expressions built around them. As
is the case for so many areas of connoisseurship, such descriptions as well
comparatively locate the current particulars in each of the phases of wine-
as-experienced in relation to other occasions of comparable experience; one
may have experienced this particular named wine in a different vintage or
phase of its bottle life, or with other named wines one has encountered.
Through such accumulated familiarity one can conceptualize a whole
sensorial universe of possibilities aggregated across evaluational dimensions
within which the characteristics of any one wine or any category of wines
can be differentially imagined and, through language, communicated.
A structured hierarchy of qualia emerges for each phase of evaluation in
multiple intersecting qualia-spaces with their own possibly conventiona-
lized descriptors. As well, this wine – say, a red one now being tasted – can
be comparatively described in relation to others of its point of origin
Lecture : Variation
Château Haut-Brion, 1961
[A. Placement in history of
acquaintance/connoisseurship] First tasted in 1963.
[B. Perduring characteristics
of such occasions – summary
note (stage III)] Surprisingly soft and
lovely on the palate even
in the mid-1960s
[C. Tasting note per se]
[II:] but the nose curiously
waxy and dumb
developing
its characteristic
hot, earthy/pebbly
bouquet
only latterly.
[III:] Ripe, soft
lovely texture,
but not as demonstrably
or obtrusively a ’61 as the other first
growths.
Fine [cf. finesse],
Gentlemanly, understated.
Figure . Diagram of poetic orderliness of a wine note.
Adapted from Michael Silverstein, “‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus,” Current
Anthropology Vol. , No. (), figure a. Published by the University of Chicago Press. Copyright
© by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
(vineyard, producer, region, etc.) in different years of production; it can be
compared to other named wines of its locale; compared to other red wines
with its predominant (or exclusive) grape-type, no matter the locale of
origin; compared to other red wines of other grape-types; et cetera.
In fact, analysis of hundreds of such tasting notes allows us to organize
in diagrammatic form what Sir Michael had to say about Château Haut-
Brion , a claret of the Graves district of Bordeaux, on tasting in
November . The orderliness of this “spontaneous” bit of English
prose follows the rigid structural pattern of that encounter.
In Figure . I have separated, on the right, the phrases composed of
the technical terms professionals use for each of the dimensions along
which they evaluate the substance. For example, under stage II, nose,
Broadbent was surprised to find the smell waxy and initially difficult to
discern (“dumb”), but later was reassured to experience the “hot, earthy/
pebbly”-ness of the bouquet component of scent, the one presumed to come
from the techniques of vinification of its particular grape (merlot and
cabernet sauvignon). There are what we term taxonomies of possibly
Wine Talk as Standardizing Cultural Value
discerned characteristics for each dimension through which the taster
moves in cognizing the experience, among the members of which
contrast-set at each stage or phase the taster distinguishes. A maximal note
records values along all five dimensions, in their proper order; a more
telescoped or minimal one generally concentrates on stage III, for which
there are the most taxonomic differentiators, and perhaps as well stage II,
since olfaction is so much a part of what is considered to be “taste” in
the mouth.
Now, in addition to such highly organized technical terminologies of
evaluative wine connoisseurship, there are other bits of prose, shown on
the left of the textual diagram. These tend to be characterological, almost
anthropomorphic, and bespeak, by their use, a kind of assumed social
position on the part of the user we nowadays associate with the rarefied
precincts of a now receding male preppy and clubby culture in the city,
and on weekends, with great estates and country clubs of toney suburbia
and exurbia. My research has revealed, however, that it is these vocabulary
and phrases that those who live socially distant from oenological pursuits
actually identify as the shibboleths, the salient contributory elements, of
the verbal register of “wine talk,” and about which there is the usual kind
of class-associated anxiety peaking in the lower-to-mid bourgeoisie – as is
the case for many realms of connoisseurship (and cultures of standard, as
we saw above in discussion of William Labov’s work).
And yet, this oinoglossic register continues to be the very medium of
this particular area of connoisseurship, particularly at its professional peak
top-and-center. Consider a couple of further examples (Figure .) that
came onto my desktop screen for a white wine from France’s Côte de
Beaune region of Burgundy, Girardin’s Puligny Montrachet, Folatières.
The text genre and especially the register are unmistakable. We can render
these two recent exemplars in precisely the same analytic framework as we
were able to do with Sir Michael’s canonical prose.
Notice in my diagram of The Wine Advocate’s tasting note (Figure .),
how remarkably active and agentive the aesthetic essence of the chemical
substance seems to be, how almost like an encountered subject-alter in
character to whom the taster develops an appreciative reaction! The wine-
as-aesthetic-essence “mingles” (active nomic); it is “vivacious” and “bright”
in its brimming-ness; it “finishes with almost startling grip and tenacity”;
and it “compensates for” what it seems to lack in the way of complexity.
But it presents itself to us, as it were, phase by phase a temporally organized
aesthetic encounter of experienced qualia (see again Figure .): first in
the aroma dimension “malt and toasted brioche” giving way to “sea breeze,
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Examples of tasting notes from Wine Advocate and Stephen Tanzer.
Wine Advocate on 2007 Puligny Montrachet, Folatieres (Girardin, Vincent) (750ml)
Overall Point 93 out of 100...Girardin’s 2007 Puligny-
Evaluation Montrachet Les Folatieres
II. Olfactionmingles... with... and aromas of malt and toasted brioche ...sea breeze, fresh
myriad... citrus, ripe white peach, ...floral perfumes
III. Taste & Vivaciously and brightly ...primary fruit, yet silken in texture ...salinity and notes of
Tongue-Feel brimming with... and toasted grain
suffused with...
IV. Finish ...almost startling grip and this finishes with...
tenacity
Overall in sheer energy... more Anything it might lack in complexity today vis a vis the
Comparison excitement... very best of the vintage it compensates for...and
& Futurity in promise. Expect ...over the next 7–10 years.
Figure . Genre structure of Wine Advocate wine-tasting note in Figure .
exemplifying register usage.
fresh citrus, ripe white peach, floral perfumes.” Next, in the mouth it tastes
of “primary fruit” and feels – its texture – “silken” on the tongue. And as it
vaporizes as it is swallowed or expectorated, it still seems to be there, its
finish in other words “tenacious,” in fact “startlingly” so. It’s an in-your-face
wine, not a subtle one: full of “sheer energy and excitement” that makes up
for lack – can you imagine, after all this verbiage! – of “complexity.”
The shorter note (Figure .) by Stephen Tanzer, too, constructs an
aesthetic object in waves of pleasurable sensation-inducing qualia as described
in the rightmost column of my chart; it is so pleasurable an aesthetic object,
apparently, as to render itself “lovely. . .high-pitched. . .vibrant. . . [and] seri-
ously sexy!” One blushes to think of the even metaphorical tingling bodily
reaction of the taster, and yet we see illustrated the important notion that the
event of tasting is an encounter with a virtually living structure of qualia –
Wine Talk as Standardizing Cultural Value
Stephen Tanzer on 2007 Puligny Montrachet, Folatieres (Girardin, Vincent) (750ml)
Overall Point 93 out of 100
Evaluation
II. Olfaction … offers lovely lift to… Perfumed nose … the aromas of flowers,
violet and saline minerality
III. Taste & Tongue- … high-pitched … combining a Juicy, stony and … saline minerality with
Feel strong impression of … obvious … chewy extract
(2) IV. Finish … vibrant and … finishing … long.
(1) Overall Seriously sexy, precise … … wine, …
Impression
Figure . Metrical analysis of wine note from Stephen Tanzer in Figure ..
rendered into a verbal report – to which the sensitive, indeed, here, the
hypersensitive aesthete responds with unmistakable affect, even emotion,
even as being able to cognize, to verbalize, the experience.
Observe this aspect of emanation. If such tasting notes are truly
authoritative – such as those of Sir Michael Broadbent or of the
American Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate, eagerly sought out by
aficionados – they become normative standards for other tasters to share
the experience, indeed, to have the experience or at least to aspire to have it
in the same way and with the same degree of subtlety and multidimen-
sional elaboration of a structure of qualia as the wine authorities manage to
convey in their tasting notes, published as beacons of aesthetic orientation
to the wine-consuming public. The tasting note becomes a verbal compo-
nent of a normative cultural schema for experiencing and enjoying the
object of aesthetic contemplation. It authoritatively constructs that aes-
thetic object as one that will, in phases, reveal its dimensionalized qualia to
the experienced sensorium of someone who purports to construe it, to
interpret it with appropriate descriptive verbalization (whether thought to
oneself or uttered or written).
Now, part of what is most interesting about wine talk is certainly not
the register phenomenon as such. Rather, it is the curious bidirectional and
tiered, dialectical indexical character – appropriately enough for wine,
Eucharistic – of this kind of aesthetic and evaluational discourse
(Figure .). For if, as we will see, it is the case that, in using oinoglossic
register in the well-formed, genred tasting note one is engaged in an
activity of construal of the aesthetic object, interpreting and ultimately
evaluating it in terms of certain dimensions or qualities manifest to the
discerning taster, one is, in-and-by this act of construal, at the same time
performatively constructing oneself, making one’s social identity salient
within the macro-order of prestige consumption. One is, then, not only
Lecture : Variation
Christian Eucharist Dialectic of Indexical Orders
[1] A’s act of incorporating Host [1] A indexes
some condition of context
with an indexical sign-vehicle
[2] A’s countervailing being incorporated as interpretable within a schema of
into enregisterment
the corporate body of Christ
[2] A is indexically identified
by performing [1]
(as made relevant by the interpretable
register)
Figure . The “Eucharistic” semiotics of qualia-fication.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Semiotic Vinification and the Scaling of Taste,” in Scale:
Dimensions and Discourse in Social Life, edited by E. Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert (,
University of California Press), figure .. Copyright © by E. Summerson Carr and Michael
Lempert. Published by University of California Press; used with permission.
characterizing the aesthetic object; one is, in effect, placing or locating
oneself socially in respect of a “community of practice,” those “in the
know” – or not – about matters oenological within the complex intersec-
tion of institutionalized practices that bring the aesthetic object and the
judging aesthete together.
To be sure, all discursive manifestations of so-called expert knowledge
inevitably suggest both directions of such tiered indexicality (cf. Carr
). In the aesthetic realms its deployment grounds the authority of
professional or avocational connoisseurship. Expert discourse is denota-
tionally terminologized: as we’ve already seen, its lexical forms – its set
words and expressions – index specific points of conceptual distinction in
the normative ontologies of such expertise, their use perspectivally reveal-
ing how the world is structured so as to produce the referent one is
differentially describing and thereby evaluating along its presenting dimen-
sions. Expert discourse is, furthermore, genred: one must use the words and
expressions just so, in a highly policed co-textual organization of discourse,
coherently to communicate all the relevantly conceptualized dimensional-
ities of the object one is describing and how they interrelate in the expert
ontological perspective. Thus, thinking and talking like an expert – or, in
varying modes and degrees of fault, unlike one – positions an individual,
Recall the fuller discussion of Eucharistic action and thus ritual incorporation in Lecture .
Wine Talk as Standardizing Cultural Value
Figure . Thurber’s joke in a New Yorker drawing.
James Thurber cartoon Copyright © by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted by arrangement with
Rosemary A. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.
associating him or her with the societal places where experts ply their trade,
as it were. Moreover, convincingly expert talk endows such an individual’s
views with a certain degree of authority in the particular realms of exper-
tise, even by those who can do no more than identify that an expert register
is in use.
Consider James Thurber’s wine-serving and -evaluating host in
Figure ., who, no doubt socially situated far from the precincts of
Sir Michael Broadbent or of Robert Parker, knows there is an oinoglossic
register and perhaps genred discourse in it. He constructs his own
“tasting note” to alert his guests to what they are about to imbibe entirely
out of the characterological fluff of the genre. It’s an attempt at oino-
glossic enregisterment at an anxious, if therefore somewhat bombastically
snobbish distance-from-the-authorizing-center of semiosis. All of this
talk is, as can be seen, characterological phraseology, all verbal material
from the left side of a would-be tasting-note diagram (Figure .), to be
sure. But it is richly communicative of the predicament of the anxious
readership of would-be wine aficionados for whom Thurber’s joke
still resonates.
Lecture : Variation
Emanation and the Register Effect of Oinoglossia
As we’ve been seeing, wine as a prestige comestible manifests a well-
developed register effect, not only in language, but in a large number of
penumbral sign systems that frame the production, circulation, consump-
tion, and memorialization of this substance and people’s relation to it.
And, this register effect is spreading, or has been spreading, from the
domain – the domaine, if you will! – of the oenological to draw in any
comestible that aspires to distinction, that is, that aspires at the same time
to confer distinction upon its consumer. In terms of the framing of myriad
other comestibles undergoing stimulated stratification by prestige, a kind
of semiotic “vinification” – turning them into metaphorical wine – has
been taking place both in the language surrounding them and in the other
sign systems by which we make their virtues known, for example, in the
visual codes of advertising.
In other words, the institutional world of wine has become a center
point of “emanation” of ways of constructing prestige, that is, circulating
throughout a whole world of construable comestibles that are brought into
the stratified precincts in which wine has long had a social life. So today,
just as one can be admired/reviled, imitated/shunned for being a “wine
snob” (a folk term of opprobriousness from outside the fold), so also can
one find a parallel place in the universe of experiencers of coffee, beer,
cheese, ice cream, olive oil, vodka, and so on – examples in my data of all
those things that through artisanal labor represent nature turned into
culture. Let me illustrate this process of value-emanation that transfers
the register effect of bidirectional thing–human co-categorization to any
such commodity now claiming the possibility of stratified prestige.
Wine is, as it were, an agricultural product with the potential to be
rendered into potable art, and thus is stratified as a commodity from the
low or vulgar registers to upper reaches perceivable aesthetically only
through knowledgeable connoisseurship, as we saw above, articulated
through a whole critical apparatus of expertise and experience, like any
art form, such as among those who can differentiate in blind tasting the
more easterly and westerly vineyards of a particular year’s La Tâche or Côte
Rôtie. As we’ve also seen, the principal events of value-setting in the
aesthetic appreciation of wine are centered on the ritual of consuming
wine and communicating – talking – about the consumption experience.
Yet such interaction is already implicitly infused with meanings and values
that intersect a number of institutionalized networks of communication of
knowledge. It is this that we would now like to understand.
Emanation & the Register Effect of Oinoglossia
One such institutional factor is that of applied science, in particular
oenological and viticultural sciences such as geomorphology, soil and
climate science, and botany, on the one hand, and, on the other hand,
the organic chemistry of esters, aldehydes, and alcohols, as well as human
psycho-physiology, sciences of olfactory and gustatory perception. A second
shaping factor emerges from the institutions of aesthetic connoisseurship in the
organized world of collecting, auctions, “capital appreciation” of heirlooms and
the like, central or peripheral as it were in the cline ranging from the profes-
sional through the serious avocational to the rank amateur or even happen-
stance wine-drinker. Yet a third arises in the institutional world of retail
marketing of commodity circulation, in particular, of so-called lifestyle com-
modities – that is, personal-value-conferring commodities of domestic con-
sumption, in which, for example, brand has become so important as an index
of distinction. Each of these institutional sources endows the experience of
engaging wine with a distinctive register effect that has been spreading from
wine to other comestibles.
First, from the applied science institution, anchored in organizational
sites in schools of oenology and viticulture and industrial research labora-
tories, emerge guidelines on everything from horticultural interventions
suitable to vines of particular ecologies to methods of maceration, vinifica-
tion, blending, barreling, and bottling with specific biochemical (and ulti-
mately aesthetic) goals and ends uppermost. At the receptive end of these
processes, tasting can be seen as a kind of psychophysical response to the
raw, biochemical data of empirical reality in ways that can be isolated and
terminologically standardized by laboratory methods, defining an orderly
perceptual space within which the sensorium operates. This would do for
the phases of wine perception earlier presented in Figure ., much the
same as has been achieved in other areas of sensory perception; note pitch,
loudness, and harmonic overtone structure for sound (related to the physical
wave frequency, amplitude, and dispersion of acoustic energy in a signal), or
the perceptual space of hue–saturation–brightness for “color” characteristics
of light in the visible spectrum (as we discuss in later chapters).
A particularly interesting and influential example is the “standard system
of wine aroma terminology,” from the University of California, Davis,
School of Viticulture and Oenology, as shown in Figure .. The circular
visual array notwithstanding, it depicts the conceptual classification of
aroma in the form of a “taxonomy” with three degrees of inclusive
specificity, locating each ultimately terminologized aroma lexeme in a
pie-shaped area at the circumference of the circle. Each of these specific
lexical forms was operationalized in the laboratory with reference standards
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Standardized terminology of the “wine aroma wheel.”
Reproduced from Noble et al. , “Modification of a Standardized System of Wine Aroma
Terminology,” American Journal of Enology and Viticulture Vol. , No. (), figure . Copyright
© Ann C. Noble. Used by permission. www.winearomawheel.com.
Emanation & the Register Effect of Oinoglossia
of olfactory percepts, based on putting certain precise amounts of some
substance into a precise amount of a reference white wine in a covered test-
tube, waiting a precise amount of time, and then uncorking and smelling.
The idea is to establish a reference standard for use of each of the
descriptive terms. The center point of the circle represents undifferentiated
aroma and the intermediate inner circle’s circumference labels clusters of
aromas into affinity groups of what the researchers presume are substan-
tively similar kinds.
Professor Noble et al.’s () “aroma wheel” has been widely circu-
lated. It is reproduced in – interdiscursively aligned with – Patrick Fegan’s
syndicated wine column (Figure .). Ronn Wiegand, in the aficionado
magazine Wine & Spirits, has adapted it to the rice-derived wine sake
(Figure .). At a slightly later period, as micro-breweries were coming
definitively into the consumer consciousness, there is even an imitation
wheel – combining aroma and flavor taxonomies in a single circular
display – for beer (Figure .), bringing this drink (and its consuming
public), formerly culturally opposed to wine, into the aesthetic fold.
The second institutional realm we should consider is aesthetic connois-
seurship as such. The analogue is, of course, connoisseurship in plastic,
graphic, and performance arts, and in matters of “collectibles” of all kinds
with pasts and futures in chronotopes of fluctuations in value. There are
professional connoisseurs who set price in the art and collectibles market,
and these people are valued for the subtlety of their judgment in discerning
and projecting futurities amid all the risks to collectors and other avocational
enthusiasts who are, at the same time, investors in a commodity that accrues
monetary value in the market. In such matters not only is professional status
and authority associated with fineness of aesthetic sense (and sensoria!), it is
dependent on a wide, cumulative familiarity with histories of production,
circulation, and consumption/possession of objects, genres of objects, styles
and registers of material aesthetics, et cetera. Art critics need to have
examined the pen-and-ink drawings related to paintings and sculptures,
the chalk cartoons related to grand frescoes, and so on, to know the history
of how and to whom they circulated as instruments of process, then as
objects of possession, and the values, pecuniary and otherwise, attached
thereto. The authoritativeness with which such aesthetic acuity is combined
with fingertip knowledge of a work’s historical minutiae and mobilized in
evaluative discourse undergirds the authority with which a connoisseur
commands respect for – and confidence in – his or her informed judgment.
Thus, it is not surprising that just as there are published The Wine
Spectator and The Wine Advocate – and, according to the Google™ search
Figure . Popular presentation of the “wine aroma wheel.”
From Chicago Tribune, December , , sec. , p. . Copyright © by Patrick W. Fegan; used by permission.
Emanation & the Register Effect of Oinoglossia
Figure . Unveiling of the “sake aroma wheel”.
From Wine & Spirits, February , . Copyright © by Ronn Wiegand; used by permission.
Lecture : Variation
Figure . The beer flavor wheel.
Retrieved from http://kotmf.com/articles/flavorwheel.php.
engine as of July , , no fewer than ,, sites accessible
through the expression “wine appreciation” and ,, through
the expression “wine terms” – so also do we now have The Beer
Advocate, The Malt Advocate (for [scotch] whiskey), The Cheese Advocate,
et cetera, both in print and online. The imitative parallelism – how these
forms of avocational fandom mimic that of wine – is extraordinary.
A Google™ search done on October , yielded , sites keyed by “wine appreciation” and
,, by “wine terms,” giving some sense of either the phenomenal growth of online
information as consumerist desire in this realm reaches out to the trendy newer media, or the
efficiency of the search engine, or some combination of both.
Emanation & the Register Effect of Oinoglossia
The third large-scale institution is lifestyle retailing, which relies on the
existence of the first two and brings them together. As we’ve seen, what you
are in consumption class is what you eat, drink, wear, and so on – and what
you consciously discover you have to think or say about the experience and,
most importantly, how you say it. In such retailing, a product that can be a
performative emblem of distinction always hovers between total individua-
tion (one-of-a-kind artisanal and artistic achievement) and brand depend-
ability (label, logo, insignia on the display/packaging of the very object), of
course. Total individuation in wine gets down to the level of the individual
bottle; the best oenological connoisseurs facing the most rarefied of wines
operate at this level. Note how this cultural concept of distinctiveness
informs the practice, at serving, of never filling a glass with bottle number
two if there is still present in the glass some wine of bottle number one. Even
where it is ridiculous not to do so, it is an indexically pregnant gesture of
interdiscursive reference to the top-and-center of viticultural distinction.
At the other extreme, it is brand, brand, brand that is the principle of
marketing, like the mass-produced couturier lines that self-advertise on the
products themselves. At the middle ranges of the wine market in the
United States, brandedness is the key to marketing; the consumer must be
made to feel the equivalent – for wine, certainly anchored in France and
French – of prominently showing off a Prada article of clothing on the
body, or a Miele dishwasher in the fabulously up-to-date kitchen. In this
light, look at the clever Clos du Bois ad in Figure . which, summoning
to consciousness what we might term the wine brand’s “Frenchness,” of
which a host serving it to guests can be proud, notwithstanding emphasizes
its – surprise! – Californian provenance.
The emanation of these cultural forms constructing wine with exceed-
ingly high register effects to other prestige comestibles (and their connois-
seurs) is, in fact, coming to define what a prestige comestible is. Returning
to the example of coffee, we can now understand better the work of
Starbucks in promoting its peculiar forms of coffee talk. Consider now
how early on in the Starbucks coffee phenomenon the company circulated
a “take one” newsletter educating its consumer-customers about the rare-
fied purchasing experience they were having at Starbucks. As can be seen in
Figure ., the prose of these informative – indeed, educational – mate-
rials takes the genred form of wine-tasting notes. We may observe in
particular the dimensionality of coffee qualia here revealed, and even the
characterological anthropomorphism we now have come to expect in the
For illuminatingly semiotic discussions of “brand,” see Moore , Manning , and Nakassis
, the latter in particular worrying the “citational” (Nakassis ) nature of branded commodities.
Lecture : Variation
Figure . The “Frenchness” of wine illustrated: summoning brand to
consumer consciousness.
Copyright © Clos du Bois Winery.
Emanation & the Register Effect of Oinoglossia
Mocha Sanani: “Properly brewed [as espresso] … combines unrivalled intensity of aroma with thick,
creamy body and bittersweet chocolate finish.”
Ethiopia Sidamo: “… a delicate yet sprightly new crop coffee … . Flowery bouquet (with a hint of
eucalyptus), light and elegant body, and a honeyed natural sweetness … one of the most seductive of
all African varietals.”
Kenya ‘AA’: “At the very top of the mountain (literally and figuratively) [t]his coffee, like a fine
Bordeaux, balances heft and heartiness with bell-like clarity of flavor and blackcurrant fruitiness.”
Ethiopia Harar: “… a carefully cultivated coffee with a flavor that’s usually anything but cultivated!
The Chianti-esque, slightly gamy aroma gives Harar a certain rustic charm that has family ties to
Mocha Sanani (though it usually lacks that coffee’s complexity, balance and breed). It is … ‘a coffee
for people who like excitement at the cost of subtlety’.”
Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Malawi: “… better used in blends than as varietals, since their flavors, while
pleasant, are much less clearly delineated…”
Figure . Wine-note-like coffee-tasting notes from a Starbucks customer flyer.
From Kevin Knox’s tasting notes on African varietal coffees, Inside Scoop, June–July , p. .
Starbucks Coffee Co. Copyright © Starbucks Coffee Co. Quoted by permission.
tasting note: “Seductive” Ethiopian Sidamo has “flowery bouquet (with a
hint of eucalyptus), light and elegant body, and a honeyed natural sweet-
ness”; Harar’s “Chianti-esque, slightly gamy aroma” gives it “a certain
rustic charm” as “a coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of
subtlety.” The explicit comparisons to (high-value) Bordeaux (Kenya ‘AA’)
and (lesser-value) Chianti (Ethiopian Harar) should be noted. But more
importantly, these tasting notes put the consumer on notice that, in
learning to experience coffee-as-drunk in this fashion, he or she will
become defined by refined tastes that learn to discern and thus to favor
this or that among the offered possibilities. Note how the Bordeaux
comparison goes with the highest-end coffee varietal, that with Chianti
with the “coffee for people who like excitement at the cost of subtlety.”
And speaking of subtlety, what could be less subtle in analogical form, as
revealed in Figure ., than the full-page glossy magazine advertisement
for Colombian coffee – a coffee varietal that is, we should surely appreciate
from this thousand-word-worthy photoshopped picture, akin to wine itself
in its most characteristically French denomination, an AOC, “Appellation
d’Origine Contrôlée.”
Every prestige comestible is now wrapped in oinoglossia, some literally.
Here, in Figure . is the wrapper of one of Lindt’s chocolate bars. The
“connoisseur’s guide to fine chocolate” teaches the consumer that choco-
late must be aesthetically perceived just like wine, through stages of
apperceptive evaluation – sight, break-feel, aroma, taste, aftertaste – in
which, of course, this brand will be seen to be the best.
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Colombian coffee in the image of French wine.
Copyright © Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia, used by permission.
As we can see, from wine emanates a notion of what it is to be part of
the prestige economy of aesthetic comestibles, people, and things linked
therein, in which all the signs from language on out are deeply enmeshed
in register effects that construct both the comestible and at the same time
the consumer in a system of cultural values that is still growing – like good
Emanation & the Register Effect of Oinoglossia
Figure . A chocolate-tasting note on the wrapping of a product of Lindt & Sprüngli
Ltd., chocolatiers.
vines. And even beyond humans. Note the image (Figure .) of the
impeccable taste appropriately enough imagined to be enregistered by the
noble king of beasts – though this cartoon also suggests a parodic backlash
against wine talk as part of an ethno-metapragmatic consciousness, perhaps
a resistant reaction to its increasing proliferation and retail power.
Indeed, it is important to note that such cultural processes of enveloping
semioticization have a temporality such that what is happening at the
institutional center of emanation may be already shifting just as its influ-
ence is being felt elsewhere in social space-time. Thus, on September ,
, the New York Times’s wine critic, Eric Asimov, wrote about the
populist proletarianization of wine connoisseurship on the online video
blog of one Gary Vaynerchuk, proprietor of “The Wine Library” (formerly
Shopper’s Discount Liquor in Springfield, New Jersey, a couple of miles
west of the Newark Airport). As revealed in Figure ., Everyman – to
use the medieval generic name – is here revealed to be a prole connoisseur
in the illustrative photo shoot: open-shirted, tieless, expressive-faced, per-
haps visibly ethnic, tasting wine in the upstairs storeroom. You, Everyman,
can borrow taste from The Wine Library!
And on the very same day, Thomas Conner of the Chicago Sun-Times
wrote about “tea sommeliers,” tea-tasting ritual, stylistically vinified tea
merchants elegantly dressed and elegant of ritual, and the emergence of
regimes of certification of expertise parallel to that of wine experts by the
Lecture : Variation
Figure . A tasting note by the noblest of beasts.
Paul Wood, New Yorker, January , ; Paul Wood/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon
Bank; used with permission.
American Tea Masters Association, a self-proclaimed certifying board.
Observe the dress, the comportment, the demeanor exemplified in
Figure .: Is that emanation of enregisterment – verbal, sartorial, of
demeanor – or what? The waves in the pond of culture continue to ripple
at the circumference of the circular undulations created where the stone is
first dropped in – perhaps, to mix the metaphor, leaving us with an
ironic aftertaste.
Semiotics of Emanation, from Standard to Brand
Especially in institutionally complex and mass social formations, emana-
tions proceed simultaneously from many competing centers of regimenta-
tion; indeed, they must operate in a socio-spatio-temporality somewhat
Semiotics of Emanation, from Standard to Brand
Figure . Gary Vaynerchuk of The Wine Library videotaping his wine blog.
Richard Perry/The New York Times/Redux. Used by permission.
slower and more scale-encompassing than mere interdiscursivity as such,
which is the semiotic infrastructure and medium of emanation. There is an
institutionalized social semiotic at work here, one that is perhaps clearest
for commodities, since culturally these exist at the intersection of our ideas
Lecture : Variation
Figure . Rod Markus, a “tea sommelier” examines a brewing pot of tea.
Chicago Sun-Times August , . Photo from Chicago Sun-Times. © Sun-Times Media. All
rights reserved. Used under license.
about the sensorium, our anxieties about the political economy of class,
and our responsiveness to how marketing is integrated into every organized
form of modern life. To be sure, Marx, one of the nineteenth century’s
great semioticians, already wrote illuminatingly of commodity fetishism, in
which what he saw to be macro-socioeconomic structures of production,
circulation, and consumption get projectively misrecognized as essential
qualia of the very commodities that come to people in a market and are
used by them. In some sense, a transformational skewing of the commod-
ity form can be seen even in regimes of aesthetic connoisseurship, where
value rests on the commodity’s scarcity, historical uniqueness, et cetera, as
well as on “inherent” objectual properties. Wine as a fetishized commodity
is thus closer to the extreme of fine art along such a scaled continuum of
relevant gradations that runs from the absolutely unique all the way to
forms of Benjaminian “mechanical reproduction” (of “brand,” for exam-
ple) in a variety of areas of circulation and consumption. The other
potables I have mentioned above in their own ways imitate wine, partic-
ularly by making their own claims to bestow second-order indexical
distinction on those who know how properly to fetishize them, how
Semiotics of Emanation, from Standard to Brand
properly to project construable qualia discernable in them. For each, one
does so by constructing appropriately enregistered language as legitimated
by an authorizing center, whether corporate or – as for wine itself – in a
more abstract intersection in social space-time.
***
So there you have it: whatever one might want to call “cultural” – be it the
culture of standard languages (and their partial inoculations), genres of
public politicking, or of prestige lifestyle comestibles – manifests in this
trimodal semiotic: indexical signification, circulation, emanation. And
these processes, as we’ve seen, exist at the intersection of the semiotics of
indexicality (as mediated by ethno-metapragmatics of various sorts) and
the institutional processes of enregisterment that emerge from and regi-
ment them. As anthropologists we may be attracted to one of these three
(signification, circulation, emanation), but always find that we must take
account of the other two in order really to locate, to find, “culture.”
Phenomenally and epistemologically, semiotic signification emerges in
the first instance in events of discursive interaction, though, as we’ve seen,
to explain the interactional text frequently involves at least understanding
the interdiscursivities of circulation. Circulation as such encompasses a
social organization of communication, frequently and especially as insti-
tutionalized across structural sites that are implicitly referenced – in renvoi
and in prolepsis – in some particular site we seek to understand and
interpret. And finally, emanation defines an overall structure of tiered
nodes in a network of sites of practice, generative centers of semiosis,
and paths to their peripheries. In or through such emergent structures,
semiotic value via genres of textuality, ever of the moment, flows and
intersects with that which comes from other generative centers, such that
complex cultural forms as experienced are inevitably multiply determined
from several such centers of emanation. Phenomena such as standard
registers in the United States, men’s house meetings and kros-es in Papua
New Guinea, but also oinoglossic registers of verbal, visual, olfactory, and
gustatory semiosis – all such phenomena socio-historically crystallize at
such intersections, even as those intersections, in turn, have seemed to
emerge as relatively autonomous centers of emanation, semiotically
informing the more general stratification of semiosis in society.
We have been talking about matters such as “cultural values,” and the
ideology concept locates such cultural value systems in the matrix of social
structure and social organization, the static “anatomy” of social formations
Lecture : Variation
and the processual, event-bound “physiology” of them. The reflexive focus
of language or linguistic ideology on indexical semiosis in-and-by the use
of language opens up for us the whole question of how culture-specific
concepts of not only language but the universes of experience and imag-
ination may emerge. What is more, we can examine how such knowledge
of language and much else is socially distributed.
Linguistics, of course, has largely focused on denotational structure –
remember, how we represent by-degrees “truthful” propositions about
referents and other denotata – and thus has been strongly “universalist”
and rather unconcerned with the emanation and other movements of
socioculturally local conceptual schemata. Yet our explorations of the
semiotics of indexical signification (entextualization), circulation (interdis-
cursivity), and emanation can be brought to bear on not simply cultural
conceptualizations of language, but also its denotational structure and
form as it intersects with the sense of culture we have been developing
thus far.
With this in mind, in the next few lectures I introduce the disjunction
between, on the one hand, strictly grammatico-semantic concepts and
grammatico-pragmatic concepts as coded in linguistic form, which we’ve
grown to presume upon in formal study of language, and, on the other
hand, what I call cultural concepts and their relation to the form and
function of language. In my reading, Benjamin Lee Whorf, that exemplar
of integrating the precision of Bloomfieldian structural analysis with the
Kant-derived Boasian issues of the socialization of cognition, was one of
the first to come to understand the distinction. So, we will lay out issues of
the universal and the culture- and language-specific partly in dialogue with
his work. To do this, in the next lecture, I develop the concept of the
denotational domain mostly implicit in, but completely necessary to,
comparing/contrasting/“calibrating” (to use Whorf’s term) language struc-
tures. Doing so will allow us to then begin thinking about other denota-
tional and cultural domains such as color and the like, which will occupy
us in the third section of the lectures, to which we now turn.
Categoriality
The making of categories in-and-around linguistic structure and dis-
cursive practice: from the phonologico-phonetic model to views of
grammatical categoriality. Formal (distributional) categories in gram-
mar, cross-linguistic comparison, and the identification of denota-
tional domains coded in grammatical (including lexical) form.
What do we know about the universe? And why? In particular, what are the
categories of knowledge, the principles by which we recognize phenomena –
for example, phenomena of perception – and by which we imagine things
and situations in imaginary universes? How much of that knowledge is somehow
reflected in, or reflects, language and/or discourse? How, then, do we commu-
nicate and share that knowledge? How much of the knowledge that language
codes is universal in some sense, and how much is socio-historically specific?
To answer these questions we need a revision of the account of language as
handed down to us by Western philosophy, arguably as early as Plato’s
Cratylus and continuing into the post-Enlightenment theories of language.
To begin our inquiry, let us recall what a wine connoisseur “knows” about
the aesthetically relevant dimensions or characteristics of wine (i.e., wine’s
qualia) that can be labeled and communicated in a tasting note, as discussed
in Lecture . Now we can ask: Does the average member of the language
community have such knowledge? Recall, too, from Lecture , how we can
translate – or project from – what Ms. C answers to Mr. A’s claims of utter
ignorance about her school of social work within the very same university as,
and indeed right next door to, his law school. In the form of a diagram, we
can project a complex structure of taxonomies, partonomies, and serial
structures, in terms of which a student at that school positions herself or
himself in respect of curriculum. Is such knowledge independent of lan-
guage-in-use, revealed in occasions of making coherent denotational text, or
even independent of language-as-structured-code, the grammatical system
as such? The answer is no. It is not independent of either.
Lecture : Categoriality
We have already seen from our analysis of transcripts how an emerging
cumulative denotational text – one kind (and, generally, a one-of-a-kind)
of informational structure – unfolds in social context so as to come to
“count as” a kind of social event, the structure of which we termed an
interactional text. As we have seen, much of the way this happens at the
plane of indexical meaning also comes to define the social roles, identities,
and attitudes that flow through such a social event – the moves in the
indexical pantomime creating an understood social context around them.
Now, in these final three lectures, we are trying to understand how
language-as-structured-code and language-in-use both play a role in cultural
knowledge, that is, in structures of cultural concepts or categorial structures
that are invoked and entailed in-and-by the coordinate processes of entex-
tualization/contextualization. A good place to start is to understand some of
the lessons for philosophy of language and of mind of what we term
anthropological linguistics – the generally fieldwork-based study of grammat-
ical diversity, especially outside of the humdrum standardized languages of
the nation-state order – in order to see how linguistic anthropology can
make use of these lessons to illuminate the culture-in-language/language-of-
culture issue.
From the outset, we will need to contrast what we might term coding
categories of two types. On the one hand, there are grammatico-semantic
(non-indexical codings of areas of denotation) and grammatico-prag-
matic (indexical-denotational codings of areas of denotation) categories
that are implied in language structure and which are connected to conceptual
schemata in organized denotational domains. On the other hand, there are
cultural categories (or cultural concepts) that seem to emerge additionally
in-and-by people’s engaging in discursive interaction in the ways they do,
creating in the place and moment of communication perhaps new conceptual
schemata that no one has ever heard of before. Such categories are what
philosophers term intensional ones. As I hope you will come to see, cultural
categories are invoked in-and-by using instances or tokens of them on
particular occasions and with constancy across occasions. By contrast,
extensions involve the enumeration of the specific things or states of affairs
This is not to say that indexical relations do not occur within the grammatico-semantic structure of a
language. Rather, the distinction here is between how denotational codings are variably achieved.
Examples of grammatico-pragmatic categories include tense, evidentiality, person, and spatial and
temporal deixis, among others.
Categoriality
Extension = determining an entity or set of entities as individuables in-and-by
the use of a sign vehicle
Intension = classifying an entity or set of entities as of a certain kind via use
of signs cueing characterizability conditions; cf. Searle 1969:77–80
on “axioms of reference.”
Figure . Some aspects of denotational acts of reference.
corresponding to – or having membership in the class invoked by – each such
token (see Figure .). These terms will be central as we forge ahead.
Furthermore, we will be concerned with two key matters. The first is the
nature of categoriality. As we will see, a semiotic point of view about verbal
and other kinds of codes moves us into a very different understanding of
categoriality than the modal one in the post-Enlightenment tradition. The
primary step to accomplishing this, as I have long thought, is to follow its
working out in the field or the plane of phonology – what I like to call
phonologico-phonetic reality. In other words, we will first focus on concep-
tual categories of sound. Saussure, as we will see, provides a key set of
insights to an adequate account of the linguistic mediation of the questions
of concepts that have long concerned Western philosophy. Ultimately,
however, Saussure failed to fully articulate a semiotics of categoriality. This
was worked out by later twentieth-century writers, such as my teacher,
Roman Jakobson. We can better understand Saussure’s shortcomings by
looking at the broader tendency within the post-Enlightenment tradition,
within which he operated in many ways, of tenaciously falling back on
questions of what a word means – that is, taking lexical denotation as the
paragon or prime example of categorization.
The second critical matter is that conceptual categories are organized by
the determination of a principle of projection that starts from what we will
call intensional prototypy – that is, particular values or (denotational) land-
marks within a conceptual space of difference; these particular values them-
selves anchor, or establish, categories of realizable difference. In other words,
intensional categories are extensionalizable, realizable in a phenomenal real-
ity; for phonemes, that reality is sound, as will be explained at length below.
And both intension and extension should be contrasted with ostension of things or states of affairs,
their presentation to the senses of an Addressee or Receiver.
As the definition in Figure . makes clear, “intension” – with an s – is quite a different concept from
the more familiar one spelled with a t: “intention.”
Lecture : Categoriality
Our aim in this lecture, then, is to reinstitute a notion of categoriality
that is sufficient for understanding the semiotics of language in culture.
While we begin with the phoneme, the point is that the semiotics of
categoriality are more general. This will allow us to rethink questions
of grammatical concepts – in particular, as articulated in the tradition of
Boas, Sapir, and Whorf (as we elaborate in Lecture ) – and cultural
concepts (defined in Lecture and further explored in Lecture ). Our
analysis of the phoneme thus provides the general template for and entrée
to a wider study of categoriality.
This amounts to a revision and a critical rewriting of the Enlightenment
theory of language. This revision prepares the way for the argument of
Lecture that central to the dialectical relationship between intension and
extension, and thus to categoriality itself, is indexicality – that is, the way in
which semiosis presumes upon categorial structures in discourse, even as
such categories only operate through their extensionalization in discourse.
Critically Revising the Post-Enlightenment Theories of Language
To begin, let us locate grammatical structure in a longer tradition of thinking
about language as a denotational instrumentality or mechanism useful for
conceptualization and communication.
We can – reflexively – locate virtually all current language-focused
sciences within the European cultural tradition, itself powerfully refocused
by the Enlightenment on the instrumentality of language as a communi-
cable, and hence sharable, representation of experienced and cognized
universes (see Aarsleff ; Eco ; Stillman ; Bauman and
Briggs ; Losonsky ). Within this tradition, and even before
and beyond it, three powerful intuitions inform people’s orientations to
language signs, both their own and others’.
One is the intuition that “words” as abstract or at least aggregate entities
stand for or even descriptively substitute for “things” to the extent that
instances of such “words” recur on particular occasions of use. Intuitively,
people think of themselves as users of particular word- and expression-
forms differentially to single things out by appropriately describing them.
In-and-by this act, the users classify things as entities of certain
As we will see in Lecture , the extensionalization of categories, as caught up in processes of
entextualization, opens them up to various forms of indexical meaningfulness, such as social
indexicality, that outstrip the intensionality of the categories themselves and may, indeed, be the
basis for the intensional transformation of those categories.
Critically Revising Post-Enlightenment Theories
experienceable and/or imaginable classes or categories: My language
describes my universe. That, for example, on some occasion I called
something I was simultaneously pointing at “(this) table” rather than
“(that) shelf” must, according to such intuition, have invoked and made
relevant to communication a distinction of at least two classes or categories
of phenomena, tables and shelves (or at least – as so-called form-based
relativism asserts – in such a language community where the two terms,
table and shelf, are directly contrasted, as we explore below).
This first intuition – refined, revised, and parceled out ultimately to
many different disciplinary studies in linguistics, philosophy, psychology,
anthropology, to name only some – involves the notion that the descrip-
tive forms of language are in essence labels. We tend to imagine that labels
give evidence of a vast classification of seemingly non-linguistic experience
and imagination, an affordance to the users of a language as they commu-
nicate about particular individual things singled out as exemplars by use of
sometimes highly constructionally complex expressions developed out of
such classificatory categories. Given that language forms are recurrently
manifested in spatio-temporally discrete events of communication, the
obvious problems here involve such matters as the stability of the categoriz-
ing effect. That is, how do particular word- and expression-forms reliably
and determinately cue particular classes of entities across discrete events
and even discrete phases of single communicative events, across types of
users even of “the same” language, as well as, of course, across what are
understood to be distinct languages? Centuries of theorizing and empirical
research in several disciplinary lines have tried to clarify these matters,
centering on the concept of linguistically consummated reference – that is,
our human cognitive ability to “extend” entities via “referring expres-
sions” – and what this may reveal about any “intensional” categories by
which we seem, perhaps even systematically, to engage such universes of
extendables as categorizable objects of discourse (see Quine ; Linsky
[]; Searle :–, –; Lyons :–).
The second intuition that informs people’s orientations to language signs
is that we can use another, more encompassing type of expression-form –
the (actually or recoverably complete) sentence – to describe happenings,
Such a vast classification is, to be sure, what we term ‑onomic knowledge (see Silverstein ) –
some people say “encyclopedic knowledge,” others “ontologies” – to the extent it is the “cosmic system
of beliefs” that renders use of language consequential as social acts of description. Recall again how, in
Lecture , Ms. C externalized her ‑onomic knowledge of the professional school curriculum which
framed her in a complexly ‑onomizing discourse involving taxonomies, meronomies, seriations, et
cetera for poor Mr. A, who professed to have no knowledge of Social Service Administration.
Lecture : Categoriality
situations, or states of affairs as actual (or “true”) or non-actual (or “false”) in
some experienced or projectively imaginable sphere or universe. To such an
intuition, each turn-at-talk (in whatever actual medium: speech, writing,
manual signing, etc.) when evaluated or parsed as a sentence, however
simple or complex, seems to make a claim about the world as cognized.
Each multi-sentence turn-at-talk, according to this intuition, should there-
fore make coherent – or at least non-incoherent – claims as to the truth or
falsity of states of affairs as so described, to whatever level of delicacy
suggested by grammatico-semantic form.
Refining this intuition about the sentence form vis-à-vis its role in
natural human languages got its impetus from two developments. The
first development was the nineteenth century’s multifaceted concern with
modeling syllogistic forms and patterns of logical inference as an idealized
“symbolic logic” to formalize human rationality – the “laws of thought”
(G. Boole ), as it were. The second development was the twentieth
century’s philosophical turn to evaluating natural human language (and
particularly its scientifically usable registers) against such models, which
resulted in a constructive linguistic philosophy of the so-called “analytic”
type (see Carnap ; Morris ; Searle :–; Strawson ;
Rosenberg and Travis :–). Of course, since sentence-sized
chunks of natural human language are, to this intuition, manifest in
communicative events, the methodological task was to determine how
“logical” (that is, transparent to and consistent with a formalizable calculus
of propositional inference) are sentence-chunked turns-at-talk and longer
stretches of discourse. One part of a sentence-as-communicated, by the
first intuition of words-as-labels, is to be taken as a referring expression,
indicating the focal individuable(s) at that moment in communication.
Then, the rest of a sentence-as-communicated is intuitively associable with
modally predicating certain states of affairs as “true” or “false” of the
referent(s), the modality indicating how to calibrate the sphere in which
something can be “true” or “false” relative to the sphere in which the users
experience the framing communicative event. The default modality is
presumed to be statemental or declarative, used in acts of asserting the
factuality of states of affairs in the episteme of the communicative act.
In this connection, it should be noted that one of the central contemporary senses of the term
pragmatics derives from such an approach. In that approach, the priority given to the propositional
interpretation and evaluation of natural human discourse necessitates a corrective overlay to what
would be a more conformably “logical” interpretability of its linguistic form. Hence, to a “logical
semantics” of sentence-expressions, this approach would append a “[logical] pragmatics” to account
Critically Revising Post-Enlightenment Theories
As we will see, both of these intuitions which segment communication
into “words” and “sentences,” are, by themselves, inadequate for under-
standing categoriality. It will be noted that if the study of linguistic form as
such corresponds to and develops medieval “grammar,” and if the study of
the classificatory, truth-functional, and syllogistic-inferential counterparts
of using language develops and corresponds to medieval “logic,” then what
is missing is the third subject of the medieval trivium, “rhetoric.”
Indeed, the effect of (and in many respects, the impetus for) much of
the Enlightenment project for understanding the nature of language was to
reform and refine language in form as an autonomous instrumentality of
(logical) human thought. It further hoped to direct the resulting semiotic
machinery, as so understood, to particular representational and thereby
ultimately sociopolitical ends. Namely, it sought to rationalize (and “dis-
enchant”) natural human language for the evolving modern institutional
forms congruent with such views of it and promote such views of language
by its users as a basis of modern institutional authority. Hence, the
ultimately evolved tripartite model of mid-twentieth-century theorizing
(see Morris ) about natural human languages sees its semiotics in this
light: an autonomous “syntax” [= grammar] interpretable in terms of – that
is, projectable into – a referential and modally predicational “semantics”
that sometimes requires adjustment relative to “context” (see below) by a
“[logical] pragmatics” of usage.
Here, then, we approach the third Enlightenment-derived intuition
about language: that the practical role of language in human affairs –
what we might term, with J. L. Austin (), “what we do with words,”
though of course we can now more adequately term it “co-creating interac-
tional text-in-context” – depends on, yet is a separate and distinct function
of, “what we say in words.” That is, the referentially and predicationally
interpretable forms of language in communicative context means that
how “what we say” counts as “what we do.” The semiotic ideology of the
Enlightenment project – as outlined above – focused a suspicious, indeed
somewhat negative intuitive, eye on how language essentially mediates
the majority of interpersonal human phenomena. In the Western tradi-
tion, those mediations having long since been subsumed under the rubric
of rhetoric.
for inferential consequences of communication – propositional meanings apparently conveyed – that
seem askew relative to the specific sentence-expression form used under particular circumstances. As
I have noted in previous lectures, such an approach is misguided. The theory is not only infinitely
regressive; it is, as it turns out, superfluous. I recommend savoring its lack of utility for any actual
empirical work. (See Grice and Horn and Ward for a revealing survey.)
Lecture : Categoriality
Medieval study of “rhetoric” addressed such questions as: How does
poetic “eloquence” in verbal performance cause interlocutors so addressed
to align with a particular societal interest on behalf of which the eloquence
is mobilized? How does language-as-used serve individuals as the medium
of mutual social and attitudinal self-revelation and thus social coordina-
tion, and even as a consequential medium of ascriptive definition directed
at the “other” in the course of interaction? How can the use of one from
among several distinct expressions that from a “logical” semantic point of
view appear to be synonymous, powerfully (and differentially) effectuate
certain social ends in events of discursive interaction? These are all ques-
tions familiar from our earlier lectures.
Such “rhetorical” phenomena, universal in human social groups, are, to
be sure, the subject matter of the wider sense of the “pragmatics” of
language that sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology develop, beyond
the logical one: discourse understood as social practice or praxis inextrica-
bly intertwined and intercalated, it turns out, with anything we might wish
to identify as the manifestation of linguistic form on the axis of grammar
and logic. So, what I shall term the denotational view of natural language
(adopting Lyons’s [:–] cover term) of the modernizing
Enlightenment project construes as distinct and separable the very socio-
cultural phenomena of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, but, as
I presume you have already seen, remains incomplete and unconvincing
precisely by excluding them. Denotation is, in fact, incoherent except
when socioculturally framed and institutionally licensed, notwithstanding
the fact that engaging such wider pragmatic phenomena reveals the inad-
equacy of the narrowest Enlightenment project.
As will be seen, immanent in and essential to language as the central
sociocultural semiotic is its peculiar character as a dialectical socio-semiotic
phenomenon in which denotation, to be sure, plays several roles. Language
manifests a tension between () what is encompassed in a denotational model
so central to the intuitions of both laypersons and professional students of
language in the West, and () discourse as practice (or “praxis”) in a sociolog-
ically or socioculturally informed perspective. These two functionalities engage
reciprocally via () several planes of metapragmatic reflexivity, about which we
will learn more in subsequent lectures. This tension can all be displayed and
examined by developing a critique of post-Enlightenment approaches to
denotation, as we will in the next section, from the point of view of a
(meta-)semiotics of denotation based on generally Peircean principles.
Against the Doctrine of “Literal” Denotation
Figure . The basic “Post-Lockean rectangle” [U of C: quadrangle], “solved” in folk
intuition and enshrined in much philosophy of language and mind.
Adapted from Silverstein b:, figure .; used with permission.
Against the Doctrine of “Literal” Denotation
Folk intuitions, as noted, underlie and animate the Enlightenment project
for natural language, conceptualized as a denotational semiotic technology
that can be refined and stabilized independent of the phenomena of
“rhetoric.” But perhaps the most important corollary – whether it was
actually dependent on that project or not is difficult to tell in our state of
historical retrospection – is the “foundationalist”
“” that posits an autonomous denotational mech-
anism to anchor referring and modally predicating. To explain this doc-
trine – really, a folk intuition enshrined in much philosophy of language
and mind – and to see its inadequacies, consider Figure ., which from
the point of view of an adequate (Peircean) semiotics of communication
sets out what I term the basic “post-Lockean rectangle” of elements – viz.
“form,” “meaning,” code, and event – of denotational literalism.
Here, we term this a post-Lockean rectangle because the way of communication that it diagnoses – as
restricted to the relationship of referent, message, and code – really only comes into full existence
after Locke, who in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding gets this Enlightenment drama off
the ground, if only partially. It is with respect to parts of the full diagram that we can locate various
thinkers. Locke, for example, loses sight of the difference between the top and bottom right of the
diagram (collapsing them into the simple/complex idea); Hume loses sight of the top two vertices,
Kant the left side of the diagram, Saussure the bottom half, and so on. Each character in this
Enlightenment drama – Locke, Hume, Kant, Saussure – is working with collapsed subspaces of the
Lecture : Categoriality
In the rectangle’s horizontal dimension, the left side of the rectangular
array portrays ; the right side depicts
differentially represented during com-
munication in-and-by the use of language (including here focused thought
of an inferential kind). Of course, some of these phenomena of experience
and imagination may themselves be essentially linguistic, as for example
when language – forms on the left side – is used (as in this entire set of
lectures) as its own to describe linguis-
tic phenomena, now playing the role of entities and states of affairs on the
right side. In the rectangle’s vertical dimension, the upper side of the
rectangular array pictures whatever stability or normativity across events
of language usage may be inherent in language and/or in the phenomena
of the universes of experience and imagination, the realm of
-- (top left) and
(top right); the lower side pictures the
event-bound instances of denotational communication in which linguistic
- (lower left) are used to pick out and modally to
predicate-as-“true”/“false” -- (lower right) in modally
calibratable worlds involving such referents (and possibly other denotata).
The relationships from upper to lower side and those between left and
right sides need some elaboration. The vertex at the lower left represents
occurring instances of language signs: word- and expression-forms precip-
itated by signaling and perceiving behaviors in the context of events of
language use. Any empirical study of language begins with corpora of such
instances or tokens, whether finite and “found,” as was the case during an
older philological period of collecting text inscriptions. Or, the study of
language may be developed by systematic, annotated sampling of ongoing
usage (and absence of usage), as in contemporary computer-assisted crea-
tion of dynamic corpora. Or, we may systematically stimulate occurrences
achieved by infinitely iteratable elicitation in interviews with speakers
(so-called “fieldwork”) or in observation of speakers’ interactions, or in
rectangle (where the collapsed subspace of each author becomes his “theory”). It takes its full form
with Hjelmslev, who crosses the Saussurean insight into the top edge of the diagram with the
Aristotelian form–substance distinction (which we replace and rectify with the Peircean token–type
distinction) to fill out the bottom edge. Yet it is important to keep in mind that this diagram is a
diagnostic for an Enlightenment way of thinking about communication. But once we move away
from a focus on the relationship of reference, message, and code to the entire communicative
situation, it is evident that many more dimensions – perpendicular to the rectangle – would need to
be added. The analysis of the plane of the event – in particular, the issue of indexicality and all that it
implies – needs to come out of the page, as it were, into a multidimensional diagram that we have
been, in these lectures, elaborating.
Against the Doctrine of “Literal” Denotation
laboratory experimentation with them. The point is that one can collect
tokens of form as data-points for many different kinds of investigation
of denotation.
Now, from such material it is possible to move to the upper-left vertex,
the type-level or covering-law concept of linguistic form, only by assuming
that there is something recurrent or constant about all of the tokens or
instances of linguistic form qua form (Bloomfield :, def. ); what
is constant is, moreover, presumed to be replicated in each instantiation of
an indefinitely large set of such tokens, which is to say, documentable in all
the phenomena represented in the lower-left vertex of the diagram.
Linguistic phenomena conceptualized as of the upper-left vertex are, in
essence, abstract objects like any covering law – Peirce (–:.–,
§) termed them Legisigns for this reason – in contradistinction to the
phenomena of the lower left, which are replicas of each other insofar as
each is an instance, token, or “Sinsign,” as Peirce noted, of the Legisign.
Such Sinsigns Legisigns, as Legisigns thus occur
each of their Sinsigns; by virtue of this relationship, Legisigns such as
abstract linguistic form-types can be said to recur in each event of usage
instantiating them.
The left edge of our diagram is connected to the right one by relationships
of what we can call Saussurean . Note that Saussurean
signification is a special, partial case of what we called in earlier lectures
[indexical] signification. The latter usage expands the special case of
Saussurean signification to include issues such as social indexicality, deixis,
co-textual semiosis, metricalization, and the like, none of which are defin-
able within the post-Lockean rectangle. Indeed, to represent these topics of
our previous lectures, one would have to imagine more dimensions, per-
pendicular to and emerging from the bottom (EVENT) edge of the
diagram.
In accordance with Saussurean signification, the lower-right vertex and
the upper-right one each correspond to their respective left-edge vertices in
the following way: When a linguistic token is successfully used as a
denotational sign, the effect is either to differentiate a referent or referents,
under whatever discursive conditions this takes place, or differentially to
predicate some state of affairs in some universe calibrated to the universe
experienceable in the event of communication. Referent(s) and states of
affairs thus constitute the phenomena signaled in-and-by deployment of
some token signal on some occasion of communication in which it occurs.
Correspondingly, under the presumption of denotation, the sign relation-
ship of the upper edge of our rectangle depicts the situation where the
Lecture : Categoriality
abstract linguistic form-type, the Peircean Legisign, stands for some prin-
ciple of grouping entities, something like a class characteristic by which
potential referents and states of affairs can be sorted as members of
coherently differentiable sets. The intuition is that Legisigns correspond
to classificatory principles, however simple or complex, by which potential
referents and predicable states of affairs can be – and in fact, in-and-as we
communicate, are – differentiated by language, being “concepts,” as it
were, wherever these can be figuratively said to “live.”
This Symbolic relationship, as Peirce termed it (–: .), of the
upper edge of the rectangle is never straightforwardly experienced as
immanent in any individual event of communication – the phenomena
of the lower edge of the figure – except under one specific assumption or,
as I have termed it, a corollary intuition: the doctrine of so-called “literal”
or non-“metaphorical” extensions for type-level words and expressions of
language, indicated by the diagonal that runs from upper-left vertex to
lower right. This intuition is that for every Legisign expression we can
distinguish those referents or states of affairs that properly (normatively) or
“literally” (“correctly”) can be signaled by token Sinsigns of the Legisign,
from all other referents or states of affairs that, on some occasion of use or
other, have been or might be extended by use of a Sinsign of that expression.
So, on some occasion of use of the expression (this) table while pointing at
the referent in question, I may have in fact successfully extended what
should have properly or “literally” been referred to with the expression (this)
shelf – not having seen, for example, that the horizontal wooden surface was
not resting on the floor with legs, so much as it was affixed to a wall by
mounting brackets not visible to me. And yet: (a) I did successfully refer to
the entity in perceptual focus, differentiating it for my interlocutor, and (b)
there is, after all, something table-like about the referent, so that, not
intending to pun, one can see that I “extended the meaning” of the
Legisign table in the act of extending a shelf using a token of the term.
My event of referring had a certain non-“literal” or a creeping “metaphor-
ical” character under the doctrine of literal denotation.
In a sense, then, the doctrine of literal denotation actually, if problem-
atically, seems to solve the problem of the relationship between the upper
and lower edges of the post-Lockean rectangle. It suggests, first, that
instead of focusing on token word- and expression-forms in actual events
of communication, we can unproblematically focus on type word- and
expression-forms, that is, that we can contemplate and analyze Legisign
forms themselves, however the abstraction from and generalization over
tokens is to be achieved. Secondly, the doctrine of literal denotation seems
Against the Doctrine of “Literal” Denotation
to suggest that we can collect (at least a sufficiently large sample of ) the
“literal” referents and predicable states of affairs that correspond to word-
and expression-forms and study them (independent of their being denotata
of language) for some common property or properties that distinguish
them, qua “literally” denotable set of entities or states of affairs, from all
those other, non-“literal” ones that may – like our hypothetical example of
tables and shelves – creep into everyday usage, whether by happenstance,
by mistake, or by intentional “metaphorical” design. Were we able to
stipulate what is common to the “literal” denotata of a word- or expression-
type – that is, were we able to formulate a covering law predicable as “true”
for all and only the word- or expression-type’s denotata, generally termed
the (designation) or () of the word or expres-
sion – we would be able to stipulate what kind of entities or states of affairs
are rightly included among the “literal” denotata. If we could do that, we
could identify the designatum – really a criterion for membership in a logical
class – with the vertex at the upper right of the post-Lockean rectangle.
Then, for “literal” denotational use of language, every referent or state of
affairs at the lower-right vertex would instantiate the designatum of the
Legisign to which, on the upper edge, it corresponds.
We seem, in this view, to have “solved” the post-Lockean rectangle, that
is, shown the proper relations among its vertices. But let us consider what
it has taken so to do, starting from upper-left and lower-right vertices in
the attempt to stabilize the two others. First, it must be unproblematic
how word- and expression-tokens at the lower-left vertex instantiate word-
and expression-types at the upper-left vertex. This problem for discourse in
general is rendered somewhat tractable only by assuming that the referring-
and-modally-predicating sentence-type is the natural and inevitable unit of
using language. To be sure, this is indeed the intuitive assumption under-
lying modern linguistics and related views of language and enshrined even
in the punctuational graphics of modern typography and related secondary
linguistic practices. This assumption amounts to the immanence of sys-
tematically analyzable sentence-grammar in every occurring chunk of
discourse, now parsed into what is termed, with Lyons (:–),
-s (as opposed to the -s that stipulate
their recurrent parsability), even if discursive “turns-at-talk” may consist of
only fragments of a text-sentence or, in lengthy monologue, of multiple
text-sentences.
Second, if working in accordance with the post-Lockean view, we would
have to assume that for any given word- or expression-type in a particular
language, those who “know” the language have strong and clear intuitions
Lecture : Categoriality
of what “literally” can serve as denotatum of an instance of its use, and
therefore of what cannot so serve. Certainly at the word level, this has been
very problematic to demonstrate empirically, and all evidence suggests,
rather, that even people thinking themselves to speak the “same” language
have widely divergent understandings of the “literal” meaning of particular
word- and expression-types under the intuitive assumptions described (see
Putnam ; Labov []).
Third, this “solution” of the post-Lockean rectangle by the doctrine of
“literal” denotation has forced us to depend upon having a language-
independent way of discovering if (or, that) the “literal” denotata of a
word- or expression-type, collectible, say, through a sufficiently large
sampling of use, can, in fact, be shown to share some property or
properties – other than being denotata of a particular form at issue – that
can be described as the criterion for membership in the set of entities/states
of affairs which may serve as its “literal” denotatum. It is sometimes
assumed that the phenomena even of the perceivable universe come in –
literally! – “natural” classes or categories, with which, then, “literal”
denotation must be in harmony as a “natural” function of the classifica-
tions immanent in the non-semiotic world (Kripke []; Rosch
; Kay and McDaniel ). But if so, then why are all systems of
intuitively “literal” denotation of that world not the same, as we know they
are not? And is there even any non-circular way to determine what those
“natural” classes are, with their dimensions of contrast determining inclu-
sion and exclusion of potential “literal” denotata, without any appeal or
essential role for linguistic communication? Only a completely language-
independent determination of such classes or categories would be a valid
grounding of the right edge of the post-Lockean rectangle so as to anchor
the intuition of denotational literalness in an autonomous explanatory
phenomenon.
Now, as it turns out, much of cognitive psychology, methodologically
taking its cue from positivist philosophy of sense data, has tried just such a
method of solution of the right edge of the post-Lockean rectangle to
triangulate the doctrine of literal denotation. Using laboratory techniques
that are, ultimately, no more sophisticated than the assumption of literal-
ness, researchers have attempted to demonstrate that an autonomous
“natural” world organized by perceptual dimensions underlies conceptual
categorization, and that it is this world that is reflected at least in systems of
word- and expression-types considered as terminological differentiae. Given
the variation in terminological systems for any domain available for (intui-
tively “literal”) denotation, such an approach is either based on a particular
Against the Doctrine of “Literal” Denotation
terminological system, whether knowingly or unknowingly, or it depends on
calibrating and thus mutually anchoring all known (or possible) termino-
logical systems in respect of their “literal” – strictly non‑“metaphorical” –
denotational relationships, were these universally applicable and determinate
phenomena in every language community. As we can see, the approach
winds up, without further refinement, being completely circular.
Modern linguistic structuralism or formalism, by contrast, has taken an
orthogonal approach to implementing the doctrine of literal denotation,
concentrating almost entirely on anchoring the signifying relationship of
the phenomena of the upper side of the rectangle. That is, linguists start at
the upper-left vertex with the assumption of a syntax or of
system-sentence scope, a complex and recursive combinatoric calculus that
determines an internally systematic and autonomous organization of
Legisign form in which classes or categories of ultimate Legisigns under
the calculus, lexical and other morphemic simplexes, combine or concat-
enate in larger and larger Legisign structures, up to the phrasal boundaries
of the system-sentence. Classes or categories of Legisign form are defined
“distributionally,” that is, as a function of their relational roles in the
combinatorics of the language. The presumption is that insofar as lexical
simplexes in the upper-left vertex of our diagram correspond to (or “bear”)
senses in the upper-right vertex, the sense of any phrase made up of such
simplexes should be a computable function of the senses of the simplexes
plus the rules for their combination into the particular concatenational
structure in which they occur one with another. This is the grammarian’s
assumption of the “” .
Note, also, that insofar as the very same Legisign form – here exempli-
fied by a phrasal projection of a common noun – may be instantiated in
either referring or predicating segments of corresponding text-sentences
(Round smooth rocks were lying everywhere vs. I saw a number of round
smooth rocks), the senses of Legisigns are assumed to be, for purposes of
linguistic analysis, stable as such across their instantiation in event-partials
of reference or of predication. In other words, while at the lower edge of
our figure we are concerned with events of actual reference and modalized
predication, at the top edge we are concerned with a completely autono-
mous relationship of signification where the quasi-propositional senses of
See John Lucy’s () remarks on “universals” of color [= hue–saturation–brightness] lexicalization,
which we will turn to when we contemplate the denotational domain of “color” or “hue” in the
next lecture.
Lecture : Categoriality
units up to and including system-sentences determine “literalness” of
actual events of referring and modally predicating, but the latter are only
in this special way instantiations of sense-bearing Legisigns. In fact, we
might say that insofar as senses in the upper plane of system-sentencehood
constitute a propositionally relevant semantic universe, they are indeed
essentially incomplete, requiring a pragmatics of deixis (that is, again,
unrepresentable on the diagram above) to describe what text-sentences
actually do as the frames in which referring-and-modally-predicating
expressions actually occur as language users engage in referring and pred-
icating under particular contextual conditions.
As we have seen in this discussion, to the degree that the doctrine of
“literal denotation” depends on us having direct (language-independent)
access to real-world denotata (and putatively “natural classes” of same), the
rectangle fails to deliver on its promises to link language, conceptualiza-
tion, and the world. Further, if the relationship between abstract system-
sentences and actually occurring discourse chunks is, in fact, more prob-
lematic than the rectangle suggests – as it is – it fails on that ground as well.
Saussurean Sense-Concepts and the Expansion
of the Post-Lockean Rectangle
Here, I want to pause in order to locate linguistic structuralism in the post-
Lockean rectangle, for, as we will see, Saussure’s partial progress on
“solving” it, that is, conceptualizing the relationship between the upper
vertices of the rectangle, offers us a way to formulate a surer-footed
semiotics of denotation beyond the two-dimensionality of the rectangle.
The Ascended Genevan Master, Ferdinand de Saussure, set the param-
eters of all modern formalism, in which the mutual distributional proper-
ties of grammatical forms, insofar as they are determinate, project into
intensional categorial distinctions. The thesis of “structuralism” – really,
structural-functionalism – is that there is an additional component of the
“sense” of forms, and that this sense depends entirely upon the existence of
grammar. Grammar becomes in this way a vast meta-semantic, but one
that is implicit in the very formedness of messages in events of communi-
cation. The grammar of a language, thus, is the immanent – to use Kant’s
word – meta-semantics for how forms in that language correspond to
categories or classes of things and events (not, note, to specific things
This is the import of the Chomskyan discernment of “logical form” corresponding to syntactic
structure, as opposed to propositional reference-and-modalized-predication. See Jackendoff .
Saussurean Sense-Concepts
Inexplicitly Use of linguistic forms in conformity with knowledge coded by them, including
lexical primes
e.g., *… so I gave the pregnant man my seat on the bus this morning.
… the pregnant person … [‘male’ or ‘female’ person?]
Use of proper co-textual devices across text-sentence boundaries, including reference
and other indexical grammatical machinery and -onomic relations among lexical
forms serving as ligatures:
e.g., *I met my daughteri at the restaurant, as agreed. But hei surprised me by having
invited along.
… of a flight attendanti or a gate agentj. These company personneli+j …
Explicitly Use of specific, sometimes special meta-semantic construction types that denote
specific sense relations among expressions (and hence knowledge structures
that anchor ‘concepts’):
e.g., [definitional sense equivalence] An ophthalmologist is an eye doctor.
[taxonomy] The red oak is a kind of tree. [full form]; …is a…
[key] The red oak is a [deciduous]ADJ kind of tree.
[partonomy (meronomy)] The council is (a) part of the government of the
country.
[serial structure] The acorn becomes/turns into the oak tree.
Figure . Conceptual knowledge revealed in denotational (in)coherence, contrasting
inexplicit and explicit meta-semantics.
and events). Contrast this implicit meta-semantic characteristic of gram-
matical form with acts of communicating meta-semantically, a discursively
explicit meta-semantics (Figure .).
In terms of our desire to put an analysis of denotation on a firm
scientific footing – and not as the naïvely intuitive doctrine of “literal
denotation” – we see that formal or structural-functional linguistics breaks
the problem down into two steps or analytic operations. That is, “literal”
denotation is now broken into two aspects: () the “sense” relation, a true
symbolic relation in the Peircean mode, which anchors linguistic forms
conforming to combinatoric rules of grammar (that build relatively more
complex “sense”-bearing units from relatively more simplex ones) to a
universally relevant differential structure of intensional prototypy (unless
grammar is completely arbitrary as a formal structure); and () the instan-
tiation by which such intensional prototypy is applied so as to characterize
some specific referent or situation-to-be-described.
Lecture : Categoriality
In making these two moves, Saussure was waging an attack on the
denotational “nomenclaturism” endemic to the approaches of his time. If
characterized in our post-Lockean rectangle, the idea that words and
expressions stand directly for things and situations in the actual world on
occasions of referring and predicating would be at the (lower) token edge
of things. But how could one ever speak of norms this way? Indeed, for
two thousand or so years in the Western tradition’s “nomenclaturism,”
people worried that indexicality and iconicity as phenomena – think of
illocutionary forms or onomatopoeia – meant that language is “natural” or
“motivated” by externalities in the way (Peircean) non-degenerate iconicity
and indexicality work. They thus pondered how, through some mystical
principle called “conventionalization,” an iconic sign evolves into a lin-
guistic symbol. (We can think of these as the “Bow-Wow,” “Ding-Dong,”
and “Yo-Heave-Ho” schools of linguistic meaning.) But once we leave the
realm of nomenclaturism, we can postulate, says Saussure, that iconicity
and indexicality are marginal to the underlying system of denotation.
Rather, the linguistic sign – the linkage between form-type and concept –
is fundamentally “arbitrary” in this respect until shown to be otherwise
(though it is “motivated,” in its own way, as we see below). In short, for
Saussure, it is the symbolic relation of something in language form that
stands for some principle that groups referents and predicable states of
affairs. But how?
Saussure’s proposal was, in effect, to remove the study of (Peircean)
symbols from “nomenclaturism,” the fruitless arguments about how word-
and expression-types “literally” denote “things.” This was, in fact, a
proposal to recognize that the only way to study what he termed signifi-
cation, the relation of “signifiers” to their “signifieds” – a relation that is so
intuitively transparent to native speakers of any language that it is an
extraordinary feat to teach elementary linguistics! – is to view signifiers
in terms of “valence” categories. That is, he emphasized that we must view
denotation in terms of the combinatoric properties of kinds of signifiers,
so-called categories of “form” or “formal categories,” and how complex
signifiers are composed of more elementary ones (the principle of
noted above). (Recall here that this Saussurean
signification is still a relatively narrow special case of our more expansive
sense of signification.)
There is, thus, what we term a “syntax” of the system of signifiers, rules
of how relatively more simplex signifier-units are concatenated into rela-
tively more complex ones. This is what we term grammar. It is not an easy
matter to figure out the grammar of any language, let alone what may be
Saussurean Sense-Concepts
common to all languages in this respect. (“Universal” is the linguist’s
preferred term.) The categories of the value system are determined on
the basis of hypotheses about how a given structure of differences would
project into context-free denotational differences; that is, to look at the
corresponding lower row in our post-Lockean rectangle, how the use of
any token of a form-type in an event of communication would differen-
tially denote some class or category of things, in contrast to use of a token
of one of the other form-types in the relevant value-structure – purely as a
function of the signifier structure (else it would be in the realm of
indexicality/pragmatics). What is at issue is that the “signified” and hence
denotation-determining capacity of language is, in this view, completely
dependent only on the form of the signifier in its own differential relations
with other signifiers.
Saussure’s structuralist impulse is that the “valences” of combinatoric
structures (cf. Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements) are the determin-
ing characteristic of the Legisign system termed langue, what we see as the
system for generating an infinite number of internally complex signifiers –
language forms – from relatively more simplex ones plus determinate rules
of concatenation in one dimension (Figures .–.).
Iterating such concatenations yields a hierarchical internal complexity to
most signifiers (see Figure .), such as [[The [quick [brown [fox]]]]
[jumped [over [the [sleeping [dog]]]]].], made up of [The [quick [brown
[fox]]]] and [-ed [jump- [over [the [sleeping [dog]]]]]] in the first instance;
each of these is itself, in turn, a tiered or iterated concatenation of parts:
[the [quick brown fox]] able to be analyzed as [quick [brown fox]] and,
further, [brown [fox]]; similarly, [jumped [over [the sleeping [dog]]]] can
be serially revealed to be [ed- [jump- over the sleeping dog]], further able
to be broken down as [jump- [over the sleeping dog]] and, further, [over
[the sleeping dog]], et cetera. Observe how each of the ultimate simplex
signifiers here (e.g., [fox] and [dog]), and as well each of the intermediate
levels of complex signifiers, can enter into a paradigmatic contrast with
others, yielding, in the instance, a different but partially same, structurally
(syntagmatically) related and comparable signifier. Hierarchical structure
emerges from iteration after iteration of such syntagmatic putting together;
paradigms derive from syntagmatic structures, not vice versa. This is what
By the way, if there are no such universally relevant differential structures (as kinds of sign
phenomena) even in language, then language is not, as it turns out, a Saussurean symbol system,
and we can turn our attention elsewhere. In fact, the Saussurean assumptions have allowed us as
linguists to clarify vast stretches of the structure of languages around the world.
Lecture : Categoriality
[[The [quick [brown [fox]]]] [jumped [over [the [sleeping [dog]]]]].]
[The [quick [brown [fox]]]] and [jumped [over [the [sleeping [dog]]]]]
[the [quick brown fox]] [jumped over the sleeping dog]
[quick [brown fox]] [-ed [jump-over the sleeping dog]]
[brown [fox]] [jump- [over the sleeping dog]]
[fox] [over [the sleeping dog]]
[the [sleeping dog]]
[sleeping [dog]]
[dog]
Compare: [[The [fox]] [jumped [over [the [dog]]]].];
[[The [fox]] [ran [past [the [dog]]]].]; [. . . [-Ø [will [be- -ing] run-]] . . . .]
Figure . Iterable constituency structure of an English sentence.
it means to do a grammatical analysis of complex signifiers to reveal what
relatively more simplex ones are concatenated so as to comprise it.
When we have a grammatical analysis of this sort, note that as we
substitute a linguistic form (or signifier) for another according to the
paradigmatic class in which they belong, the signified (or meaning) of
the whole complex signifier changes accordingly. Whatever fox- means, if
we substitute rabbit-, then the meaning of each of the signifiers/forms that
hierarchically encloses – linguists say “dominates,” an unfortunate term! –
the respective form changes accordingly. Thus, we can say that there is a
certain constancy of meaning we can assign to each form, its Saussurean
“sense” under distributional analysis.
The important thing to see is that in terms of “privileges of occurrence”
in relation to any of the other signifiers in a phrase or sentence, all forms
Following a Searlean () analysis, “predication” is the communication of the “sense” or
characterizability condition associated with an expression as subject to evaluation as a “true” or
“false” description of a state of affairs in the world – or some world, while “referring” is the
communication of that very same sense or characterizability condition as indexically presumed
truthfully to apply to some entity presumed to exist at that moment. Between the two, note, the
“sense” or interpretability of any word or expression as a characterizability condition of such-and-
such sort remains the same. Here is the structuralist theory of where such characterizability
conditions come from – from an internal distributional structure of Legisign forms/signifiers.
Saussurean Sense-Concepts
Constituency
The man was walking down the street.
The man | was walking down the street.
The man | was | walking | down the street.
The man | was | walking | down | the street.
The man | was | walking | down | the | street.
The man | was … ing | walk | down | the | street.
[The man was walking down the street.]
[[The man] [was walking down the street]]
[[The man] [was walking [down the street]]]
[[[The] man] [was walking [down [the street]]]]
[[[The] man] [was walking [down [[the] street]]]]
[[[The] man] [[was…ing] walk [down [[the] street]]]]
Paradigmatic sets:
Mr. Obama, he, someone, no one with whom you might be familiar, … [Subject Phrase]
might soon have shambled along, stood up, inserts a digit in the electric socket, … [Verb]
clown, woman, cow, dog, cockroach, dish and spoon [note: …were walking…], guy I
was telling you about last evening, just-by-chance-encountered “ex”, …
[(Animate & Agentive) Nominal expressions]
runway, alley, hill, embankment, … [(Locational) Nominal expressions]
down, up, across, through, parallel to, … [Prepositional/Adverbials]
walk, run, skip, hop, jump, … [(One-denotatum argument) Verbs of Translational Body-
Motion]
was…ing, has…ed, (past), has…ed be…ing, … [Perfection, Aspect, and Tense]
Figure . Paradigmatic sets within syntagmatic frames (constituencies) in English.
Lecture : Categoriality
are not, in fact, equivalent: some occur in some distributions and some
occur in others. The signifier desk-, that might occur in [The quick brown
fox jumped over the desk.], cannot occur where jump- does. Languages
consist of asymmetrically distributed kinds of complex signifiers that
themselves are built around asymmetrically distributed simplex signifiers,
the ultimate bits of lexical material obvious when we approach those
realizable as chunks of text. That’s where we get the concept of “parts of
speech” in traditional school grammar, from such facts as that there seem to
be simplexes unique to referring expressions in actual text-exemplification,
and simplexes unique to predicating expressions when realized in text-
sentence chunks.
The union of all the distributional privileges of occurrence of a class or
category of signifiers, as modern formal analysis understands, may include or
make use of the configuration of hierarchical structure as well as the linear
structure. This is particularly the case for many configurative distributions
of syntagmatic co-occurrence, such as the “agreement” of the constituents
serving as subjects of predicating verbs in a language like English:
[My quick brown fox from the Windsors is/*are destined for the hunt
today.].
In this example, note the distinction between mere closeness of pieces of
the sentence versus the fact that fox- is hierarchically the centerpiece
(linguists say the “phrasal head”) of the whole complex signifier [my quick
brown fox from the Windsors]. Taking all this into consideration, every
unique distributional class under a language’s rules of concatenation – its
syntax and morphology – is associated, in linguistic analysis, with a
grammatical name or label that points to () its particular unique distri-
butional properties, its unique “valence”-class; and, by the Saussurean
assumption, () to some corresponding effect in conceptual sense, even if
only indirectly. If simplex signifiers can be grouped into paradigmatic
classes on the basis of their parallelism of distribution under a grammar,
then they ought to have some conceptual projection, some Saussurean
“sense” or signified, in common.
Thus, insofar as even simplex signifiers – roots and stems of simple
words – are Saussurean signifiers, their “meaning” or corresponding signi-
fieds are purely a correspondence of their distributions. The Saussurean
sense of every class of signifiers, down to the unique simplex lexical form –
the class of one – is grammatically determined under the structuralist
hypothesis. For structuralism, there is no distinction between so-called
“lexical” and so-called “grammatical” meaning, though to any speaker of a
Signifier–Signified to Phonological Categoriality
language it seems clear that words and expressions – those objects of
reflexive contemplation that live in entextualizations-in-context – have
denotational values associable with them on perhaps other grounds (as
we will see later in our lectures). Structuralism rejects this intuition, basing
all “meaning” of symbols in the grammar (langue) and its distributional
(valence) categories correlated with differential denotational effects.
This is what we mean, then, by saying that the grammar is an implicit
meta-semantics for a language: By virtue of the patterns of distribution,
positive and negative, we can deduce the differential senses we can assign
to signifiers, even if we experience them as words and expressions. We
might say, by contrast to our experience, that grammatical description of
signifiers is like an X-ray of the words and expressions in the form in which
they materialize in entextualization-in-context. One can see that finding
the paradigmatically contrastive distributional classes is the first order of
business, followed by correlating the paradigmatic contrast with some
contrast of denotation in the more complex signifiers in which the para-
digmatically contrastive forms occur. Only then can we associate a partic-
ular form with a particular meaning. Hence, we realize that it is always
differential form and differential meaning with which structuralist analysis
deals. “Dans la langue il n’y a que des différences, sans termes positifs,” as the
Ascended Master noted.
Observe also that for each significant paradigm of contrastive units (as,
e.g., in the bottom of Figure .), we have grammarians’ labels that are
ultimately ways of suggesting what is key in the semantic projection of
members of that distributional class as distinct from all other comparable
classes (e.g., subject phrase, verb, quantifiers, perfection, aspect, tense).
After we see the logic of structural analysis in the realm of phonologico-
phonetic structural units, we will return to this problem of labeling in
Lecture .
From Saussurean Signifier–Signified to Phonologico-
Phonetic Categoriality
So how, then, do we move from Saussure’s structuralist breakthrough to a
fuller account of the relationship between intension and extension (the top
And note the attempts of dictionaries and other such paraphernalia to make explicit the sense
relations of various words and expressions, insofar as the senses enter into structures of ‑onomic
kinds, such as tax-onomies, mer-onomies, serial structures, et cetera, with or without a special set of
meta-semantic operators like [ ] be- a kind of [ ] and so forth.
Lecture : Categoriality
and bottom of the post-Lockean rectangle), and from there to categoriality
in language, and finally to categoriality tout court? Here, the lessons learned
in the study of sound systems illuminate what is at issue.
While for any true Saussurean unit, its characteristic is to be solely a
negative, correlative entity whose “most exact property is to be what others
are not” (Leur plus exacte caractéristique est d’être ce que les autres ne sont pas;
Saussure :), the discovery that phonological/phonemic structure
lurks within – hence, the X-ray metaphor – the actual phonetics of
articulating, transmitting, and aurally processing utterances emerged by
the logic of the grouping of substantive variance into categorial units of
equivalence. Such equivalence classes render actual sound segments tokens
of some constant phonological type. This model was then calqued –
copied, mutatis mutandis, point for point – for the analysis of all the other
planes of semiotic structure in language (phonotactic, morphological,
syntactic). In the twentieth century, it was even applied way beyond
language in other semiotic codes of culture, generally with highly prob-
lematic results because such other codes operate in the first instance
indexically and iconically (Silverstein a), though, as Roland Barthes
() astutely observed, saturated with language as an explicit or implicit
meta-semiotic.
In any case, for us the importance of looking at the distinction between
event-bound token phonetic facts and structure- or norm-bound type
phonological (“phonemic”) facts is to see what is necessary to an empir-
ical science of true Peircean symbols, the project of modern formal
linguistics, and, more generally in Lectures and , a linguistic anthropo-
logical account of categoriality per se.
Phonemes – segments of sound in language – are organized into syllabic
structures manifest in utterable verbal signs, the hierarchical syntax –
syntagmatic structure – of which is just like the formal structure of higher
planes of language, those that Saussure identified as true “signes linguis-
tiques,” linguistic signs. Furthermore, phonemic segments are organized
into paradigmatic classes but signal mere otherness or difference of the
actual linguistic signs of which they form the building blocks. For instance,
in English, /k/ differs from /b/, a paradigmatic contrast or opposition in
initial position in the forms spelled c-a-t and b-a-t and in final position in
forms spelled j-a-c-k and j-a-b. But the /k/ : /b/ opposition means nothing
in and of itself, only that the simple words in which these phonemic
segments occur are different one from another.
How do we anchor a phonological analysis in phonetic reality? That is,
how do we conceptualize the relationship of intension and extension in the
Signifier–Signified to Phonological Categoriality
realm of sound? Trubetzkoy and Jakobson proposed that the paradigmatic
contrasts of phonemic (phonological) units – which, recall, will be sets of
phonemic categories that are distributed in parallel in relation to making
syllables – operate along phonetically extensionalizable – that is pronounce-
able and hearable – but nevertheless intensional dimensions of contrast
which they termed “distinctive features.”
That is, the various paradigmatic sets of contrasting phonemes differ
one from another not as an unorganized list of distinct things, but along
language-specific dimensions of contrast, or “distinctive features.” As the
simplest hypothesis, Jakobson proposed that such features are asymmetri-
cally binarily quantized into two values, signaled by polar distinctions,
represented as “plus” (+) and “minus” ( ) (though “” and “” or any
other digital quantization would work). Under this hypothesis, every
paradigmatic contrast of a phonemic segment with every other phonemic
segment in a language can be expressed as the logical Boolean combina-
tion – meaning, simply, the simultaneous relevance – of all of the distinc-
tive features that explain their respective distributional privileges of
occurrence in syllabic structures. Such features, thus, crosscut one another
in formally matrix-like ways, such that every phonemic segment in a
language can be seen to be a combination of distinctive feature values
simultaneously implemented along all the pertinent dimensions of
contrast. These features come from a set of such potential dimensions of
contrast that is universal – available as a cognitive grid to speakers of all
languages – and realizable in actual phonetic articulation – acoustic trans-
mittal – auditory perception in the real-time events of language-in-use
(Saussure’s parole). Such features specify those among their pronounceable
and hearable attributes that contrastively identify them as distinct catego-
ries of sound, thereby enabling us to identify them as segmental units of
speech having characteristic distributions in the language in question.
As was noted by Jakobson and Trubetzkoy, such distinctions often demonstrate the asymmetric
relations of markedness, whereby among members of a paradigm, one is marked (and often bears
the presence of a mark of some kind, as indicated by a plus sign, vis-à-vis some feature) and the
other(s) unmarked (i.e., lacking that feature, as indicated by a minus). In such cases, the marked
member is narrower, in terms of either occurrence (as with phonological distinctions) or referential
range (as with semantic distinctions). Markedness relations are thus not equal (or equipollent) in
their opposition, with each term positively bearing the presence of some feature (in opposition to
the other[s]). Rather, they are hierarchically related, with the unmarked member (specified simply
by lack of some feature) encompassing the marked member(s) (specified by the presence of the
feature) such that the distributional or referential range of the unmarked member may include that
of the marked member (as in so-called “zero interpretations” and contexts of neutralization).
Lecture : Categoriality
Feature values thus differentiate the landmark variants – the intensional
prototypes, we should call them – that define the continuous extensional
regions of phonetic realization of phonemic categories. If we recorded
, exemplars of pronunciation of purportedly “the same” word-form,
it is almost certain that some of the token variants of the pronunciations
would overlap those of the pronunciation of a phonologically related word-
form: think of swill and swell having some tokens among the ,
pronunciations sounding like [swəl]. “What was that you said? ‘This is
swill!’ or ‘This is swell’? Learn to talk more carefully or you’ll offend
someone, Bub!” The particular token of the syllable nucleus phonological
type overlapped the categories, but the categories as such are distinct, and
anchored in phonological space at /ɪ/ vs. /ɛ/, realizable – extensionalizable –
as [ɪ] vs. [ɛ]. As we communicate, the theory tells us, it is as though
simultaneously the values along each among the sum total of dimensions
of contrast are in play, defining each segment we utter and hear, changing
over the durational time of the linear Saussurean signal as it unfolds in
what we process as syllables.
Every phonemic segment now becomes the sum total of all its values
along these dimensions of contrast, and we can group or cluster phonemes
in a structured space so as to see that whole groups of phonemic units
cluster in certain subspaces of contrastive phonetic realization, and that
there are many ways of creating such lesser-dimensioned subspaces so as to
reveal all the ways each phoneme is like others that have parallelism of
distribution (Figure .).
Phonemes of a similarly featured feather distributionally flock together. That
is, the distributional classes of phonemic units are not fundamentally or
radically “arbitrary,” in that any old phonemic type can occur in any old
syllabic position. Trubetzkoy and Jakobson hypothesized that there is a
force of phonemic homeostasis that operates universally in languages, such
that the category-defining landmark variants of the categories of phonemic
systems tend to be organized into symmetric, equidistant structures of
oppositions (paradigmatic contrast) as intensional cognitive spaces that are
comparable across languages. We can compare any given region of exten-
sionalizable phonemic contrast – phonemic units that have parallel distri-
butions and, by hypothesis, some featural “content” in common – in two
or more languages, to see () how many phonemic units contrast in that
particular subspace of paradigmatic opposition, such as , , , . . ., , . . .
distinctive vowels in a system (as shown in Figure .); and further, to note
() that the landmark values have an orderly relationship across languages.
The landmarks remain landmarks in each respective system, a point of
Signifier–Signified to Phonological Categoriality
(a) Correspondence condition: Phonemes function in all languages to build up syllables in
referential and predicational forms of relatively similar, cross-linguistically comparable
phonetic shapes, which similarity can be expressed in a relativistic extensional
metalanguage of sound.
C V (C) – LINEARITY OF SYLLABLE
+ cns – cns ( + cns ) e.g., ta(p) -
– voc + voc ( – voc )
+ cns + cns e.g., tra… -
– voc + voc
+ cns + cns + cns e.g., stra… -
– voc – voc + voc
+ ctn – ctn
( + str )
(b) Universals of organization (form–function specifications that yield the correct
correspondence conditions in typologically diverse ways):
1. surface scope (meaningful syntagmatic domain) over which a system of oppositions
is defined (e.g., morpheme, word, phrase-with-clitics, etc.);
2. ‘delicacy’ of oppositions (number of paradigmatic units of each distribution class);
3. linkage hierarchy of dimensions of contrast (features), yielding a nested set of spaces
of comparably implemented features;
4. markedness nature of oppositions/dimensions of contrast
a. terms: n-ary, for n ≥ 2,
b. dimensionality: private, gradient, etc.;
5. syntagmatic linkage of feature-classes (including neutralizations).
Figure . Praguean refinements of Saussureanism.
stable contrast valid across language systems regardless of whether or not
they are implemented in a particular system: thus [ɑ] is the intensional
prototype of the [ high] vowel in a -vowel system and the -vowel
system; it is the [ high, +back] vowel of a -vowel system; et cetera.
Here is where we come to the Prague School hypotheses about the
relationship of distributional classes of sound segments to a kind of universal
substrate of phonetics-as-possible-phonology that provides the way to decide
between the “right” and “wrong” analyses of phonological structures in any
natural language whatsoever. The overall hypothesis is that denotationally
relevant sound as producible and audible for the purpose of making lan-
guage is, cognitively, not a continuous multidimensional cloud or measur-
able space, but one organized by intersecting, quantized dimensions of
Figure . -, -, -, and -point landmark-and-region phonemic structures imposed as the cognitive organization of articulation in the oral
cavity (left-to-right, front-to-back). Here, the dark dot represents the intensional prototype of the category, the encompassing region its
extensional range as they map into the variously intersecting feature space +/ high, +/ back, +/ low.
Signifier–Signified to Phonological Categoriality
contrast (“features”) of a plausibly binary [= -possible-values] character.
“Features,” thus, are descriptors. They are intensional specifications “f(x)”
that can be true or false, or probabilistically true or false, of some object –
here, the segment-of-the-moment-of-phonological-realization in the linear
flow of the syllable, word, phrase, sentence, et cetera. Every segment enters
into many different paradigmatic contrasts as a function of its total distri-
bution in the language, and thus each segment type has at least as many
feature specifications simultaneously as there are paradigms in which it
contrasts with at least one other phonological segment. So, consider syllabic
structure C‑V(‑C) in Figure . once more in the potential sequential
complexity of each of the major syntagmatic positions, and note that from
a distributional point of view, there are really four categories of relatively
more “vowel”-like and relatively more “consonant”-like segment types:
[+cns, voc] which can also be written in vertical dimension to emphasize
the non-syntagmatic way features combine (logical “and” = “Boolean com-
bination”): [ cns, +voc], [+cns, +voc], ?[ cns, voc].
How features combine one with another to define the segment types of
any particular language defines the structure of the phonological inventory
as a cognitive space of landmarks such that we can state the following:
() Variance such as occurs in the extensional realization of any phono-
logical category defined by an intensional prototype in feature space
projects into continuous regions of the space. Here, note how only one
of the solutions of the phonological structure of the language satisfies
this criterion – to measure relative similarity –
which means that members of a particular phonological category, a
phonological segment type, will always be at least as relatively “close”
to the landmark of the class than to that of any other phonological
category.
() Members of a particular phonological category cluster around landmark
sound-types [= intensional prototypes for sounds], generally manifesting
in distribution as the maximally non-conditioned (“unmarked”) variant
– hence, for a -vowel language, with /a/–/i/–/u/, which, unlike the
variants ɛ, ɔ, e, o, are generally unpredictable of occurrence by
The feature labels used here, such as [+cns] and [ voc] for consonant and vocalic, are intended
purely for purposes of illustration. Phonologists and phoneticians do not always agree on which set
of features constitutes the optimal set in terms of which the maximal number of facts can be
explained. My point here is that however these disputes are terminologically resolved, the logic of
feature decomposition will proceed in the manner illustrated here.
Lecture : Categoriality
syntagmatic context, occurring in all other possible word and
syllabic positions.
() Further, these intensional prototypes will define a structure of pro-
ductive and receptive difference that is comparable and stable across
all languages. The idea is that systems of different “delicacy” of
categorial differentiation are nevertheless organized around cross-
linguistically stable intensional prototypes, no matter how many
paradigmatic distinctions there are for that distributional class.
Hence, if a vowel system has three vowels, [ɑ] – [i] – [u] must be
landmarks of three different phonological vowels. And supposing a
language has two vowels, like Kabardian, a Kartvelian language of the
Caucasus? Then [ɑ] is still in a different category from the other
intensional landmark vowel, [ə] (“schwa”), along a dimension of
tongue height/aperture width.
The mathematics for designing such a space of nested spaces of orthog-
onal difference need not concern us here; what is critical is that we get a
good intuitive picture of what is being proposed in such a correspondence
that sets up: (a) an individual Saussurean phonological system for some
specific language; (b) its projection into experienceable phonetic reality in
a particular way; and (c) its conformation to expectations of “possible”
versus “impossible” phonological systems in the way that distributional
classes (syntagmatically based paradigms of contrast) can be calibrated
across language structures by reference to the intensional prototype land-
marks. For any kind of distributional privileges of occurrence defining a
position of possible paradigmatic contrast, then, we should be able to
predict, given n-distinct phonemic segment types that fill it, which inten-
sional prototype sounds will be in distinct categories, with some typolog-
ical variation as to the possibilities. In short, segmental phonological
categories are defined by intensional prototypes that intersect values along
several dimensions – “features” – simultaneously, plus all of the variance-
around-the-prototype that may even overlap the variance of another
phonological category. There is an ideal system of structured opposition
manifest in how the intensional prototypes are actualized, that is, become
extensional through pronunciation and hearing.
Moreover, the only way we can determine the feature structure operat-
ing in some particular language is to look at it in the light of general
expectations for the distributional class – a differential intensional phonetic
prototype correspondence or projectability for all the languages of the
world. Note that this is at once a theoretical position and an empirical
A Theory of Comparative Grammatical Categories
enterprise: If we don’t know that something should be possible in the
sound system of a language on the basis of prior experience, then we are
faced with the problem of either revising our general expectations or
concluding that what looks like a violation of expectation really is not.
Remember that in structural-functional analysis we are not describing
the entire phonetics of a language, what one can measure in the way of
clouds of variability among tokens of usage. We are describing the cate-
gories of significant paradigmatic contrast relative to the syntagmatics, or
concatenation-structure, of phonological form. In the actual flow of lan-
guage, one is claiming, it is as though n parameters of perceptual land-
marks (for some relatively small number n, the featural dimensions
necessary to describe paradigmatic contrast in some language) are individ-
ually shifting in value as someone speaks and another processes the signal
form: feature [fi] moves from value [+] to [ ] as feature [fj] moves from
[ ] to [+] and feature [fk] stays constant at its value, whether [+] or [ ].
Our cognitive mechanism for the production and reception of phonolog-
ically formed code is this extraordinary ability to render the continuous
signal of melody and white noise into an apparently digital one, recon-
structing the Saussurean syntagmatic order in syllabic representation of
point-like segments that are simultaneously paradigmatic units defined
along all the significant dimensions of contrast.
Toward a Theory of Comparative Grammatical Categories
How to bring these lessons of phonology into the comparative analysis of
what we term “grammatical categories”? We will want to see that at the
planes of grammar and sense-semantics there are parallelisms (see
Figure .), in that “grammatical categories” are like features, organizing
spaces of conceptual contrast – differential intensional prototypes – that
are the anchors or stable points in terms of which the regions of variance in
universes of actual denotata – referents and predicated states of affairs – are
construed. The assumption of a cognitive theory of feature-spaces defin-
ing denotational domains that organize grammatical categories is the
key idea.
So the analysis of language as a Peircean symbol system is a workable
solution only under these conditions, where the analysis of any one system
of symbolic units implies a framework of calibration of that system with any
other such system. (It is now called “universal grammar” by some.) This
constitutes a theory of grammatical categories – that is, of grammatico-
semantic and grammatico-pragmatic dimensions of contrast – in various
Lecture : Categoriality
mare- ‘being’• ‘animate’• ‘non-human’• ‘count’• ‘female’
cf. [female [horse-]]
‘being’: distributional category of bear-, ghost-, toddler-, deity-, etc.
‘animate’: distributional category of bear-, toddler-, robot-, etc.
‘non-human’: distributional category of bear-, frog-, wind-, etc.
‘count’: distributional category of bear-, frog-, molecule-, cup-, etc.
‘female’: distributional category of mother-, ingénue-, duchess-, etc.
Figure . Grammatico-semantic categoriality (on parallel with phonetic-phonological
categoriality).
areas of extensionalizable denotation that has the same power as the theory
of distinctive features in phonology; indeed, it constitutes a theory of
categoriality more generally. This is, of course, precisely what the classic
writings of Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, and Whorf were attempting to establish,
as we explore in more detail in the next lecture.
Viable theories of grammatical categories presume that there are areas of
differential denotation, what we can term denotational domains, that are
equivalent to the subspaces in phonemic space in that they must be
comparable across languages. Indeed, languages will tend to manifest
similarities of structural arrangement in the way that such denotational
domains manifest in the formal structure of linguistic signs. Denotational
domains, it is important to see, are labels for the extensionalizably com-
parable grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic categories that
appear across many languages. They are not natural kinds, but a particular
aspect of linguistic systems; which is to say, they are the projectable domains
of extensionalization from intensional categories that are calibratable across
languages.
Thinking back to our post-Lockean rectangle (Figure .), if Saussurean
differential signifiers – morphological and grammatical structural forms –
Note how this implies that one cannot simply approach the problem of meaning categories directly,
as for example in the attempts by experimental cognitive psychologists to extract inductively from a
sufficient number of trials of reactive grouping of actual objects as stimuli the apparent “concept”
that lies behind such grouping.
Extensionalizability, thus, is the absolute sine qua non of recognizing, as one moves across languages,
the existence of denotational domains. Indeed, denotational domains allow us to compare languages
in their categories, and thus to work out the intensional structure of any particular language’s
categories, which are extensionalized, or projected into, some denotational domain or other. As
should be apparent, a denotational domain demands that one have evidence in contrastive signaling
of membership in one or another subcategories within the domain.
A Theory of Comparative Grammatical Categories
project into differential signifieds – senses immanent in our ability to refer
and to predicate – what is the nature of those signifieds and how can we
analyze them? On the analogy to phonology, we should say that
Saussurean “senses” are intensional prototypes that anchor different con-
ceptual categories in terms of which we refer and we predicate in actual
events of using language. If we recall our discussion of formal linguistics’
“solution” to denotation – breaking down the diagonal line connecting
Legisigns with the phenomena of the universe of experience and actualized
conceptualization into its two aspects, the Saussurean “sense” relation and
its instantiation in extensionalized reference and predication – we must
now ask: What relation does the use of intensional prototypy to commu-
nicate about the world bear to “thinking” about the actual world? Is
“translation” possible only to the extent that human cognition is anchored
by universals of intensional prototypy in various referential and predica-
tional domains – denotational domains – that structure human languages
everywhere and do so with criteria for conformity sufficient to make
translation at the level of Saussurean prototypes possible?
As you can see, one cannot even ask these questions without a rich
theory of a sort very much along the lines that we have fashioned for
phonologico-phonetic matters, but now extended to grammatical analysis
and, as we extend further in our next lecture, to cultural conceptualization.
I hope you can see, thus, the importance of empirical research within this
structural-functional understanding of Peircean symbolism (and, more
generally, what he called Thirdness; Peirce –: .–.). It is
nothing less than the pursuit of universals of human thought that takes
seriously into account the fact of the existence of multiple languages.
***
The possibility of glimpsing universal tendencies amid multiple languages
was an urgent one for Franz Boas (:), a contemporary of Saussure,
who came to this fundamental insight: “Since the total range of personal
experience which language serves to express is infinitely varied, and its
whole scope must be expressed by a limited number of phonetic groups, it
is obvious that an extended classification of experience must underlie all
articulate speech.” Here are the questions, then, that Boas – along with
Sapir and Whorf in what we term the “Boasian tradition” of the study of
“exotic” indigenous languages of the Americas (exotic to European expe-
rience, that is!) – was asking: How can we compare and “calibrate”
languages insofar that engines of thought are revealed in denotational
Lecture : Categoriality
functionality? Are all languages “universally” made up of the same gram-
matical categories? If not, does it make any difference to the users – to the
linguistic community in the first instance, to their various social-
organizational groups and categories in the second – how they “classify
experience” via the formal structures – both syntagmatic and paradig-
matic – of their languages? If all languages extend to the same or similar
human experience, what effect might result from seemingly very different
formal expression – or lack of formal expression – of some area of
denotation, of some denotational domain?
In the next lecture we turn to these questions, exploring how an
essentially Saussurean approach to studying language structure was devel-
oped in America through the Boasian tradition. As we will see, the
questions we must ask require us to “triangulate” () the attempt to
analyze a specific language and its distributional categories, () how those
categories seem to project into distinctions of intensional prototypes
(“concepts,” “senses,” “meanings,” etc.), and () how those categories
anchor possible referents and predicable states of affairs. Such an analysis
is either predictable from, or requires changes in, the comparative expec-
tations of linguists, already built up from all the prior analyses of lan-
guages. Boas, Sapir, and their colleagues saw “American Native languages”
(as Boas termed them) as sources of material that would deepen and
expand our comparative understanding of how the range of human expe-
rience can be comprehended and made sensible by the differential struc-
tures of languages that simply differed from the ones European scholars
had habitually studied.
Thus, we move yet closer still to an empirical science of symbolic form,
in which “description” always implies at least implicit “comparison,” or, as
Whorf termed it “calibration” of languages. As we will see in the next
lecture, Whorf brilliantly articulated the wider implications of Boas et al.’s
kind of structural-functional typological relativism, by centering his ana-
lysis on the problem of grammatical categories. He demonstrated how
the categories definable in particular language structures by linguists’
distributional analytic techniques were the proper locus of cross-language
comparison and generalization. Whorf’s point in the focus on comparison
is simply that there is typologically interesting categorial variability observ-
able in denotational language structures, such that when we look at new
and “exotic” language structures for their coding categorizations, we dis-
cover all kinds of enrichments to our up-to-then accumulated experience
of linguistic coding that make us revise our expectations about the space
of universally available possibilities for grammatically coded conceptual
A Theory of Comparative Grammatical Categories
differentiations. Some years later, Kenneth Pike (:–), of the
University of Michigan, suggested the term “emic” for the structural-
functional particulars, as against the universalistic “etic” space of possibil-
ities for structured systems of coding categories.
The key point in this lecture, then, has been to outline an approach to
comparativism that allows us to leverage the dialectic of intension and
extensionalization to map out an “etic” (universal) grid of linguistic
possibility. Our expansion of these methodological principles from the
realm of phonology reveals parallels between the different planes of lin-
guistic analysis. Having here analyzed the coding of hearing and speaking
(forming syllable-series in speech), in the next lecture we turn to matters of
seeing (as with color terminologies) and other domains. It will become
clear that a simple collection of intensional categories or denotational
domains will not be sufficient. On the contrary, this mode of analysis
reveals a pattern, an inner logic of possibility to the relationship between
denotational domains and the intensional categories that code them –
which is to say, a structure of human experience.
So, we are now prepared to examine the many forms of grammatical
categories – the formal coding of denotational domains – by taking a close
look at the pioneering work of Benjamin Lee Whorf as exemplar of the
Boasian comparativist project. This in turn will enable us to see that the
conceptual schemata organizing the logic of denotational domains in
formal linguistic analysis differ crucially from the phenomenon of cultural
concepts, which are the real locus of what we will recognize as socially
consequential “linguistic relativity.”
Relativity
Grammatical categories and denotational domains exemplified in
Whorfian grammatical and typological analysis. Defining the concept
of cultural category. The significance of universal and language-
specific categorization of denotational domains. Color as a denota-
tional domain versus color as a cultural category. Is “linguistic
relativity” in dis(re)pute for the right reasons?
In the last lecture, we set the background for being able to talk at all about
“linguistic relativity” by reviewing the post-Enlightenment concern with
language as the instrument of rationality – grammar and logic in the
medieval trivium – as well as by introducing the problem that linguistic
diversity poses for it, let alone the diversity of the cast-off third member of
the trivium, rhetoric, that is, the socioculturally effective use of language in
events of communication. We then developed the necessary strategy of
structural or formal linguistics if it is to be an empirical science of language
by first considering the phonologico-phonetic categoriality of language.
We then expanded this analysis by considering other planes of language, an
approach we develop here. Our analysis suggested that “meanings” or
“concepts” as projected from formal distributional categorizations:
() must be projected through the grammatico-semantic equivalent of
phonologico-phonetic “distinctive features” (or, in the Boasian anthro-
pological linguistic tradition, grammatical categories), such that
() they define differential intensional prototypes that anchor concep-
tual categories within relevant cognitive spaces or frameworks of
“sense” compatible across languages; and
() they are extensionalizable in events of reference and predication that
invoke the intensional prototype as the relevant conceptual anchor-
point for describing the universe of referents and predicable states of
affairs about which one wishes to communicate.
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
Only in such terms can we say that grammar thus provides default
intensional–extensional “literalness” for the anchoring points of conceptual
value within what we might term – paralleling phonology/phonetics –
semantic space in a denotational domain.
We are now prepared to appreciate socially consequential “linguistic
relativity” in line with Boasian comparativism. Benjamin Lee Whorf’s work
exemplifies the Boasian tradition, and in this lecture we explore Whorf’s mode
of analyzing the supposedly “exotic” languages of Native America to demon-
strate the way grammatical categories encode what can be seen as universal
“etic” potentials on the basis of comparing “emic” particularities. Several
denotational domains are presented, displaying Whorfian calibrationist typol-
ogies. Considering, in particular, the much-studied realm of color in this way
allows us to distinguish between grammatical categories and cultural concep-
tual structures. Crucially, the perceptual domains we discuss – sound and color
vision – and their universally compatible coding via intensional prototypy are
not the same as cultural conceptual structures through which people make
discourse about their worlds of experience and social relations. This lecture
argues that it is when cultural concepts and grammatical categories are studied
together that we can understand what is rightly called “linguistic relativity.”
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism Exemplified
A denotational domain may sometimes project from a single paradigmatic
class within distributional structure – think of affixes in languages with
simple, straightforward dichotomies that are formally isolable. Such a formal
coding of a denotational domain may be quite simple, such as an easily
segmentable set of roots or stems, or of affixes within a morphological word.
Alternatively, a denotational domain may project from the formal intersection
in language structure of several types of formal distinction, each with a distinct
value we can establish on other grounds, as we will see in Whorf’s analysis of
English and Hopi predicational systems. At this other extreme, it may involve
a complex morphosyntactic configuration, a hierarchical constituency that
intersects through formal concatenation many autonomously analyzable
grammatical categories, only through the existence of which we can recognize
the coding of some denotational domain.
Note that this powerful role of phonology as a starting point for the study of categoriality and
conceptualization should not be confused with structuralist calques from phonology to non-
linguistic domains that were dominant in the anthropological tradition of Lévi-Strauss,
componential analysis, and other fields. For discussion, see Silverstein a:, :,
b, b:–, and discussion in the previous lecture.
Lecture : Relativity
[a] Overt vs. Covert
i.e., degree of ubiquity, robustness, lexicalized transparency of
marking in/on or in dependent construction with the item so
categorized (vs. configurationality);
‘Gender’ in German, etc. vs. ‘Gender’ in English
[b] Selective [prototype: lexical] vs. Modulus
i.e., degree of subcategorial obligatoriness or facultativeness;
‘Noun’ in English vs. Nootka
[c] [Semantic] vs. Isosemantic
i.e., degree to which formal mark correlates with a clear
conceptual difference;
‘Tense’ vs. ‘Conjugation Class’ in French
[d] Specific vs. Generic
Relative position within a structure of inclusive taxonomy in dividing a
denotational domain; cf. markedness of structures of “enantiomorphism”;
‘Past Tense’ vs. ‘Tense’ in any language with this category
[e] Descriptive vs. Taxonomic
Degree to which category is one of “universal grammar.”
‘Relative Case’ in Inuit vs. ‘Case’ as a formal system
Figure . Whorfian dimensions of contrast of (word-centered) categories.
Whorf himself realized all this, evidenced in his paper on “Grammatical
Categories” ([]). He thought about typological variation across
grammatical structures and the implications of such variation for a com-
parative theory of mind (cognition). Remember that Whorf wrote at a
time when the structure of words was at the center of language, particularly
for the polysynthetic languages of the Americas that were the focus of
anthropological linguistic investigation. So syntax as such is not clearly
developed here and these are, for the most part, grammatical categories of
morphology with which Whorf was concerned.
Looking at Whorf’s classification of kinds of grammatical categories
(Figure .), we see that he distinguishes between “overt” – or “pheno-
typic” – and “covert” – or “cryptotypic” – categories depending on the
sliding scale of whether or not, as we would now say, there is a single, isolable
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
English
[move-]V move- + -ment]N ( “event of moving”
(
Nouns of Action (
(
ve)- + -tion]N ( “[ontological] fact of moving”
[move-]V mov(e)- + -er]N Noun of Agency “[being] who moves”
Figure . Whorf’s “modulus” categories exemplified.
lexical [= segmentable] morphosyntactic form that signals a value of
the grammatical category. Sometimes that morphosyntactic form – like
the English anaphoric singular he/him/his–she/her/her(s)–it/it/its – appears
in certain construction types only, and where the form it categorizes (which
the anaphor substitutes for) does not; this is rather cryptotypic. By contrast,
on the phenotypic side of things – like gender in Latin – the mark occurs
with every member of the class.
Another Whorfian dimension of classification is “selective” versus “mod-
ulus,” that is, how obligatory or optional is the formal marking of the gram-
matical category. Here, Whorf is thinking about the differences between the
“selective” subcategorization of the lexicon by different formal treatment –
think of “count” and “mass” nouns in English – and the various derivational
additions to such fundamental lexical roots or stems that may or may not
occur along with those roots or stems, like suffixes signaling derived “nouns of
action” or “nouns of agency” that are sometimes added to verb roots or stems.
The resultant form [Verb + Affix] is rendered the head of a derived syntactic
constituent: English [move-]V ! [move- + ‑ment]N; [mo(ve)- + ‑tion]N as
nouns of action and [move-]V ! [mov(e)- + ‑er]N as noun of agency
(Figure .), the first two describing, respectively, the event and the ontolog-
ical fact of “moving,” which are slightly distinct denotational domains.
Some formal distinctions don’t semantically or pragmatically project,
such as the so-called conjugation classes of Romance language verbs or
the “strong” (vowel change for past) versus “weak” verb roots of English or
German; these Whorf terms “isosemantic,” that is, bearing the same
structure-derived meanings. “Specific” and “generic” describe a value
within a grammatical category, such as the specifically “past” tense (con-
trasted with the specifically non-“past”) as one possibility within the
generic category of Tense. Finally, “descriptive” versus “taxonomic” refers
to the sometimes language-specific labels for categories developed by
grammarians as opposed to the framework of cross-linguistic comparison
Lecture : Relativity
Figure . Whorf’s diagram for “different ways in which English and Nootka formulate
the same event.”
Reproduced from Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, edited by John B. Carroll and
Stuart Chase, figure , p. . © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The
MIT Press.
in the way of denotational domains. Hence, Inuit “relative case” used for
Agents of certain two-argument predicates and for Possessors. Cross-
linguistically, however, we now know that Inuit relative case is merely
one of the expectable and garden-variety configurations of “ergative” case
marking within a case system.
At the time Whorf was writing, many, many of these cross-linguistic
typological generalizations that anchor and stabilize grammarians’ termi-
nology were still being worked out. But I hope you see that typological
study of linguistic structures yields the actual labels for grammatical
categories (ideally, the full such range of categories), a subset of which
are used – just like subsets of distinctive features in phonology – in any
particular language. It is the comparison of grammatical structures that is
at the heart of linguistics as an empirical science, even where that variabil-
ity seems in some ways “exotic.” It turns out that all languages are, indeed,
to be seen as typologically variant ways that grammatical categories inter-
sect in their grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic structural
codings. This is one way of thinking about “linguistic relativity”: the
orderly variance we observe in the coding structures of languages.
To demonstrate, let us consider Whorf’s example of two seemingly radi-
cally different sentence forms that we think of as sentence-level “translations”
of each other (Figure .); here, “translation” gets redefined as a comparative
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
study of grammatico-semantic and grammatico-pragmatic codings across
languages. Nuu-chaa-’nutlh (formerly, “Nootka”) is a so-called “polysyn-
thetic” language where a single complex word-form – actually a word-form
with a predicating clitic (an obligatorily unstressed word that connects to what
precedes or follows) – has the referring and predicating potential of a full
English sentence. As Whorf writes in the caption of this figure: “Here are
shown the different ways in which English and Nootka formulate the same
event. The English sentence is divisible into subject and predicate; the Nootka
sentence is not, yet it is complete and logical. Furthermore, the Nootka
sentence is just one word, consisting of the root tl’imsh with five suffixes.”
So what English does in its syntactic organization at the phrasal level, Nootka
does in a complex “derivational” organization at the level of word – here, verb-
word – morphology. It is important to see that any of the stages of derivation
in Nootka itself can function as a predicating form as well as a referring one.
But the question is, how “exotic” is the language from the point of view of a
grammarian, if not from the point of view of a monoglot speaker of English?
If we do the equivalent of a word-by-word comparison of Nootka and
English, the languages look so distinct and mutually “exotic,” we might
scratch our heads and wonder – as would Whorf’s naïve “Mr. Everyman,”
unpossessed of grammatical analytic machinery – if these other folks
thought about (or “saw”) the world in the same way as we do. But look
at the way the Nootka sentence is formed (Figure .).
Let’s start at the bottom line of Figure .. A predicating clitic (‑ma) is
attached to a complex suffixed form (Nootka has no prefixes, only suffixes).
Each of what we term the derivational suffixes here, when concatenated with
what precedes it, results in a combined constituent of a distributional
category different from that of what precedes the suffix. So note that ‑iƛ
makes a transitive verb construction, the understood Object or Patient of
which is expressed by the form (here, a very complex one) with which it
combines, here, a Noun. In turn, the Noun is composed of the suffix ‑itaq
with a form that precedes it that happens to be a transitive verb, et cetera. So
the “exoticism” from the English perspective is the fact that the surface head
of the Nootka word-sentence is the leftmost transitive verb root, ƛ’imš-
‘boil’. But note how the grammatical machinery is entirely tractable once
seen as a hierarchical Saussurean sense-creating system with grammatical
suffixes entirely comparable to those of any “Standard Average European”
language (Whorf []:), and even stem and suffix senses that are
entirely understandable to the speaker of English.
I hope you can see that formal structural analysis makes the problem of
comparison tractable in one particular way: Studying denotational
- - - -
- Vtr
- Vtr + -ya(q)- NPat ‘ - - - sc
- Vtr + -ya(q)- NPat + - - Vtr - -
generic object + transitive verb construction; cf. English [[window]+wash-] Vtr.gnrc
- Vtr + -ya(q)- NPat - - Vtr + - ta(q)- NAgt ‘ -
generic agentive deverbal construction; cf. English [[[window]+wash-] Vtr.gnrc + -er]
- Vtr + -ya(q)- NPat - - Vtr +- - + - L- Vtr -
- Vtr + -ya(q)- NPat - - Vtr +- - - L- Vtr – ‘ -
Figure . Sentence formation in Nootka.
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
domains organized by grammatical categories reveals typological variation
in the way that formal systems “code” differences of intensional prototypy.
This became the central enterprise of Americanist – and thence, American –
linguistics in the Boasian tradition, just as it did in the parallel European
tradition of structural-functional linguistics after Saussure. Thus, we can see
that, just as for the phonologico-phonetic correspondences induced by
assuming the structure of simultaneously operative “features” that explain
the distributions of phonemic segments/“sounds” (sons), we can look at how
particular denotational domains are structured by grammatical categories in
linguistic structure.
Observe in this connection Whorf’s famous chart (Figure .). Here,
Whorf compares and calibrates the distinctive, language-particular categor-
ial structures of “Standard Average European” English grammar with those
of the Uto-Aztecan language Hopi in the “etic” area of anchoring a verbal
description of an event to a presumed (presupposed) epistemic context of
observation and communication. Whorf has been careful to include a
speaker and a hearer, each with different accessibility conditions. He, thus,
has constructed an “etic” diagram of a contrived scenario embodying what
he considered the most important “emic” features in play to compare these
two languages along different possibilities within a denotational domain
(here, of what can be presumed to be seen or not seen).
In such a comparison, English is a “tense”-language, that is, in simple
complete sentences English obligatorily uses a simple, directly coded
(generally suffixal) categorization that differentiates a reported event as,
respectively, “prior-to” or “simultaneous-with” a reference event, in the
default case the event of communication itself (Figure .). We call this
“past” versus “non-past” (also, inaccurately, “present”) tense. Every finite
clause in English bears a single operative tense-indicator; it is a ubiquitous
category expressed by an obvious word-level, or morphological, marking
on a verb-word, like the suffix ‑ed or in exceptional cases by stem-internal
vowel change and comparable, as in run/ran, though it is not always found
on the operative descriptive word, the predicating verb, of the clause,
because of the complications of how other verbal categories are coded along
with tense.
English also has obligatory grammatical “aspect,” coding the significant
interval-properties of the predicated event projectible at and from the
stipulated temporal point. In English we have “progressive” or “durative”
aspect, indicating that an event is, was, or will be ongoing, that is,
configures like an open interval around the “tense”-point, and we have
“non-progressive” or “punctual” aspect, frequently suggesting by
Lecture : Relativity
Figure . Whorf’s chart showing the contrast between a “temporal” English and a
“timeless” Hopi.
Reproduced from Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, edited by John B. Carroll and
Stuart Chase, figure , p. . © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The
MIT Press.
(markedness-derived) contrast that the event is like a closed interval, with
“tense” projected at and from stipulated beginning-point and/or end-
point. “Progressive” aspect in English is formally expressed – or coded –
by the presence of a so-called “auxiliary verb,” be-, which takes the tense
marking instead of the descriptively “main verb,” along with the use of the
suffixed ‑ing-form, or “present”-participial form, of the predicating verb,
Some languages – Russian is famous in the textbook literature – have a “completive” or “perfective”
aspect, in contrast to a “non-completive” or “imperfective,” the latter suggestive of incompleteness
and hence implicating durativity. Note that both possible asymmetries of coding, the English type
and the Russian type, are “etic” potentials for particular “emic” grammatical systems.
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
Grammarians’ Label Denotational Distinctions Formal Marking
Tense “past” : “non-past” in the denotational {- - -t} on next lexical verb
domain of event seriality with respect stem : -Ø
to anchoring event (default: event of
communication)
Perfection “perfect” : “non-perfect” in the {have- . .. -en} with suffix
denotational domain of event appearing on next lexical verb
completion overlapping anchoring stem : Ø
event (default: event of
communication)
(Grammatical) Aspect “progressive” : “non-progressive” [= {be- … -ing} with suffix
“durative” vs. “punctual”] appearing on next lexical verb
stem : Ø
Aktionsart [=Lexical “telic” : “non-telic”; “inceptive” : Lexical verbs sort into
Aspect] “non-inceptive”; “repetitive” : “non- Aktionsart classes according to
repetitive”; etc.
Figure . Categories of the (standard-register) English predicating/verbal phrase.
while the “non-progressive” lacks the auxiliary and occurs with the simple
verb stem. Thus, crossing the categories of “tense” and “aspect,” note
English “progressive” am/are/is running versus “non-progressive” run(s)
in the “non-past” and comparable was/were running vs. ran in the “past.”
Observe in Figure . the exemplification of how all these categories
formally interact in English.
In a communication that asserts the factuality of the event in question,
English uses the “assertorial” mode throughout, as Whorf’s chart in
Figure . shows. But note the situations of communicated assertion that
Whorf constructs as his “etic” framework of comparison. At issue is the
simultaneity or non-simultaneity of the communicative event and the
event-predicated, differentiating situation b as a later phase of situation
a, and situation as a later phase of situation ; note that in English b
and are reported with “past” tense codings, and it does not matter that in
b the addressee of the message was visually privy to the event of running
being reported, while in the addressee could not have been. Note the
parallel irrelevance to English categorial structure of the “shared” or
“sender-only” eyewitness experience of the reported event in situations
a and . Observe in a and that in what we call the etic “true ‘present’,”
the “present” of sensorial simultaneity of the reported event and the event
of communication, English intersects the formally “non-past”“progressive”
tense aspect paradigmatic values in its particularly structured emic
categorial space; there is no other more direct way of communicating this
Lecture : Relativity
[1]
John sits here all day.
-Ø
sit-
[2]
John is sitting here all day.
-Ø
{be- … -ing}
sit-
[3]
John has sat here all day.
-Ø
{have- … -en}
sit-
[4]
John has been sitting here all day.
-Ø
{have- … -en}
{be- … -ing}
sit-
Figure . Grammatical interaction of tense and aspect in English. NB: have- and be- are
highly irregular verbs in morphological expression of non-“past” grammatical subject
agreement by “Person,” as in examples ()–().
under English coding regularities, no distinct unitary category, for exam-
ple, that uniquely has this specific differential meaning. And likewise in
and , to report an event the realization-point of which is etically prior to
the communicative event, English uses the “past” tense, though we can
make the finer distinction in the “past” of reporting something as specif-
ically and differentially then-ongoing, for example, (he) was running, again
crossing “past””progressive” tense aspect.
As Whorf means to indicate in his chart, for all four of these etic
situations, Hopi uses the same categorial form of the inflected predicating
word, here the stem for “run,” wari(k)-. It is the basic “punctual” aspectual
form as well as what Whorf calls the “reportive” “assertion”-category, that
is, the category coding the reported event’s epistemic status relevant to the
Here we use the symbol “” for logical combination of particular “specific” paradigmatic values
within a “generic” grammatical category (e.g., “past,” “non-past” with Tense) and “” for the
interaction between the generic categories themselves (e.g., tense, aspect, etc.).
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
communicative event from the sender’s perspective. The simple Hopi one-
word sentence is categorially augmented only in , where the speaker
communicates not merely the pastness of the event being reported, some-
one else’s having run, but vouches for the factuality on the basis of the
sender’s having been in sensorially evidenced etic situation , watching the
running, at some point prior to the event of communication. Here, the
category of “vouched-for” or “eyewitness” “evidentiality” is coded in the
sentence-particle era, which implicates – though note, it has nowhere
distinctly and explicitly grammatically coded – the pastness of the event
reported. Hopi is a “tenseless” language, though, as we see, there is at least
one etic situation in which “past”ness can be effectively coded along with
“evidentiality,” which reports the event as having been evidenced to the
sender on some prior occasion.
Note that in situation in Whorf’s chart, both English and Hopi,
lacking specifically “future-tense” forms in their grammatical-categorial
structure, use alternative paradigmatic crossings of yet other grammatical
categories. Standard English uses one of the modality-coding auxiliaries,
the most usual being will-, for such “unrealized” or “unactualized” situa-
tions of expected or anticipated factuality of what is predicated relative to
the factuality experienced in the event of communication: hence, (he) will
run. Note, by the way, that this modal can be suffixed with a form that
looks like the past marker to differentiate an event “anticipated”-from an-
unrealized-reference-point, and construed as a “conditional” in relation to
such an as-yet-unrealized reference event, as in (he) would run. And this
can even be crossed by the “progressive” aspect, thus yielding an antici-
patedly actualized, though as-yet-unrealized view of an event-in-progress,
(he) would be running, much as it can be in the regular “unrealized-but-
anticipated” event-in-progress signaled by (he) will be running. In Hopi, as
Whorf points out, in situation , communicating speaker-anticipated
factuality requires an overt verbal suffix ‑ni, that directly and distinctively
communicates the speaker’s “anticipation of factual realization”; he calls
this the “expective” kind of assertion, and, since it can also be used for
coding expected events clearly prior to the event of communication, it
comes closest to being like the “future” formation as used in English to
form conditionals.
Finally, note that in Whorf’s etic situation , the speaker is communi-
cating of the reported event the general quality of being out of the realm of
On the “conditional” in Hopi, see Whorf :, sec., under “modes,” and Whorf
[]:–.
Lecture : Relativity
sensorial particulars, for example the notion of a generic or even habitual
event that emerges not only from the realm of countable-instances of
“running” predicable of the verbal subject, but equally possibly from
“law”-like general properties or characteristics of the world unmanifested,
or as yet not manifested, or just unmanifestable in observable instances. In
English, for verbs of the run- type, this is the place where the simply
inflected, at least formally “non-past” tense form of the verb occurs: (he)
runs. For such predications of law-like general regularities, Hopi, too, has a
special formal category, Whorf’s ([]:) “nomic” – law-stating –
realm of factuality, the predicated event so coded existing in that epistemic
realm that necessarily needs no individual-occasion sensorial confirmation
to be predicable of the verbal subject. As seen in , where English uses the
simple “non-past” verbal inflection – which, recall, does not mean the
equivalent of etic situation a, the “true present,” for verbs of this semantic
type – Hopi uses the specific and differential suffix ‑ngwɨ.
So the overall point of Whorf’s comparative-typological chart is this: Hopi
uses “aspect” “evidentiality” “ epistemic modality” as its basic, obligato-
rily coded categorial dimensions to encompass the six “etic” situations of
relating reported and reporting events (as contrived in his chart), while
English uses “aspect” “tense” ( “mode” in the “future” of ). To fill out
his somewhat cryptic sentence summarizing the importance of the chart for
his readers, in the figure’s caption Whorf notes that “What [etic distinctions]
are [projected] to [the obligatory coding-structures of] English [as] differences
of [emic-“]time[”-categories] are [projected] to [the obligatory coding-
structures of] Hopi [as] differences in . . . [emic “]kind of [epistemic] validity”
[categories]” (bracketed insertions are mine for clarification).
Whorf’s point in the comparison is simply that there is typologically
interesting categorial variability observable in denotational language struc-
tures, such that when we look at new and “exotic” language structures for
their coding categorizations, we discover all kinds of enrichments to our
up-to-then accumulated experience of linguistic coding that make us revise
our expectations at the etic level, the space of universally available possi-
bilities for grammatically coded conceptual differentiations. Etics, thus, is
the inherently comparative framework of assumptions of what is available
to Language for specific and differential grammatical coding – such as
these putatively “different” situations of predicating an event of “run”-
ning – that makes descriptive emics possible for any particular system of
language. So far, so good.
These comparisons and contrasts define the grammatical categories of
languages, with a view to elaborating the Boasian point that while every
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
language is a complete and perfect engine for extending the same ultimate
universe of experience and imagination, how – that is, using what partic-
ular grammatical-categorial machinery – any particular language does so is
significant. This argument was an anti-evolutionist stance in a debate that
was both scholarly and political and articulated Boas’s commitment to
both the “psychic unity of mankind” and the relativity of “mind.” One
language community needs a whole complex phrase to communicate the
differential denotation of something or some state of affairs another
language does with an obligatory morphological paradigmatic contrast
(“dual” in English vs. Worora or Kiksht; “evidentiality” in English vs.
Hopi). It was thought that this fact should have consequences for conceptual
focus; in particular, it should matter for what we are “habituated” to in our
behavioral and perceptual environment, and on which our normative
social relations in genred interactional texts mediated by denotational
textuality depend.
The whole Boasian tradition of linguistic theorizing was devoted to
establishing the significance of variability across languages in relation to
our ability, as analysts of distributional structures to – here is Whorf’s
insightful term – “calibrate” languages in terms of intensional prototypes
in denotational domains. The simplest such calibrations people attempt
are at the level of lexicon, that is, the lexical simplexes that belong to the
various “parts of speech.” (These, it turns out, are distributional classes that
“head” distinct kinds of phrases in the larger structure of clauses and
sentences; we will look at how “color” works in this way, later in this
lecture.) But the Boasian lesson is that once we start analyzing words and
expressions by “X-raying” them with the analytic machinery of formal
grammar, all linguistic forms, insofar as they are analyzable in this way,
must be anchored to categories of ultimately denotational applicability.
Turned the other way ’round – recall, Boas moved from physics to
psychophysics to geography to anthropo-geography, a.k.a. anthropology –
it is as though language were a system of categorical responses to a constantly
shifting empirical world in which the possible referents and states of affairs
to predicate are infinitely variable. How can a mechanism consisting of a
combinatorics (grammatical rules) and a finite set of ultimately Legisign
simplexes – word stems; pre-, suf- and in-fixes; phrasal clitics concatenated
in arrangements of various sorts – serve to express everything and anything
that humans can think? If there is a certain “psychic unity” of humankind,
moreover, then must every language be able to express precisely what every
other language does? Are there any consequences of the fact that variability
in the combinatoric systems is obvious across languages?
Lecture : Relativity
As we have seen, Whorf offered the most sophisticated answer to this
question, articulating a more general “relativist” – that is, calibrationist –
view through a typology of grammatical categories of word-forms (recall
Figure .), focusing in particular on the way, in the overall grammatical
structure of a language, a category has a formal profile, a mode of formal
manifestation under grammar, and a possible “sense”-differentiating role.
Note that he hypothesizes that relatively overt, obligatory, lexically unitary
forms are easily susceptible of consciousness, while relatively covert, facul-
tative, configurational categorial forms remain unconscious, even though
permeating our actual use of grammatical forms.
Such “Whorfian” research continues today, though it is carried on in an
environment that radically misconstrues “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” for
instance, by primarily focusing on overt versus covert grammatical forms.
The question is, what is the cognitive role of the structurally driven “sense”
system as we have now identified it in relation to other cognitive systems?
In particular, the question we are pursuing here is: What is the relationship
of the structure of a particular grammar – now nestled in its typological
framing in relation to other possible grammars – to how one thinks, or to
how one functions in society?
We can observe how various denotational domains are sometimes
isolable by elaborate formal coding structures – structures of different
distributional treatment of the forms that are the differential signifiers of
intensional prototypes of one or another sort. For instance, note how
categories we call grammatical “gender systems” are really formal codings
of lexical nominals – the general distributional phenomenon of obligatory,
selective-category noun classes – that always keep distinct “[adult human]
female” versus “[adult human] male” whatever else they may assimilate to
the formal classifications, such as tables and chairs and whatnot (Figure .).
“Female” versus “male” are the differential intensional prototypes of
two of the categories of such systems, and there will generally be some
differential intensional prototype for each of the other categories as well.
Note the structure of asymmetric taxonomic subcategorization – ordered
grammatical-categorial dimensions of differentiation – of our kind of English
system, each category carving out a more specific subset from the category in
the table listed just below it. Note that for what Whorf would term our
gender “cryptotype,” the “signature,” the diagnostic mark of at least some of
the distinctions in the singular number, is the anaphoric pronoun that, as we
earlier noted, substitutes in entextualized denotational discourse for the
nominal head it replaces: thus, she/her/her(s) for the “feminine singular,”
he/him/his for the “masculine singular” and – in the older standard register
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
Figure . Some classificatory distinctions of formal, notional, and referential
noun classes.
Reprinted from Michael Silverstein, “Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of
Structure, Usage and Ideology,” in Semiotic Mediation, edited by E. Mertz and R. Parmentier (,
Academic Press, Inc.), Table . Copyright © , with permission from Elsevier.
(see Lecture for discussion) – for any “human singular” and metaphorically
extended such kind (e.g., large animals of household, farm, or exploitation),
and it/its for every other noun class. Some gender systems are completely
overt, as Whorf noted for German and French (and many others), wherein
determiners, quantifiers and other kinds of Specifier paradigms are differen-
tiated for gender agreement. Even systems considered rather “exotic” in the
literature turn out to be garden-variety ones, such as Dyirbal, as discussed by
R. M. W. Dixon () and then a host of commentators such as George
Lakoff (who titled his book based on an enumeration of denotata in the
Dyirbal balan class, class II) (Figure .).
Dyirbal differentiates I+II versus III+IV, and within the first, “masculine
[+ male appurtenances]” versus “feminine [+ female appurtenances],”
extended to many creatures and mythic characters in plotlines of pairing;
within the second, the division is specifically “edible flora” versus “every-
thing else in the universe,” as shown in Figure ..
Basic “predicate-argument” predication types, too, constitute a denota-
tional domain organized in Saussurean fashion universally (Figure .).
By Shakespeare’s day, for example, English was dramatically losing its
“experiencer predicates,” its inverse transitives, which were partly merged
with active intransitives [methinks > I think] and in some cases with split
passives/pseudo-transitives [I am reminded of NP / NP reminds me of. . .],
though many Indo-European languages retain them as so-called “dative
Lecture : Relativity
Figure . Some extensions of the Dyirbal noun class/gender system.
Reproduced from R. M. W. Dixon, The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland (, Cambridge
University Press), p. . Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through
PLSclear.
I-II-III-IV
I+II III+IV
Human(oid) All Else
I II III IV
“male” “female” “edible flora” “all else”
bayi balan balam bala
Figure . Dyirbal noun class/gender system.
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
Figure . Typology of predicate types.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Cognitive Implications of a Referential Hierarchy,” in Social
and Functional Approaches to Language and Thought, edited by M. Hickmann (, Academic Press,
Inc.); reproduced with permission.
Lecture : Relativity
subject” predicates. Similarly, verbs of adjunction, for part–whole and
possessum–possessor relationships, frequently surface in most larger con-
structions as derived “inalienably possessed” nominal or equivalent. The
relationships of telescoping are quite regular cross-linguistically, which
allows us to assemble this denotational domain of basic distinctions of
predication types of which, modulo a particular morphosyntactic system,
we can correctly analyze the actually occurring distributional classes. While
languages may have fewer sharp distinctions of type, they work consis-
tently across all languages, so that the basic space of event-types defined by
essential referent and any other denotata is clear.
Ditto for the array in Figure ., which shows a grammatical category
space as reflected in numerous facts about how certain category-types –
determiner phrases – are distributed in languages.
This multidimensional grammatical category space displays the cross-
linguistic regularities of case marking and many other distributional facts.
(I created it originally to explain so-called “ergative” versus “accusative” case-
marking systems [Silverstein b], but its importance is much wider in
languages. See Lecture for discussion of address terms.) What is interesting is
that it differentiates heads of determiner phrases (DPs) along a cline of regions
in denotation-space, starting from those at the extreme left of the display, the
senses of which are “inherently metapragmatically anchored categories of
denotata.” That is, they are entirely and irreducibly metapragmatic in-and-at
the moment a token of the type is implemented (“we du[al] incl[usive]”
denotes Referent as identical to Speaker & Addressee), while those at the
extreme right, complex compositional DP heads made up of any descriptive
phrase, themselves do not even denote, but only provide a sense-descriptor that
must be combined with a deictic in order so to do. Excluding the deictic, their
senses are made up completely of the senses of the constituents plus the rules of
concatenation by which they are constructed, that is, they rest entirely on the
existence of the meta-semantic system of grammar as invoked in communica-
tion, a system of “cosmic knowledge” that supervenes any specific act of
communication. Along the way, we move across degrees of metapragmatic
immediacy and intersections with asymmetries of grammar (see Silverstein
b, for more discussion). The point, here, is that though in their
distributional or formal categories languages differ in their relative elaboration
of these subspaces, they are quite consistent as, of course, is fundamental to this
being a denotational domain for constituting referring phrases.
But with what consequentiality? Here, we approach the general area of
concern termed “linguistic relativity,” or “linguistically mediated relativity.”
As we saw in the previous lecture, Saussure himself had the notion of a
Whorf’s Grammatical-Categorial Comparativism
Figure . Speech-event-focused view of the noun phrase categories.
Adapted from Silverstein, Michael, “Case Marking and the Nature of Language,” Australian Journal of
Linguistics Vol. , No. (), Table , p. . Copyright © The Australian Linguistic Society,
reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Australian
Linguistic Society.
“relative motivation” whereby linguistic sense was conditioned by the
systematic differences in language, a motivation, he noted, that emerges
from each system in a different way, rather than being something pre-
symbolic. Here, the question is: In what way do contrasting coding systems
Recall the point discussed in Lecture that despite (in fact, because of ) the “arbitrary” relation
between form/signifier and meaning/signified, there is a system-relative motivation of linguistic
signs, as Saussure intuited and Jakobson and others further elaborated. This is what Saussure termed
valeur or ‘valence’ (often translated as “value”).
Lecture : Relativity
at that level have consequences for something about human cognition,
modes of social organization, and so on? For if languages are consistent
one with another in terms of different but congruent codings of denota-
tional domains, in some sense within any particular system lurk tendencies
we can explain only on the basis of universals. And then the very (Peircean)
symbolic structure of any particular language is not completely “arbitrary”
after all. It allows “calibration,” precisely as Whorf pointed out. This is a
very tame and tractable notion of “linguistic relativity,” to be sure. Let us
turn now to a more robust phenomenon of what one can call “relativity,” as
emergent in social practices.
From Grammatical Categories to Cultural Concepts
We frequently encounter the term cultural concepts, maybe even in our
very own professional or lay usage, as we come to awareness of how we are
using language and reflect on what the many expressions we commonly
use might actually denote. But how many of us have stopped to think
about what a “cultural” concept might be, as opposed to merely a “con-
cept”? And where do such concepts live? To a realist psychological dis-
course, a “concept” is a property of an individual mind. But in most
anthropological or equivalent social-scientific discourse, “cultural” con-
cepts are properties of “mind” in a different sense. Properties of mind
are, in a real sense, an emergent of social life informed by sociocentric
norms, that is, a consequence of the existence of humans “in society.”
Perhaps the social-scientific usage of the term “cultural concept” is just
another way of talking about what is, after all, really just a normative verbal
usage, an expression-type that presumptively labels something. That would
mean we are really confusing “mere” labels, deployed forms of language,
for something else.
Why do anthropologists in particular – as a species of the genus
inherently inclined to relativism more generally – believe that “cultural”
concepts can and perhaps do actually differ from social-historical
formation to social-historical formation? Indeed, why do anthropologists
think of such “cultural” concepts as being inherently bound up with
those very socio-historical formations, making “cultural” concepts essen-
tially dependent on the fact that the individual’s mind both emerges and
exists in the context of group-relative social practices? Sapir in chapter
of Language (:–) provides insight into these questions. He
observes:
From Grammatical Categories to Cultural Concepts
The word is merely a form, a definitely molded entity that takes in as much
or as little of the conceptual material of the whole [propositional] thought
as the genius of the language cares to allow. Thus it is that while the single
radical elements and grammatical elements, the carriers of isolated [gram-
matical] concepts, are comparable as we pass from language to language, the
finished words are not. Radical (or grammatical) element and sentence –
these are the primary functional units of speech, the former as an abstracted
minimum, the latter as the esthetically satisfying embodiment of a unified
thought. The actual formal units of speech, the words, may on occasion
identify themselves with either of the two functional units; more often they
mediate between the two extremes, embodying one or more radical notions
and also one or more subsidiary ones. We may put the whole matter in a
nutshell by saying that the radical and grammatical elements of language,
abstracted as they are from the realities of speech, respond to the conceptual
world of science, abstracted as it is from the realities of experience, and that
the word, the existent unit of living speech, responds to the unit of actually
apprehended experience, of history, of art. The sentence is the logical
counterpart of the complete thought only if it be felt as made up of the
radical and grammatical elements that lurk in the recesses of its words. It is
the psychological counterpart of experience, of art, when it is felt, as indeed
it normally is, as the finished play of word with word. As the necessity of
defining thought solely and exclusively for its own sake becomes more
urgent, the word becomes increasingly irrelevant as a means. We can
therefore easily understand why the mathematician and the symbolic
logician are driven to discard the word and to build up their thought with
the help of symbols [=sign-vehicles] which have, each of them, a rigidly
unitary value. (bracketed terms added by author)
What Sapir is contrasting is the world of structural-functional analysis of
grammar in the Enlightenment mode (which culminated in Saussurean
formalism coupled with Boasian calibrationism) and the use of language in
the enterprise of entextualization/contextualization, the universe of what we
should call cultural concepts (or what we will call stereotypes in Lecture ).
This is a very different universe of categories than those of Saussurean
grammar. It is in the semiotic realm of entextualization/contextualization –
making denotational text-in-context so as to effectuate social action – that
cultural concepts arise and operate, giving a second area of “sense” in addition
to those senses analyzable under Saussurean (formalist) presumptions.
To demonstrate to ourselves the “reality,” if you will, of cultural concepts
as opposed to grammatico-semantic and even grammatico-pragmatic ones
We might also call such concepts Bakhtinian concepts, in contrast to Saussurean concepts, to draw
out the process through which the dialogism of language is part and parcel of the dialectics of
extensionalization and intensionalization.
Lecture : Relativity
vacuum cleaner-
? = [[vacuum- + clean-]V + -er] ‘agent of [vacuum+cleaning]’
[vacuum- + clean-]Vitr ‘(generically) [to] cleanVtr vacua’
cf. [window- + wash-]Vitr ‘(generically) to cleanVtr windows’
= “machine instrumentally using suction – creating a vacuum
at its operating interface – to cleanVtr surfaces”
Figure . Grammatical and cultural analysis of the English lexeme vacuum cleaner-.
(and thus the limitation of a strictly linguistic analysis of conceptualization),
all we need do is consider the degree to which the senses of certain expres-
sions really are compositional in the way we would expect from grammatical
analysis. Consider a lexeme like vacuum cleaner- (Figure .).
It looks like a noun of agency given its ‑er derivation from a generic verb
with pre-posed nominal Patient; thus from [vacuum-clean-]V one gets a
noun of agency, much as from [window-wash-]V one gets window washer-.
But the lexeme “vacuum cleaner” does not denote a human Agent, that is,
the “do-er” of some generic transitive; it denotes a machine, first off, and
secondly, the combining stem vacuum- is not the Patient of the verb clean-,
it is the instrument or modality, an adjunct of the verb of a very
different kind. A “vacuum cleaner” is not a person who cleans vacua; it
is a machine that uses suction – the creation of a vacuum at some nozzle
or similar interface – to collect surface dirt and dust. To use this term
correctly, notwithstanding its seeming grammatico-semantic projectible
regularity, we must know something else independent of its grammatical
categorization, something we can only learn in events of use, indeed in
events of “baptism” on the plane of actual denotation – that is, where we
are socialized to the meaning and use of the term. The conceptual
knowledge invoked and cued in-and-by the use of a token of this lexeme
but not projectable from morphological-derivational structure illustrates
cultural knowledge in essence attached to the form.
Take another example: the denotational domain we can term egocentric
kinship. We call it “egocentric” because it is focused on a universe of
relationships imagined for a fixed individual and because it is projected as
positions in genealogy all around that individual generated by relations of
filiation – parent–child relations – and affiliation – spousal relations,
iterated over many structural generations. Think of it as an endless,
From Grammatical Categories to Cultural Concepts
father- vs. mother- ‘kinsperson’• ‘lineal’• ‘G+1’
= ‘male’• ‘parent-of(x,E)’ vs. ‘female’• ‘parent-of(x,E)’
BUT:
(to) father- [X father- Y] – cultural concept of realm of procreation on which the social
relation rests;
(to) mother- [X mother- Y] – cultural concept of realm of nurturance on which the social
relation rests.
cf. “non-sexist” usage of (to) parent- [X parent- Y], as in guides to “good parenting”
practices.
Figure . Grammatical and cultural analysis of English kin terms, father and mother.
infinitely extensible, fishnet sack, with the nodes where connectors inter-
sect the positions in the genealogical universe. The late Joseph Greenberg
([]:–) demonstrated that there are about six fundamentally
distinct ways that this denotational domain is lexically coded in simplex
lexemes (e.g., generation, lineal vs. collateral, consanguineal vs. affinal,
relative age within generations, sex of relative, sex of speaker); and the late
Floyd Lounsbury ([]) demonstrated the focal intensional gene-
alogical prototypes of each kind of system. So far, so good. Now, consider
a pair of English simplex lexemes in our cognatic non-merging collateral
type of system, the noun stems father- and mother-. Approaching the
terms father and mother as conforming lexemes within the egocentrically
reckoned genealogical domain, they can be defined by the intensional
prototypes “male lineal first-ascending-generation kinsperson” and “female
lineal first-ascending-generation kinsperson.” (Note how implicatures of
relative age/seniority emerge by default, based on generation.) Is that what
we know and invoke in-and-by using these terms?
Well, if the senses of these terms were limited to the grammatico-
semantically conforming, we would have a very difficult time understand-
ing the “conversion derivation,” available widely in English, that makes a
verb from any noun, in particular, verbs that characterize doing with/to or
being whatever the noun denotes. So consider the derived transitive verbs,
[(to) [father-]N]V and [(to) [mother-]N]V (Figure .). Do they mean “to
serve as male lineal first-ascending-generation kinsperson” to someone and
“to serve as female lineal first-ascending-generation kinsperson” to some-
one? Obviously not. In such derivation, in fact, it is the cultural concepts
adhering to, that is, essentially cued in-and-by the use of a token of the form,
notwithstanding the grammatico-semantically conforming denotational
Lecture : Relativity
meanings, that carry over and determine the derived form’s sense. Thus,
[(to) father-]V has the sense “to engender as procreator”; [(to) mother-]V has
the sense “to support by nurturing/caring for.” The phenomenon is, so far as
I know from all the languages I have studied, universally true: In derivation,
forms keep their cultural concepts even if they lose their grammatico-
semantic ones.
Linguistic Relativity and the Denotational Domain of Color
So, now we turn to how any non-trivial approach to “linguistic relativity”
turns on the idea of cultural concepts, as opposed to what various
researchers have claimed. Indeed, much of the research that has been done
in the wake of the republication of Whorf’s papers, starting in and
more fully in , has unfortunately focused on “words-for-things” (or
“nomenclaturism”), as has long been the limit of understanding of lan-
guage among psychologists and others trusting in the “literal denotation”
dogma, as we saw in Lecture . There is, of course, a salience of simplex
lexemes to the non-grammatically sophisticated, as Whorf () long ago
pointed out, because – recalling Figure . – simplex lexemes are
semantic–selective–overt types of categorial codings insofar as they enter
into little local paradigms of sense contrast as distributional classes under a
grammar (Silverstein a). Even Bloomfield () noted that morpho-
logical paradigms with transparent categorial coding are highly salient to
speakers of languages, stimulating folk views of the transparency of deno-
tational form to the denoted universe. Thus, under the doctrine of “literal”
denotation, people have gravitated to attempting a “words-for-things” –
German, Wörter und Sachen – approach to the “content” of language
(trying to relate the upper-left and lower-right sides of the post-Lockean
rectangle, as we discussed in Lecture ). They have done this rather than
study grammar in the first instance. Starting with grammar shows how
formal structure projects into differential sense, which is then elaborated
by the indexicalities of discursive interaction and the making more gener-
ally of text-in-context (the lower edge of the post-Lockean rectangle
systematized in a third-dimension of genres of practice that intersects
denotation at that lower edge – perhaps to be diagrammed as coming
out in a plane orthogonal to the two-dimensional one of the chart).
Consider one of the classic cases of lack of understanding of the issues,
the claim that Saussurean “relativism,” system-relative motivation of inten-
sional prototypy, is overthrown in favor of the extra-linguistic determination
Linguistic Relativity & Color
of how words stand for things-in-the-perceptual-universe: the strange case of
so-called “color.”
In the Anglophone world, books at the intersection of academic and
popular – haute vulgarisation in French – have once more put concepts of
“linguistic relativity” back in the general reading public’s imagination. For
some time, as the field of linguistics has been a major interlocutor of
cognitive science, the Chomsky-inspired among these writers have aggres-
sively put before the public ideas of the biological universality of language as
a “mental organ” unlike any other organ of any living thing: presumably
unique in its species-specific and species-defining universality without
variation, and in its distinctness from organic soma and its functionality,
even though manifest through bodily activity. Besides Chomsky himself,
who has, over the years, vigorously argued this position (e.g., Chomsky
, ), for example, as over against all of biological thinking in the
framework of evolution by natural selection, one can think of such popu-
larizers as Steven Pinker (), who again and again has denounced ideas of
the significance of formal and functional variability of language, and in
particular ideas he erroneously ascribes to Benjamin Lee Whorf, whom he
has apparently never read, but has only read about in others’ accounts.
In the last couple of years, we have had reactions against such specula-
tions, for example Guy Deutscher’s () Through the Language Glass: Why
the World Looks Different in Other Languages and Dan Everett’s ()
Language, The Cultural Tool among others. Calling out Deutscher, on the
other hand, is John McWhorter’s () The Language Hoax: Why the
World Looks the Same in Any Language, which seems at least to be anti-
“relativist” though not necessarily committed to a “language organ” of the
Chomskyan variety. Again, in the mode in which laboratory psychological
findings are splashed across popular websites for the general public, research
by Lera Boroditsky and others (e.g., Boroditsky, Ham, and Ramscar ;
Casasanto and Boroditsky ; Boroditsky ) has figured prominently
in announcing test results in areas of memory, reaction time, and sensory
acuity that correlate with various lexical distinctions across languages spoken
by research subjects. Featured as well are even aggregated demographic data
on rates of retirement savings, bodily obesity, smoking (and safe sex!) that
have been correlated with whether or not there is a distinct future tense in
the language of a population (Chen )!
In general, since the republication of four of Benjamin Whorf’s
pre-war papers – he died in mid , aged – and the publication
of a more complete volume of his writings (amusingly, by MIT Press in
the year Chomsky was hired at that university), two key trends have
Lecture : Relativity
shaped discussions of so-called “linguistic relativity,” a concept that Whorf
himself, wishing to make an impression on his fellow MIT graduates
knowledgeable about Einstein, invoked in addition to that of special and
general relativity in physics.
The first trend is the reformulation of Whorf’s actual views into a model
of cognitive and, in particular, perceptual determinism in which something
in the way of linguistic form is taken to be an independent variable and
something in the way of behavioral response to an organismal environment
is taken to be the dependent variable. Thus, the question becomes: Is there
an “effect” in laboratory-testable behavior that can be shown to be consis-
tent with, versus independent of, some formal fact of language?
The second trend is to presume that perception is a categorial space of
categorical distinctions of a direct and taxonomically shallow denotation-
ally coded domain. Thus, n-term formal differences in language are
generally presumed to code n-categorical differences in perceptual or
percept-near categorization, the latter a long-standing presumption of
much of the literature on cognitive categorization in humans. The fre-
quent manifestation of this is a more technical version of the question “Is
there a word for x in language L?” where it is presumed that we can
characterize x independently of language form or use – in fact, that x can,
in effect, be named with some valid and language-independent metalanguage.
Thus, given these framing approaches, we come to the psychophysical
field of “color,” long the post-war testing ground in the enterprise of
investigating the matter of the “relativity” of denotation. The irony of the
matter is that, taken together, work in this area demonstrates precisely the
characteristics of two kinds of concepts coded in languages. One is revelatory
of the very Boasian principles of universality and calibration of linguistic
difference (to which all of Whorf’s descriptive and typological work
adhered), grammatical categories; the other is a function of realms of cultural
specificity, about which Whorf’s last major theoretical work, on the cultural
relativity of “time,” propounded a mechanism for the emergence of what we
now term cultural concepts (see Lucy ; Silverstein ).
In order to understand the issues, it is necessary to think about the
structural-functional position of lexemes, on the one hand, and on the
other hand, the denotational applicability of “color” words and expres-
sions. To be sure, in the developed Boasian view, as noted above, any
structure of grammatical categories in a denotational domain, of whatever
degree of subcategorial delicacy, can be coded in forms of a variety of types.
Some categories manifest in paradigms of affixes, one or another of which
is chosen in any actualized expression in which it occurs as a constituent;
other categories manifest in configurations of constituents, et cetera.
Linguistic Relativity & Color
“Color” [= “hue”]a
In a 4-term system (e.g., “red,” “green,” “black,” “white”) each lexeme extends
different amount of “color space” from those in
an 8-term system (“red,” “green,” “black,” “white,” “yellow,” “blue,”
“violet,” “brown”)
or
a 14-term system (“red,” “green,” “black,” “white,” “yellow,” “light.blue,”
“dark.blue,” “violet,” “brown,” “gray,” “tan,” “pink,”
“orange,” “purple”).
“Numerosity-of-denotatum/-a”
In a 2-term system (“singular” vs. “plural”) each form extends different amounts of
“numerosity space” from those in
a 3-term system (“singular” vs. “dual” vs. “plural”),
a 4-term system (“singular” vs. “dual” vs. “trial” vs. “plural”)
a 5-term system (“singular” vs. “dual” vs. “trial” vs. “paucal” vs. “plural”).
Figure . Real-world descriptive boundaries for conceptual domains
denotationally extended.
(Sapir’s and Whorf’s typologies of categories lay out their word-focal ideas
of such, needing only to be informed by modern phrase-structural syntax
to be up to date.) Now, there is nothing unexpected in the circumstance
that some denotational domain might be coded by the very roots or stems
of morphological constructions (which manifest in pronounceable words).
Deictics of person – mislabeled “personal pronouns” – for example, are
roots or stems when they head determiner phrases (though in some
languages there are affixal agreement markers of person as well, frequently
in distinct paradigms depending on the morphosyntactic class of the head
word of determiner phrases [DPs] or inflectional phrases [IPs] to which
they attach). The elaborately structured paradigms of simplex kinship
lexemes constitute another such example, as discussed above, as do para-
digms of spatial deictics with sometimes elaborately multiplex dimensions
of contrast within locational and directional frames anchored by the locus
of the event of communication.
Linguists within the structuralist tradition have long pointed out that the
denotational domain of “color,” universally coded by simplex lexemes at the
highest taxonomic level of subdivision, is differently subdivided as a function
of the delicacy of the lexical paradigm (Figure .): The real-world descrip-
tive boundaries – the extensions in color space – among areas denotationally
subtended by a four-term lexeme system are inherently different from those
coded in an eight- or fourteen-term system, just as the categorial boundaries
Lecture : Relativity
of numerosity-of-denotatum/‑a differ in a two-term system (“singular” vs.
“plural”) when compared with a five-term system (“singular” vs. “dual” vs.
“trial” vs. “paucal” vs. “plural”). But it is, indeed, a universal that all
categories that map as the most general divisions of the denotational domain
of perceptual hue are coded in morphological roots or stems; we know of no
language where, for example, a red book versus a blue book would use the
lexeme for “book” and add an affix or an ablaut – not, note, a compounded
root or stem – to denote the hue of the denotatum.
Furthermore, if the denotational domain of perceptual hue does,
indeed, correspond to a system of grammatical categories that happen to
be coded by simplex roots/stems, then, like all systems of grammatical
categories, there should be a structure of differential intensional prototypes
that () correspond to the delicacy of the categories, and () correspond
across all possible systems in a structure of implicational relations. Recalling
our previous lecture, the analogy is to the universality of what is now termed
“feature geometry” in the realm of phonologico-phonetic facts of language.
Hence, according to this hypothesis, just as two-value vocalic systems like /
ɑ/ : /ə/ yield by subdivision of phonetic space to three-value vocalic systems
like /ɑ/ : /i/ : /u/, where the higher vocalic region is split into two regions (see
Figure ., Lecture and discussion therein), the realm of perceptual hue
(“color”) also has an internal structure of anchor points available in an
orderly cross-language potential.
Of course, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, in their then startling and still
influential book, Basic Color Terms (), happened upon precisely this
fact about language: that perceptual hue is a denotational domain every-
where coded by simplex root/stem lexemes at the highest level of semantic
contrast and behaving precisely as we would expect. As becomes clear as
well, even languages without a superordinate domain-name for perceptual
hue or “color” – such as Hanunóo, as investigated by our late colleague
Harold C. Conklin ([]), or Mursi, as investigated by David
Turton () – conform to the regularity, just as languages without
domain labels such as would translate our grammarian’s metalinguistic
term “transitivity” or “numerosity” still systematically code distinctions of
propositional argument structure as to number and grammatical relations
of projectable arguments in a clause-level construction and distinctions of
cardinal membership in sets of denotata.
While in their work Berlin and Kay made no distinction between sense
and reference, let alone a careful consideration of the grammatical distri-
butions of color terms, they did appeal to two category-inducing responses
in subjects who were presented with a two-dimensional array of Munsell
Linguistic Relativity & Color
color chips equidistantly spaced across all hues, plus black–gray–white, at
maximum saturation per hue (Figure .).
The subjects were asked, in effect, to trace on the array the proper
extent – what would be, denotationally, the literal maximal extension – of
a particular term; they were also asked to identify the “best,” the “real,” the
“perfect” exemplar – denotationally, the paragon-as-prototype – of a
particular term. Perfecting and elaborating the experimental methodology,
as has long been a concern of later work, certain results seem to be
indicated consistent with the fact of the existence of a denotational domain
projected as sense categories and actualized in events of reference and
predication. Subjects show little consistency – both cross-subject and
intra-subject, in fact, on multiple trials – in where to draw boundaries of
extensional inclusion. They are much more consistent in identifying what
we can see is the intensional, extensionalizable prototype of a term as
inferred from the paragon-as-prototype extension. Similarly, while research
subjects for any given language are widely different in outlining the total
extension of each term, they are highly consistent in identifying the
perceptual prototype of a basic color term.
But the most interesting fact here emerges cross-linguistically, decisively
entailing that we are dealing with a Boasian denotational domain of regular
structure. The intensional prototypes for every term from language to language
line up, with some typological variation, as a function of how many distinct
basic color terms each language has (Figure .). Thus, one can predict
which prototypical perceptual hues will be coded by distinct terms in a
language just by knowing how many such terms the language has, its
categorial delicacy in the denotational domain of perceptual hue. This is
precisely what one would expect on the basis of how all other grammatical
categories operate in the languages of the world so as to be “calibratable” in
a structured space of a denotational domain.
Of course, grammatically speaking, so-called basic color terms, the most
superordinate categorial forms, become the basis for several kinds of
Here, I discuss Berlin and Kay’s original work because it presents a clear case to demonstrate the
more general point that we are interested to make. There have certainly been a number of critiques
and subsequent revisions of this work (e.g., regarding the status of a feature analysis of color terms,
what constitutes the first categories, partitions of the space and their sequence, and their optimality).
Yet, such revisions do not alter the fundamental aspects that are relevant to our discussion here,
namely, the question of intensional prototypy of color terms (whether conceived through a feature
analysis or not, fuzzy boundaries or not, etc.) as they stand in relations of difference. What is critical
to the parallel of phonological and color terminologies, then, is the contrastive relations between
intensional prototypes as they are extensionalized in some denotational domain (in phonology,
sound; here, color).
Figure . Munsell color chips, as used by the World Color Survey.
From www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/data.html.
Figure . Berlin and Kay universal sequence of lexicalization of hue foci (revised).
Reproduced from Paul Kay and Chad K. McDaniel, “The Linguistic Significance of the Meaning of Basic Color Terms,” Language Vol. (), figure .
Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center.
Linguistic Relativity & Color
“basic color terms (CT)” – e.g., English Bk-Wh-R-O-Y-G-B-V[-Gy-Bn-P]
“secondary” color terms – e.g., English mauve-, aquamarine-, scarlet-, etc.
color expressions of several sorts – e.g.,
derived word-stems: CT+CT- (blue-green-, blue-black-, etc.) [dvandva
compound stems]
color-modifier plus color term: [CT+ish [CT-]] (reddish brown-, pinkish
orange-, scarletish tangerine-, etc.)
-ish adjectives take degree adverbial modifiers as well, e.g., slightly
reddish brown-
descriptions with object-property landmarks, headed by color-/shade-/hue-:
the color of [my Aunt Tillie’s 1964 DeSoto convertible], etc.
Figure . Expressions elaborating the denotational domain of color in English.
grammatical constructions producing expressions that further differentiate
the denotational domain terminologically (Figure .). In English, for
example, we freely form dvandva compounds, such as red-orange-, blue-
green-, particularly used for regions of perceptual space at adjacent
primary-category boundaries. We also freely construct color expressions
with the deadjectival/denominal ‑ish suffix on a modifying stem, such as in
expressions blue-ish green-, purpl-ish brown-, with the suggestion of
subcategorization (‑ish being one of Sapir’s “derivational” concepts) by
secondary accretion of hue characteristics of a percept. With the head noun
color- we can freely form expressions like the color of DP, where the
complement can be any nominal describing something perceivable in the
mode of hue, for example, the color of [my Aunt Tillie’s DeSoto
convertible]. Finally, there are many further lexicalizations within the
vocabulary of a language like English, such as those specialized for the
appearance of particular default categories of entities, the very lexicalization
of which already indicates that cultural concepts are involved. Here we find
English mauve-, blonde-, amethyst- – some derived from names of objects
that display particular hues – any of which is a hyponym of one or more
Note that we also have English terms such as shade-, as in the/a shade of [color term] that specifically
implicate a hue percept of a non-prototypical sort, shade- thus indicating a structure of subcategorization
within color categories.
Lecture : Relativity
basic categories, testable by the meta-semantic operator frame for taxon-
omy, [term] is a kind of [term].
But there are grammatical facts about even the basic color terms that seem
to point to internal differentiation of them into subsets even within a single
language. Thus, English seems at present to have eleven basic color terms,
but they seem to have distinct structural distributions that indicate sub-
divisions. Terms black-, white-, and red- take the change-of-state verbalizing
suffix ‑en, to form both causative/transitive and intransitive verbs; blue- and
green- seem to occur with the noun of action gerund suffix ‑ing; yellow- and
brown- directly make unsuffixed verbs; pink-, orange-, gray-, violet- or
purple- all require a construction to indicate change-of-state, as in [turn-
pink], et cetera. What is interesting is that such distributional distinctions
more or less follow the implicational scales of categorial delicacy that
subdivide the denotational domain, as proposed by Berlin and Kay. These
distributional facts seem to be reflections of precisely the same markedness
structures that we find in every domain of categoriality in language, phono-
logical as well as morphosyntactic. But what is the presenting non-linguistic
reality of this denotational domain of conforming sense categories?
“Color” emerges from a perceptual mechanism sensitive to electromag-
netic wave phenomena (Figure .), where our peripheral receptors in the
retina – the rods and cones – fire off a neural response within an envelope
of just about one “octave”-like increment, from ca. nanometer wave-
length waves to ca. nanometer wavelength waves. Light can be of a
concentrated wavelength, a narrow-spectrum beam, or of energy diffused
over a mixture of many wavelengths (compare resonant sound with
concentration of energy in tone and its overtones versus so-called “white
noise” with the energy disorganized and all over the place). We seem to
perceive light percepts along three psychophysical dimensions of charac-
terizability: hue (which is principally a function of dominant wavelength),
brightness (which is principally a function of the narrowness or diffuseness
of the beam), and saturation (which is principally a function of the ratio of
wavelength dominance to diffuseness of a beam). When experimentalists
in the lab, colorimetrists, test people’s acuity (“just noticeable difference”)
along these three dimensions, it turns out that we are sensitive to up to
ca. ,, different psychophysical percepts in the color space
Sound, transverse wave energy impinging on our auditory apparatus, is perceivable by your average
child between cycles per second frequency and , cycles per second! This envelope of
response decrements with age and long exposure to too-intense noise, to noise of high decibel
intensity (as from airplanes, rock concerts, constant earbud stimulation).
Linguistic Relativity & Color
Figure . The four unique hues of the visible spectrum.
Reproduced from Peter Lindsay and Donald Norman, Human Information Processing: An Introduction
to Psychology, nd edition (New York: Academic Press, ), p. c, color plate III. Copyright ©
Elsevier Inc. Used with permission.
Lecture : Relativity
75
610
50
554
440
25
-25
-50
-75
524
445
(472) (492) (573)
400 500 600
Figure . Perception of hue and wavelengths of light as a function of opponent-
process pairs.
(blue-eyed, light-pigmented folks seem to run at the low end at
ca. ,, such distinctions to which they are sensitive).
The cognitive mechanism for such perception of hue seems to involve
something like what color scientists term an “opponent process” – think of
it as a computational system of balance between degrees of two possible
perceptual states. Depending on the dominant wavelength of perceived
light, our visual cortex is, first, switched into either a or a state
that, as you see from the graph in Figure ., moves from at the
lower, shorter-wavelength end of the response interval – remember, all
perceptual responses operate within bounded intervals – to
position to state that becomes more intense and then less, to
again, and at the higher end of longer wavelength is once more
in the region. (Note that the computational state occurs in two
regions.) The / system operates at only part of the interval
for /, as shown. When both systems are operating together, as
in non-color-blind perception, then the point at which red/green is at
but blue/yellow is at is perceived as the percept intense or
Linguistic Relativity & Color
; when the blue/yellow is and the red/green is tipped
to , the light is perceived as intense or ; et cetera.
is smeared over multiple regions, note. If we join them, we get a
circular plot.
Putting together brightness on a white-to-gray-to-black axis, with satu-
ration as the distance from this axis, plus the hue-circle, we get the color
solid, a representation of the irregularly spheroid perceptual space in which
those ,,-ish just distinctly noticeable light-beam percepts are
organized in this way (Figure .).
Let us think for a minute about the denotational problem involved here.
We know of no language that has distinct lexemes, one for each one of
those possible percepts. (Remember Boas’s wise psychophysicist’s observa-
tion on the way language groups or classifies the phenomena of the
perceivable world under discrete sign-forms.) Other than creating a solid
geometrical vectorial numerical expression for values along each of
the three psychophysical dimensions simultaneously, which is the way
the Munsell Corporation described each of its perceptual samples
(No. ,, = αchroma/hue βsaturation γbrightness), we tend
to group whole regions of the color space under a particular coding,
whether by a single lexeme or a complex expression, even the default
one the color of . . ., where any nominal descriptor can fill out a compar-
ison (Figure .).
So, does every language abound in terms like sienna-, aquamarine-,
mauve-, et cetera, as well as red-, blue-, purple-, et cetera? Is it all just
arbitrary lexical confusion as we move from language to language? Do
people “think” in categories that arbitrarily subtend areas of the color space
as a function of their simplex lexemes? This became the besetting question
of so-called “linguistic relativity” researchers obsessed with hue more than
saturation or brightness.
Now, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, then both professors in the
Department of Anthropology at Berkeley, California, and about fifty years
of people following in their footsteps, discovered a most interesting fact
about how people identify regions of the maximally saturated array of
hues, as these can be assembled and presented as a stimulus array (such as
Figure .). Imagine peeling the surface off the color solid, the now two-
dimensional array of maximally saturated hues, an equidistant sample of
which can now be arranged in rows and columns presented to experimen-
tal subjects. These subjects speak a particular language, a language that has
n different purported “basic color terms,” that is, in our Saussurean
interpretation, lexical simplexes differentially coding the intensional
white
10
red
red- purple 8 yellow-red
purple yellow
red yellow
6
6 4
blue 8 5
10 0
12 2
blue 2 green
purple-blue blue-green
0
(a) black (b)
Figure . (a) Brightness, saturation, and hue-circle mapped onto (b) the Munsell Color System.
(b) Copyright © , Jacob Rus, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike . license; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/./deed.en.
Linguistic Relativity & Color
Figure . Taxonomy of denotational domain of color in English.
prototypes of hue-space as hypernyms of more specific simplex terms.
Note how subtle a fact this is, since there are multiple superordinate taxa
in a language like English for degrees of specificity of color concepts, for
which we even have a meta-semantics indicating the taxonomic structure
in our cultural categorization of hue, et cetera.
When properly done, with task counterbalancing, and so on and so
forth, we can test one term at a time, and have people (a) draw a line
around, say, the inclusive denotata of red; and (b) draw a line around “real/
perfect/best red.” As we noted earlier, if we assemble the results, it turns
out that for the (a)-type question, the inclusive boundaries yield over-
lapping regions on the two-dimensional array of hues, that people speaking
purportedly the same language do not agree on these boundaries, either
with each other or with themselves on multiple trials. Anything we might
term a hue- or “color”-category extended by any of the color terms is a
“fuzzy” and “unstable” set of denotata. However, for the (b)-type question,
people generally pick a more robustly stable sub-region of the region of
total extension; it is as though there is a prototype denotatum that anchors
the fuzzy category. Berlin and Kay call this the “focus” of the category, and
identify this prototype as the “focal hue.” People agree with themselves and
with each other to a much greater extent.
Yet, here again, is Berlin and Kay’s most startling result: these focal hues
are stable across languages in the sense that, if we know how many “basic
color terms” a language has, we can predict where the focal hues differen-
tially corresponding to those terms lie on the saturated hue-space.
You would want to vary the order of presentation of such terms; vary the order of the two tasks; and
clear the display after each trial, of course. Berlin and Kay did none of this, and in fact to investigate
non-English languages, asked bilingual Berkeley graduate students to translate and administer the
“test” to themselves!
Lecture : Relativity
Paradigmatic contrast of lexical forms projects into categories differentially
inclusive of the focal hues. These Saussurean significations – as we can now
term them from our post-Lockean rectangle – are not only stable within
languages, they are relatively stable across languages, generating a small
number of possible categorial systems for any number n of so-called “basic
color terms.” This is precisely what we saw with the phonologico-phonetic
categorial space addressed in Lecture . Certain areas of the simplex
lexicon, such as color [= hue], similarly seem to be semantic categorial
codings directly. The typological facts about calibration of lexical systems
work accordingly.
So Long, “We Don’t Have a Word for That!”
Think about the “simple lexeme hypotheses” that underlie much of the
non-linguistically informed cognitive theorization of knowledge, as though
lexicon is the face of language to the extendable world, just as folk linguistics
and dictionary publishers would have us believe. Such researchers have no
understanding of the structural-functional solution to the intuition of
“literal” denotation, that any distributionally formal categorization in gram-
mar can be the coding of some denotational domain. Lexeme-focal or
punctate semantics and the tendency to Aristotelian and Boolean approaches
to categorial structure for word “meanings” mislead, in this respect, since, of
course, “red” percepts cover a great swatch or smear of hue–saturation–
brightness space, but they are all, in some sense, subtended under the category
by virtue of the term red- differentiating the category anchored at its inten-
sional prototype. The color space is more interesting in that further lexical-
izations themselves iterate the anchoring of subcategories, so that one can have
a mauve-ish- color if one wishes to describe at a more specific level of lexical
differentiation, et cetera. But speakers of languages “have” concepts of orga-
nized denotational domains even where there are no “words for . . .” in their
language (any “cryptotypic” grammatico-semantic category they use but
don’t label as such will exemplify). The simple lexeme hypothesis is itself
completely compatible with how we study the sense categories of languages: It
simply asserts that there are denotational domains of particular dimensionality
and intensional prototypy coded by paradigmatic structures of simplex lexemes
within a Saussurean grammar, which become the basis for more grammati-
cally complex collocations (parsable, sense-compositional phrases). So Berlin
and Kay, speakers of a language with a fairly elaborate paradigm of
differentiation of the focal-hue color space of intensional prototypes, fell
over the fact of direct lexical paradigms for certain denotational domains,
So Long, “We Don’t Have a Word for That!”
conforming with what we know about grammatical categories: that some are
coded in lexically isolable form.
But what about culture-specific concepts of “color” as opposed to
perceptually based foci of coding of “hue” that conform to a cross-
linguistic regularity of coding structures? What happens, for example,
when there is no superordinate taxonomic label like color-? Might this
be a clue to cultural difference beyond or in the face of the universality of
direct lexical coding of hue foci in color space?
Bear in mind that the significance of Berlin and Kay’s findings results in
an implicational scale demonstrating that “color” is a denotational domain
coded in the first instance in each language by a paradigm of n simplex
lexemes – nouns, stative verbs (verbs of states-of-being), or adjectives, as
the specific language may have – termed “basic color terms,” from which
both hyponyms and more complex grammatical constructions derive.
Berlin and Kay, however, hypothesized that this was an evolutionary
sequence correlated with politico-economic complexity. This has been
contradicted even within the time-span of written records. In fact, color
terms have come and gone in “basic”ness for a host of reasons. And
whatever the reasons or the specificities of the current theory of stages,
partitions, and the like, we have seen that the structure of color terminol-
ogies conform much more reasonably to the properties of grammatical
categories that are like those of phonology: “light” : “dark” at any one of
three foci, then “chromatic” versus “achromatic” added as a dimension of
the system, then the dimensions neatly crossing in four categories, and
so forth.
But is this all that is involved in the “meaning” of “color” terms, even
“basic” ones? No. The fact of the existence of lexical simplexes of the
lexicon in a grammatically identified sense is to be distinguished from
terminologization at the level of entextualization/contextualization of words
and expressions, in which emerges the difference between grammatical
categories (or concepts) and what we call cultural concepts. It was
Whorf, I have long maintained, who first demonstrated a viable way of
thinking about cultural concepts on the basis of how discourse – and,
indirectly, then, the grammatical collocations of which text-sentences are
comprised as metrical units – serves as metapragmatic discourse in practical
situations that gives rise to “cultural concepts” in what have been termed
particular “communities of practice,” that is, in emergent sociocultural
reference groups (not categories!); and, conversely, how these cultural
concepts grow into models of the universe with which we engage with
others as strategic actors.
Lecture : Relativity
Here, we obviously get to the genuine kind of “linguistic relativity” in
that we bring together grammatical categories with the fact that language is
instrumental in orienting us to the experiential and especially social worlds
in which we live, the world of “practical” affairs or “practice,” as it is called.
Thus, the analysis of how (lexico‑)grammatical categories intensionalize
denotational domains only brings us so far. While not unrelated to cultural
conceptualization, even grammatical categories do not work in ways
reducible to structuralist analysis. Instead, they necessitate additional
semiotic analysis; indeed, they require us to pay keen attention to the
dialectical relationship of how categories are extensionalized in events of
communication. It is their relevance to communication, we further sug-
gest, that is the basis for the grammatico-semantic lexicalization in the first
place. As we have seen, there are parallel calibrations in grammatical
coding of various perceptual domains: hearing and speaking (forming a
series of syllables in speech), seeing (as with color terminologies), and
participant roles in events of speaking (as with case marking and noun
phrase hierarchies). All of these – as we will see in the next lecture – emerge
from the metapragmatic functional bases of language, in particular from
the speech situation. Ultimately, for cultural concepts too – as they code
realms of cultural specificity in discourse – it is the extensionalization of
categoriality in particular communicative contexts that grounds categories.
Cultural Concepts and Conceptualizations of “Color”
Let us conclude this lecture by examining how this relationship between
grammatical categories and cultural concepts works through a comparison
of Hanunóo and Mursi “color” concepts. This comparison will allow us to
see the crucial point that perceptual domains and their universally compatible
coding via intensional prototypy are not the same as cultural conceptual struc-
tures through which people make discourse about their worlds of experience.
When Harold Conklin ([]) wanted to elicit what we term
“color terminology” among the speakers of the Austronesian language
Hanunóo of southern Mindanao in the Philippines, he discovered that
there is no lexeme corresponding to the English term color. He had to play
something like Twenty Questions with his consultants in order to isolate
with them what one might suspect were the four “basic color terms” of the
language (Figure .).
Now, sure enough, armed with Munsell color chips in his early s
fieldwork, Harold Conklin determined that Hanunóo indeed has a Berlin
and Kay IIIa categorial system, with foci at Bk–W–R–G, as shown in John
Cultural Concepts & Conceptualizations of “Color”
Q1: “Kabitay ti·da nu pagbanta·yun?”
‘How is it to look at?’
A: [. . .]
R: “Bukun kay ‘anyu’.”
‘Not its shape’
Q2: “Kabitay ti·da nu pagbanta·yun?”
‘How is it to look at?’
A: [. . .]
R: ...
Figure . Conklin’s twenty questions to isolate Hanunóo’s “basic color terms.”
Lucy’s re-drawing in Figure ., which enumerates some of the denota-
tional range of each of the terms. As you see, the denotational range of the
terms goes way beyond chromatic phenomena in the universe of perception.
Following Conklin, John Lucy enumerates these other parts of the denota-
tional range as “other reference”; note that psychophysical hue is not distinct
from psychophysical saturation, for example. Also note that one pair of
terms, the R–G opposition, also codes such distinctions as surface appear-
ances such as matte versus shiny, dry versus wet, among others.
What, then, is more interesting than the conformity of the system to
expectation for a four-term lexical paradigm is that () pairs of these terms
are opposed for other perceptual phenomena involving surface appearance
of material; and () these four terms seem to constitute a two-by-two array
under a diagrammatic relationship of “more” versus “less” or “dark” versus
“light” chroma, as shown in the chart in Figure ..
Nothing in our own distinct cultural domain of chroma/hue would
prepare us for this local understanding that chroma/hue goes along with –
that is, appears to the local cognition as – a “natural icon” of all of these other
perceptual characteristics like matte versus shiny, indelible versus faded, dry
versus wet, et cetera. As Conklin also notes, even fabric design in local batik
products entextualizes this two-dimensional structure of oppositions in
what we may term “entextiles.” (Hanunóo people use black–white–red
but not green in textile design.) At the time of Conklin’s research, there
was no unique cultural domain of chroma/hue among Hanunóo people,
notwithstanding the fact that the etic denotational domain of perceptual
hue coding reveals conformity to Berlin and Kay’s expectations. A single
Lecture : Relativity
Figure . Conklin’s ([]) glosses of Hanunóo visual quality terms.
Reproduced from John Lucy, “The Linguistics of ‘Color’,” in Color Categories in Thought and
Language, edited by C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi (, Cambridge University Press), p. .
Copyright © Cambridge University Press. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance
Center.
Cultural Concepts & Conceptualizations of “Color”
Figure . Hanunóo “cultural concepts” that frame “hue” and the
dimensional paradigm.
quadripartite set of lexemes structured in terms of two binaries organizes the
local cultural (or ‑onomic) knowledge of surface appearances and how they
are expected to line up. We might look at these as a locally relevant set of
diagrammatic relations, the presumption locally of the way all these psy-
chophysical percepts constitute “natural” metaphors one of the other in a
multidimensional space of ‑onomic knowledge. (Of course, it should be
recalled that there are no such things as lone “concepts” – Saussurean/formal
or cultural – in isolation; each is a point in an organization of distinctions, a
conceptual structure made up of one or more laminations of elementary
‑onomic types, like taxonomies, meronomies, paradigms, seriations, et
cetera, that underly our capacity to denote.)
Similarly, consider the Mursi system of terminology shown in the
anthropologist David Turton’s list in Figure .. These traditional pas-
toralists in the central Omo region of southwest Ethiopia speak an Eastern
Sudanic language of the far-flung Nilo-Saharan “phylum.” In one sense,
there are no “color” terms, but only terms for the appearance of cattle skins
on their central and prized wealth item, their livestock.
However, as noted by Turton – referenced as well in John Lucy’s ()
article – the Mursi system has an octopartite (eight-term) hue-differenti-
ating set of terms, a subset of those used for cattle skins. Yet such
hue-differentiating terms fully satisfy the Berlin and Kay predictions for
Compare Indo-European *peku- “cattle wealth” from which, via its Latin cognate, we get our
English term pecuniary-.
Lecture : Relativity
Mursi “English renderings of the cattle-colours” English translation
term to which Mursi term is applied (elicited using Colour Aid cards)
Figure . Mursi “color” vocabulary.
Adapted from David Turton, “There’s No Such Beast: Cattle and Colour Naming among the Mursi,”
Man Vol. , No. (), p. . Published by Wiley. Copyright © Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; used with permission.
perceptual differentiation around focal hues. Number () golonyi- used for
a roan (reddish brown) cattle skin has a Berlin and Kay focus at ; the
Berlin and Kay focus of number () biley- for tan/yellowish brown is at
; and number () chagi- for slate gray has a Berlin and Kay focus at
[green-blue]. Yet so many of the terms that line up at particular
intensional prototypes in the color space are completely outside of the
denotational range of inclusion of what one would expect in the way of
perceivable cattle-skin hue: clearly, the octopartite cattle-skin model is pro-
jected onto the wider universe of hue in a very culturally particular way, so one
might say that every so-called “color term” of the Mursi is like the
etymological basis for our terms orange- and pink-, meaning “with a hue
like that of an orange,” “with a hue like that of a pink,” et cetera.
It is important to see that it is, locally, the analogic projectability of a
cattle-skin model onto this available coding-universal of intensional
prototypes in “color” space that associates the larger world of color as a
generalization, culturally speaking, of the universe of cattle. These cattle,
or more particularly their skins, are indeed “good to think with.” Again,
here there is no local cultural conceptual scheme of chroma/hue; there is
only a space of diagrammaticity in which perceptual phenomena like hues
and their focal values are in one-to-one correspondence with differentially
lexicalized cattle-skin types and their focal appearances. From a colorimetric
perspective, it is a small sub-part of the whole phenomenon, as differentially
coded, projecting onto the larger universe of possibilities, a pars pro tota
structure of projections.
Consider, further, the character of chroma/hue as a culturally operative
indexical phenomenon in the fashioning of material objects, as well as the
use of color lexicalizations associated with such phenomena. As we will see
Cultural Concepts & Conceptualizations of “Color”
in the next lecture, any structured subset of colors can be put in diagram-
matic relationship to categorial distinctions experienced and commented
on in the real world of sociocultural experience; the distinct colors become
indexes of the categories they associate with. Little girls in the United
States are dressed in and otherwise surrounded by bubble-gum pink, little
boys are in sky blue; note how these non-saturated deflections from focal
red and focal blue are a diagrammatic icon of the innocence and coming-
into-being phase of pre-adulthood – that is, ripening sexuality and mar-
riageability and its risks even of adultery! – in relation to the focal colors,
especially red. And yet Marimekko fabrics and other appurtenances for
childhood in the Euro-American West come in the most saturated of the
four simplex focal hues against a white background, under a folk or ethno-
developmental story of children’s perceptual appreciation of chroma/hue, a
folk rationalization or essentialization for a particular indexical system of
color, the ethno-colorimetric equivalent of Baby Talk register (not, note,
child language) spoken by adults to children (and, as Charles Ferguson
[] and others have noted, to trans-languaged – as opposed to cis-
languaged – foreigners).
Further examples proliferate: red and green and white (snow) for
Christmas, with the two chromatic-perceptual opposites; red and white
in the War of the Roses, the fundamental chromatic with the fundamental
non-chromatic; red and blue for political coloration as Republican Party
affiliated/oriented versus Democratic Party affiliated/oriented (opposite to
conventions in Europe, note, given red for labor, socialism, communism,
etc.), with the two deep colors of each chromatic opposition plucked from
the national emblem, the flag, and so on. One of my favorites is the north–
south opposition of cloth and its sartorial use in early Renaissance Europe,
where the colored silks of the Catholic south, through trade with Asia,
became indexically – and emblematically, by rhematization – opposed to
the gray, black, and brown woolens of the emerging Protestant north (see
the brilliant article by Schneider []).
But where do “cultural concepts” come from and how do they function
socioculturally? It is to this question that we turn in our next, and final,
lecture.
Knowledge
The generativity of entextualization/contextualization as metaprag-
matic in the interdiscursive emergence of cultural concepts;
the “sociolinguistic division of denotational labor” (Putnam) in
“communities of practice”; and the institutionalization of social
distinction and stratification around centers of emanation of value.
Where, indeed, do cultural concepts come from? Whorf was the first to
propose a general way of understanding the emergence of cultural con-
cepts, so he will be our main guide as we build on our earlier lectures to see
how cultural categories are formed from the confluence of grammatical
structure, denotational domains, and the sociocultural practice of using
textualized language within broader historical process. We’ll also draw on
the work of Hilary Putnam in the philosophy of language as well as
examples from the sociocultural anthropology of Stanley Tambiah so as
to generate our own account of cultural conceptualization.
As we saw in the last lecture, Whorf developed Boas’s anti-evolutionary
doctrine of the mutual perspectival “relativity” of language structures. He
provided us with a sharp method of structural “calibration” of grammatical
structures against a background assumption of the existence of denotational
domains that are differently coded in distinct systems. Paralleling the model
of phonologico-phonetic feature analysis, as discussed in Lecture , we came
to see in Lecture that denotational domains are organized by structures of
differential intensional prototypy. This scaffolds and anchors our ability to
extensionalize referents and predicable states of affairs by in effect catego-
rizing them as of such-and-such – and not some other – categorial types
within the particular organized domain of semantic (non-indexical-denota-
tional) or pragmatic (indexical-denotational) knowledge. Through the last
Recall that the organizational structure of such domains can range from a simple, straightforward
organization of knowledge, i.e., the “‑onomic” dimension, such as a taxonomy, a partonomy (or
meronomy), a serial structure, a categorial matrix (such as distinctive features exemplify), to a more
Knowledge
two lectures we have learned that virtually all of the post-World War II work
on “linguistic relativity,” focusing on word-forms denoting perceptual
domains such as “color” – the psychophysical space of hue–saturation–
brightness (a.k.a. value–chroma–lightness) – fails to establish anything of
interest about so-called “linguistic relativity” in this typological sense of
comparative grammatical category systems; nor, for that matter, in how
such linguistic categorial types articulate to cultural categories.
In turning our attention now directly to the semiotics of cultural con-
ceptualization, let us extend the work of the last lecture to emphasize that
the conceptualization of color is not simply a matter of lexical items. Rather,
it manifests in the culturally inflected poetics of discourse, something that
none of the authors discussed in the previous lecture demonstrated. Recall
that Berlin and Kay’s work confirmed (if unknowingly) that “color” is a
denotational domain that is universally coded by tiered structures of lexemic
roots or stems (i.e., grammar) in an orderly way. Yet, we also learned that
“color” lexemes, like all lexemes, seem to convey other kinds of conceptual
knowledge that is more or less independent of grammatical structure. Such
conceptual knowledge, when it is systematic and organized, is the domain of
cultural concepts, that is, concepts that are invokable by people in certain
social groups existing at a certain place and time, which is to say, a commu-
nity of practice. We have also been calling such knowledge ‑onomic knowl-
edge. And, as we saw in the Hanunóo work of the late Harold Conklin (
[]) or the Mursi work of David Turton (), the lexemes in these
languages at once conform to the regularities of coding of the denotational
domain and, at the very same time, are organized by principles of a very
different sort from a mere dimensionalized semantic taxonomy, one that
parallels phonological categories.
Recall that in Hanunóo, much like in American wine talk, there is a
distinct cultural (or sociocultural) domain in which hue–reflectivity–
moistness–freshness–intensity comprise a structure organized by analogous
perceptual oppositions. In Mursi, the pars pro tota or synecdochic projec-
tion from eight cattle-skin types into the entire universe of perceivable
hues is a culture-specific overlay on any typologically expectable octopar-
tite lexemic field. We might term it the “cattle-skin model” of what we call
the domain of “color” – though the Mursi people do not have a label for
the domain, analogously modeling each category of “color” by one of the
complex crisscrossing of several of these kinds of knowledge (as with Ms. C’s knowledge of her
School of Social Service Administration curricula). We return to this point in concluding this lecture.
Lecture : Knowledge
names or labels for the appearance of a bovine’s skin. In both cases, as in
the one presented below, one or more central social practices anchors the
use of these verbal expressions, which, we can see, emerge as forms for
communicating about the universe consistent with such social practice. In
effect, as expressions for denoting the “reality out there,” the lexemes
directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly have metapragmatic meaning
in respect of such social practices; they indexically presuppose such social
practices as common knowledge such that a use of a token of such a lexeme
brings into the context of communication precisely the ‑onomics, the
cultural concepts, the “cosmic knowledge” that thus is “in play” in making
a denotational text consequential for an interactional text, a social hap-
pening. That is, indeed, the significance of using one expression rather
than another in a pragmatic paradigm of contrasts.
Let’s continue with the cultural domain of “color,” but now with a full
appreciation of how people generate new or enriched cultural concepts via
the poetics of entextualization. Consider Figure ., a revealing piece by the
late William Safire, a Nixon Administration legal operative who became a
conservative political columnist for the New York Times (as well as a self-
appointed language expert in their Sunday magazine section). Safire was an
excellent writer, and we can recognize here a political tract, a rhetorical
appeal to the NYT reading public/electorate in the presidential election
when Ronald Reagan was running for re-election as president with his
running-mate, George H. W. Bush, against Democratic nominee Walter
Mondale (who had been President Carter’s vice-president from –)
and his vice-presidential running-mate, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, the first
woman ever on the national ticket of a major party.
In this article, Safire cleverly introduces the new concept of “political
coloration,” a play on the then fashionable and undoubtedly feminine
(pseudo-)expert register of sartorial and make-up advice, aiming to match a
person’s inherent coloring (skin tone, hair color, eye shade) and the clothes
that are presumably necessary to deal with that coloring, whether to
enhance or mask one’s “natural” coloration. As if in drag, Safire uses the
feminine register of “seasonal colors” – which are coded by non-basic color
lexemes and reserved in particular for the vice-presidential candidates
(Ferraro and Bush) – as a foil for the masculine register of primary political
colors: red and blue (here, emblematicized by the exemplary masculine
accessory: the necktie in Republican red or Democratic blue). So, let us
draw out Safire’s opposition between political coloration (basic primary
colors, real, essential, masculine) and seasonal coloration (non-primary
colors, feminine, chosen to enhance or mask natural coloration).
Knowledge
Figure . William Safire’s perspective on “political coloration.”
Chicago Tribune, October , , I.); William Safire, “The Candidate’s Hue and Dye.”
© William Safire. Reprinted by permission from the Author.
In macro-structure, the text is organized into a preamble and four main
sections, followed by a punchline about Safire and his own political
affiliation. All one needs to see is a couple of these densely metricalized
paragraphs to note the extraordinarily rich cross-domain set of analogies
metrically organized as the denotational-textual structure. Specifically,
note the use of an available and conventional chromatic subset of the basic
color categories for the candidates’ so-called “political coloration,” a Safire
metaphor that has stuck, by the way. (It was one source of emanation,
some years later, for the barely disguised roman à clef, Primary Colors,
about the Clinton campaign of , which uses the concept. “Red states”
and “blue states” in common American parlance is just the collective
ascription of the same trope, to which Safire continued to contribute as
the phrase took hold among political pundits.)
Lecture : Knowledge
In keeping with the analogy of having one’s sartorial colors done,
Safire ascribes to each of the four national candidates an inherent “polit-
ical coloration” along with the clothing hues and shades needed to
enhance and/or mask that coloration. (In Safire’s satire, the vice-
presidentials clearly need masking/transforming, and the presidentials
simply enhancement.) In the order of the article, observe the metrical
positioning of the Democratic Party’s nominees for vice-president
(Ferraro) and president (Mondale) at the discursive extremes; those of
the Republican Party are in the discursive center. Further, the vice-
presidential candidates are first and the presidential ones second. This
serial metrical structure thus culminates in a most-significant last: Mr.
Mondale as the punchline (see Figure .). Most importantly, this
scheme is balanced between autonomously existing schemata in the
cultural universe, such as that of the seasons and the organization of
the calendric year in conventional form (compare Vivaldi’s “Four
Seasons” concerti or any Renaissance art). As brought together with the
candidates’ colorimetrically correlated personalities, such schemata sug-
gest a pars pro tota trope: of birth and new development (Ferraro);
efflorescence and vigor (Bush); harvestable ripeness and fulfillment
(Reagan); and used-up desiccation, cold, and death (Mondale). As shown
in Figure ., there is a whole argument about which pair is “modu-
lated,” which “extreme,” with the obvious suggestion to the reader/
potential voter as to how to choose among “political colorations.” Most
amusing is the post-script, the coda, reporting that the color consultant
associated Mr. Safire with vice-president Bush: “That’ll be the day!” this
firm Nixon and Reagan guy observes, disassociating himself not just from
the candidate’s questionably masculine “rainbow pastels,” but from the
emasculating exercise of getting one’s colors “done” altogether.
The lesson here about so-called “color” should by now be clear in respect
of Saussurean concepts (intensional prototypes projected from grammar
into denotational domains) versus cultural concepts (intensions of a very
different kind). Namely, color as a Peircean quale (plural, qualia) is always
immersed in local cultural practices of indexicality, as we pointed out in
Lecture . Furthermore, qualia are frequently rhematized – that is, turned
into “natural” icons in culture – by circulating ethno-metapragmatic
discourse, and even – as we see with Safire’s piece – rhematizable by creating
entextualized structures of diagrammatic relations across not only percep-
tual and experienceable, but conceptual and hence thinkable, conceptual
schemata. In the specific case of the s United States, color was dia-
grammatically associable with the four – why four? – seasons of the
Knowledge
Figure . Text-metrical structure of William Safire’s “The Candidates’ Hue and Dye”
(in Figure .).
European conceptualization of the year cycle or, in pars pro tota the four
stages – as opposed to Shakespeare’s seven (As You Like It) – of the human
social life-cycle, and projected onto politics signaling as well the speaker/
author’s social relation to politics and political figures.
The question we now confront in this final lecture is how the very
denotational capacity of words and expressions in textual occasions of use
(as discussed in Lectures –) both reflects and contributes to a social
order (the focus of Lectures –), thus completing the dialectical arc or circle
of semiotic process as also the arc of this series of lectures, as announced in
our introduction.
Lecture : Knowledge
The Sociolinguistic Division of Denotational Labor
Language is, as we have demonstrated in our earlier lectures, the very
mediator of social relations. As we mutually align to “what has been / will
have been said” in co-constructed denotational text we wind up aligning to
each other, if always differentially based on sociological as well as denota-
tional divisions of labor. In all cases, the performative efficacy of language-
in-use has both presupposing and entailing indexical qualities.
So, we now ask: How do intensional prototypes – the presupposable
structure of categories of things in our universe of denotation – arise and
circulate with authoritative force? Who, to allude to Humpty Dumpty,
can make words mean just what they want them to? And what does that
“count as” as a social act? Such cultural conceptualizations, that is, ‑ono-
mic knowledge, is, I believe, also what Hilary Putnam () and Saul
Kripke () meant by denotational stereotype and what they were really
after in their so-called “causal theory of reference.”
In his famous paper, “The Meaning of Meaning,” Putnam () notes
that in order to correctly and successfully refer to something by the use of a
word or expression token, to accomplish a literal denotation, in other
words, both the Speaker and Addressee have indexically to presuppose: (a)
a grammar; (b) a grammatico-semantic system that communicates the
intensional prototypes associated with the word or expression qua
Saussurean signifier, up to a certain level of delicacy; and (c) the indexical
rules of use of who-should-say-what-using-what-form-under-which-condi-
tions-to-whom, such as lexical-register effects about which we have talked
extensively; and they must pay attention to (d) a sociolinguistic division of
denotational labor, as prototypically illustrated by the “expert–layperson”
dichotomy (in Putnam’s examples, involving the use of the terms gold
or water), wherein members of certain categories and groups associate
certain stereotypes (i.e., ascriptive intensions) about the denotata grouped
into categories or classes (viz. gold, water) as a function of their mode
of life within a community of denotational practice. We have been
calling such denotational stereotypes cultural concepts, and they are pre-
cisely what are at issue in intensions cued by words and expressions in
denotational text that cannot be captured by the Saussurean approach
to intensionality.
As Safire’s satire on color (and expertise) exemplifies, word-“types” and
fixed expression-“types” – what we call in the lexicographic trade lexemes –
are the bearers of cultural concepts, a.k.a. Putnamian stereotypes, which are
intensions about the categories of the universe of reference and predication
Sociolinguistic Division of Denotational Labor
that arise in-and-by language-in-use. That is to say, they arise in
entextualizations-in-context, they live in enregistered fractions of language
associable with certain social categories of people, and they obviously,
then, have certain ritual sites from which emanates – via a kind of implied
interdiscursivity that we understand because of the social positionality of
the user – the license that those who claim to use the lexemes have to use
them.
But Putnam stops short of providing anything in the way of an empir-
ical theory of stereotypy, in just saying that we presume upon (that is, we
indexically presuppose) a whole sociolinguistic division of denotational
labor by which certain authoritative baptisms influence the extensional
activity (the use of tokens of words and expressions to pick out referents)
on the part of various others in what we would call a community of
practice. But that is precisely the question we are interested in as social
scientists: Where does such presupposable authority come from? Is it
literally vested in some individual or individuals? (Recall the account of
baptism in Genesis!) Or are we dealing, in effect, with “social contract”
concepts of normativity? Are baptisms permanently authoritative, or only
with respect to some occasions of usage? Do we move from authority to
authority, as with “becoming educated,” where we index a shift of alle-
giance from one authoritative source to another? How is a structure of
authoritative baptism manifest in discursive phenomena? For example, are
textual structures necessary to the manifestation of stereotypes? How does
such a structure propagate in socio-spatio-temporal formations? How is
our use of words and expressions in making denotational text an overall
index of a social order of praxis (practice), that is, of processes of interper-
sonal social action through which social categories and groups come into
being, perdure, are transformed, disappear?
These are what Locke called “ideas.”
Note, in this respect, that this is precisely why Putnam and Kripke (in his own famous paper,
“Naming and Necessity” []) use the properties of systems of proper naming to show that
cultural concepts/stereotypes emerge from reintensionalization of baptismally authorized chains of
extensional usage. For Putnam and Kripke, the proper name names an object such that every token
of usage of that linguistic form denotes that object forevermore (what they call rigid designation).
What’s interesting, of course, and ultimately limiting about their proper name model is that to get to
symbols in the Peircean sense, we cannot merely talk about the conventional way in which one goes
about referring to particulars like using a proper name; rather, we have to talk about how when you
use any token of a proper symbolic form, it can denote any token of its category. The interesting
question, then, is what is the criterion of generalization (namely, from rigid [indexical] designator to
proper symbolic sign)? Putnam and Kripke suggest the rather problematic criterion of likeness
(problematic because it is circular). I return to this issue at the end of this lecture.
Lecture : Knowledge
As Whorf was the first, I believe, to hypothesize the general character of
specifically “cultural” concepts and to make a pregnant attempt to deal
with them, here I want to return to Whorf to answer some of the above
questions, essaying a constructive account of where Putnamian “stereo-
types” – as designated in Putnam’s philosophical discourse – cued by
words and expressions come from. To do so, we will recount with
Whorf a complex story about “time” as a Standard Average European
(SAE) dimension or characteristic property of “reality.”
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: The Case of “Time”
The key innovative Whorfian idea is that cultural concepts are emergent
in, or as we would now say, are generated from, particular interactionally
based conditions of subjective “misrecognition” (Bourdieu , :
and passim) involving both language-as-structure (grammar) and language-
structure-in-use (text). To be sure, the whole post-Lockean tradition of the
“natural philosophy” of ideas – Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s idéologie of
– – has tried to understand why socio-historically specific “wacky”
ideas, what many have called “ideological” ones, seem to emerge and bias
human thinking as it goes on in specific socio-historical groups. In an end-
run around the phenomenon, this tradition has again and again tried to
limn the boundaries of that relationship by looking into and sometimes
purportedly beyond languages to the plane of (as we now say) any “innate-
ness” of ideas “behind/before” language itself.
Whorf’s struggle with this issue is not, after all, unlike the struggle of all
those currently dubious of the scientistic juggernaut in the human sciences
in matters of mind-and-brain. In our times, it is fueled by the problematic
intersection of cognitivism, in the penumbral shadow of the currently
ascended master Chomsky and his autonomous-syntactic model of the
asocial mind – and of biogenetic reductionism – in the biologized compu-
tational image of “hard-wiring.” So, I want to point out that there is a
contemporary non-disinterest in rescuing Whorf’s insights from almost fifty
years of ridicule by the uncomprehending in linguistics, anthropology,
psychology, and related fields; there is more than quaint historical revision-
ism involved in reworking them in a more precise and contemporary
analytic language. Further, doing so allows us to understand his early-
model conceptual breakthrough that, even in its own historical context,
can now be retrospectively seen as a special case of a more general phenom-
enon, which we can recognize as culture-dependent conceptualization, in
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: “Time”
which we are interested as anthropologists (and as reflexively reflective
people with socioculturally saturated minds).
As we saw in Lecture , Whorf’s lines of investigating specifically
“cultural” or socio-historically emergent concepts involved asking:
(a) whether or not such cultural concepts exist in addition to, or in
contradistinction to, the grammatico-semantic and grammatico-
pragmatic categories through which we “calibrate” linguistic structures?
(b) if they exist as a distinct realm of default cognition effective as people
conceptualize or model and “rationally” act in the universe, where do
they come from?
(c) what, in particular, might be the role of denotational structure – or
the partial and “phenotypically” biased reflexive understanding of deno-
tational structure – in the coming-into-being and growth of cultural
conceptualizations?
In this method, Whorf was perhaps the first modern linguist clearly to go
beyond merely remarking on the seemingly irresolvable problem here. He
posed specifically a model of the space of agentive social consciousness –
“subjectivity,” in essence – where there is a dialectical coming together of,
on the one hand, the native language user’s misrecognition of a demon-
strably unconscious or tacit language structure with, on the other hand, the
misrecognition of empirical reality that emerges in-and-by the conven-
tional use of language itself to denote (refer to and predicate about) that
empirical reality through the clunky digital (not analogue) syntax and
morphology that concatenates intensional prototypes as extensionalizable
category-anchors.
The first type of misrecognition, of language structure itself, is equiva-
lent to the “analogical pressures” or forces that are generated among the
expressions of any language. These analogical relations come into being as
a function of the way those expressions are analyzable in terms of particular
Note that Boas and Bloomfield were both concerned with the socio-historically and linguistically
specific projective concepts that people seemed to have about “reality” that emerged as a kind of mirage
from the morphological categories of surface lexical form. Having remarked on this “error” introduced
into human perceptually focused cognition, they simply use this fact as a way of de-legitimating any
“native-speaker” testimony on the meanings, i.e., denotational range, of the words and expressions of
their language. The lesson was, only the linguists, with their basis in wide-ranging typological
comparison of systems of structure, and their view of structure based in distributional techniques –
for which, in Bloomfield’s case, Saussure had given the theoretical basis – could begin to say what
words and expressions denoted, because the linguists’ view of grammatical categories was unclouded by
the projective tendencies from (mere) surface morphology that native speakers demonstrate.
Lecture : Knowledge
[[[spin-]Vtr+p.p.] [lime+[stone-]N]N]N
i.e., a taxonomically specific kind of ‘stone,’
treated in some way
Figure . Constituent structure of the English noun phrase spun limestone.
grammatical-categorial structures in the grammar of the language but are
distinct from those structures. Within historical linguistics, long a topic of
embarrassment to Neogrammarian (and generativist) theorizing – where
the impersonal forces of langue or “competence” are supposed to operate in
“regular” systemic change – so-called analogic change (i.e., the analogical
alignments of language forms) constitutes the diachronic proof of the
synchronic existence of such pressures, as do so-called folk etymologies,
so-called contaminations and blends. The synchronic pressures that give
rise to these kinds of diachronic effects paradoxically change language
forms by strengthening structure-based ties of certain linguistic forms to
certain others. It has been only after World War II (of course, long after
Whorf’s death) that such pressures and their diachronic outcomes have
received any systematizing attention in the post-Saussurean era (most
notably by Jerzy Kuryłowicz and Witold Manczak).
This is the force of Whorf’s focus on frequently misunderstood exam-
ples from his fire-insurance inspector’s experience. In that job, he investi-
gated people’s default “rationality” in practical situations, where words-for-
things, that is, denoting expressions of various sorts, seem to animate
people not by their internal grammatical construction plus rules of con-
catenation – the logician’s (and linguist’s, alas) ideal and dream of com-
putability – but by the grammatical analogies of surface “fashions of
speaking” about so-called “reality.” If something is called “spun lime-
stone,” then, by golly, it ought to have the basic inflammable properties of
“stone,” as we would analogously reason from the full and basic attributive
construction, Adjective + Nominal head of a Determiner Phrase (see
Figure .).
Analogy, a diagrammatic iconic relationship among forms, is something
that is fundamental to all cultural semiosis, as shown in Figure .. The
kinds of analogy that confounded the Neogrammarians in trying to give an
historical account of changes in linguistic structures and upon which
Whorf concentrates is type (c) in Figure .. But discourse is, to be sure,
shot through with such processes and structures, as can be seen in the two
other places where analogy, that is, diagrammatic iconicity, reigns.
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: “Time”
“Analogic” relationships
(a) In entextualizations, both denotational and interactional:
spring : summer : autumn : winter :: green : red : yellow : blue (Safire 1984)
Initiator : Respondent :: lower : higher :: griot : noble :: active : passive :: wind : stone (Irvine 1974)
(b) In Saussurean planes of semiotic structure, paradigmatic proportionality:
II: “regular” and “productive” proportions of differential signifier (form) and differential
signified (meaning); (all grammars leak)
I: simultaneously operative distinctive-feature dimensions of proportionality of phonological
segments (Jakobson [1932]1971)
III: simultaneously cued grammatical-categorial dimensions of proportionality of meaning
differences
(c) In the surface (lexically expressed) forms of denotational code, a force of attraction of one form
by another:
historically, reshaping of forms in the image of others (generally, “irregular” forms
becoming more “regular”)
English plurals: brother : brethr-en > brother : brother-s [brethr-en becoming a
meaning-narrowed form];
syllabus- + Pl > syllab-i [cf. alumn(-)us : alumn(-)i]
in the language community, imposing the form—meaning relationship of one surface form
on another
“Folk etymologies,” e.g., sparrow-grass (asparagus), Welsh rarebit (Welsh rabbit)
Figure . Analogy as a diagrammatic iconic relationship among forms.
The second type of misrecognition Whorf posits is that of “reality” itself,
though here the misrecognition is a function of the representational role of
discourse. Such misrecognition is possible to the extent that language users
presume that there is a transparency of coding of “reality” in specific textual
formulae, that is, “fashions of speaking” for Whorf. Such fashions of
speaking are, of course, conventional in a community of users as the means
to describe that “reality” to which they must adjust their aggregate selves in
practical situations of social action. Whorf posits an “as if” notion of
reasoning about reality in such practical situations: People’s misrecognition
of “reality” is as if they were using language expressions of their “fashions of
speaking” in an inferential discourse about the “reality” they rationally
adjust to. Again, in this second realm – long after Whorf – we now have a
more highly theorized understanding of the modes of coherence of dis-
course, among which are the structured textual coherences of denotational
Lecture : Knowledge
text constituted by words and expressions of a language, their patterns of
parallelism, repetition, topicalization and topic-maintenance, et cetera. And
we have a developed understanding of how such intendedly descriptive or
denotational entextualizations are anchored to their contexts, and thus their
referents and predicated states of affairs, by elaborate indexical systems in
every language. We will see more of this later, as we generalize on Whorf’s
insights.
Bringing these two types of misrecognition together, we see that people’s
consciousness of “reality” is actually, for Whorf, a kind of projective construc-
tion of that “reality,” which operates in a dialectical fashion making possible
the mutual confirmation of one misrecognition by the other. Whorf is
interested in fashions of speaking that conventionally constitute the
metapragmatic descriptors of practical situations of social action, that is, in
how one describes the very objects and attributes in terms of which we cognize
practical social action. He claims that subjectivity in effect analyzes such
descriptors in terms of the meaning-categories that analogical pressures on
them suggest, and in dialectical turn, the descriptors evolve and grow consis-
tent with those categorizations as a function of those analogical pressures.
Fashions of speaking are thus generative over time; they solidify and
achieve a kind of discursive consistency, not unlike philosophers’ “mean-
ing postulates” or “theories of the world” or anthropologists’ “world-views”
or “Weltanschauungen.” The “concepts” in terms of which such consistent
discourses can be understood are abstract intensionalizations of things and
states of affairs, to be sure. But they are, as we now know, the products of
an essentially practice-based use of language as much as of language
structure as such. Whorf was saying that this obviously intersubjective
space hosts what we would call today “culture-specific” and “constructive”
concepts – concepts that are specific to the way that a particular language
structure lies behind the situated social practice of making denotational
text-in-context. Whenever we think rationally about the world, we think
in discursively manifest language, words and expressions, or in a develop-
ment, a “relay” of language (in Roland Barthes’s terms). Discursively
deployed denotational language becomes a tool of thought in this way,
since we can work out the consistencies of discourse under various kinds of
regimentations (“inferential,” “tropic,” etc.) as the instrumentality by
which we work out the consistencies of analogies already implicit in
language structure; or, alternatively, by which we solidify newly minted
meaning relations among forms, even grammatical forms, from the ways
that words and expressions about the world can be made to have a
coherence under such-and-such conditions.
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: “Time”
What is key for us, here, is that cultural concepts emerge in and to
natives’ cognition in the sociocultural practice of using textualized lan-
guage – discourse, as we find it on the wing – according to the ideological
interests in representing “reality” and as a function of misrecognizing
structural intuitions that native users of language everywhere manifest.
These concepts are no less abstract than Saussurean sense-concepts associ-
ated with the facts of grammatical-categorial structure generally unavail-
able to native consciousness. However, they are specific to certain
intersections of natives’ “analogical” appreciation of language structure as
this makes language-use-in-context – text, in short – seem to be “trans-
parent” to the “reality” that it seems to denote.
From the universalizing linguist’s or cognitivist’s perspective, especially
the reductive scientistic one, these ideas are just wacky. Their meaning, we
have been suggesting, dialectically emerges from verbal practice in context
as much as from language structure; they are at variance both with
linguistic structure grounded in comparative formalism, and with what
an empirical-scientific (to the extent that there might be a “true”-ish model
of anything) understanding of the denoted phenomena might be. They are
(Putnamian) stereotypes about denotable phenomena that are associable
with the use of words and expressions to denote those phenomena; they
are ideas invoked in-and-by the use of certain words and expressions in
referring to things and in predicating states of affairs about them, but not
in the normal Saussurean sense “coded” in the grammatical structures of
the language used. Indeed, these stereotypes, or concepts, Whorf points
out, are generally at variance with the conceptual ontology implied by the
Saussurean sense categories of a particular language’s distributional struc-
ture. They depend, even more, on patterns of actual denotational language
use (“fashions of speaking”) to calibrate cognition to an experienced
universe and to the psychosemiotic process of associating those experiences
with particular pieces of cognizable language structure, for example,
chunks of lexical form such as word stems, affixes, et cetera, which native
users of language seem to feel directly code aspects of “reality.”
Whorf works out his understanding of such cultural concepts by recon-
sidering “time” as a cultural concept of “Standard Average European
(SAE)” languages such as our own. Whorf himself lived and worked
against a scientific backdrop of Bloomfieldianism in American linguistics,
Bloomfield and followers were as well behaviorists, with no tolerance for a concept of “mind.”
“Meaning” in language became merely the probabilistic and difficult correlation of the occurrence
of grammatical forms directly or mediately, i.e., through other grammatical forms, with their
Lecture : Knowledge
named for the then-ascending master who believed in the ultimate reduc-
ibility of descriptions of the non-human universe to absolute physical
momentum of matter, and of the human universe, mind, to (autonomous)
grammatical form. In particular, the historical circumstance seems to have
been for Whorf the backdrop of somewhat puerile Bloomfieldian obiter
dicta professing physicalism and behaviorism and, indeed, Bloomfield’s
faith in the essential correctness of pre-relativistic Newtonian notions of
absolute space-time. As we see, though Whorf could contrast linguistic
categories of English and Hopi so as to bring out the fact that English is a
“tense” language, and Hopi is not, he now wanted to reply to reductive
physicalists by asking: What is a “tense” language? That is, what might be
directly and categorically coded in the distinction between, say, “past
tense” and “present tense”? Is it a direct categorial coding of some
etically-available stuff divisible into “past” and “present” and “future”? Is
surrounding physical – including neurochemical – contexts. Hence, such corollary issues arise for
Bloomfield as whether or not a child’s predication of its own hunger (“I’m hungry!”) when it is clearly
well fed and not desirous of going to sleep has a “meaning” like the otherwise same predication by a
Depression-era homeless person who has not eaten for some time; the former utterance clearly occurs
in the face of probabilities to the contrary that a physicalist would want to be able to rely on to give the
expression’s “meaning.” With an example like this in focus, we should not lose sight of the point that
we are dealing with what would come to be seen as communicative events in which through language
use itself, particular and conventional interpersonal social actions take place, rather beside the point
being the strict “truth” or “falsity” of any representational statements being coded in whole or in part
by grammatically conforming expressions. Such “performativity” of utterance-in-context would not,
of course, be clearly discerned and at least preliminarily analyzed until Austin (). Yet, ironically,
Bloomfield’s unsophisticated behaviorist theory of “meaning” – cf. also Malinowski’s (, )
even less sophisticated and racist version – ought, of a right, not try merely to focus on extensional
meaning of utterances and assume this can simply be intensionalized to yield senses (signifiés) of
grammatical units (signifiants). It ought to rest on the analysis of just such “pragmatic” uses of
language-in-social-context as these denotationally problematic ones if it takes verbally mediated
cause-and-effect interpersonal relations as its centerpiece.
Though remarks about this are distributed through his entire corpus, Bloomfield’s most concise
professio fide is his Presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America, “Language or
Ideas?” published originally in the journal Language in and reprinted in Hockett :–,
:–. Though Bloomfield himself had long since recognized the irrelevance to the practice
of linguistics of such penumbral beliefs and their expression in obiter dicta about psychology, about
metaphysics, et cetera, Bloomfield’s views were obviously () the cause of the great divide, even
antipathy, between European and American structuralists of the next generation, () the litmus test
for acceptability of linguists in America in the next generation’s professional structure centered on
the LSA, and, above all else, () they indeed became the real focus of critical antipathy of the
Chomskyites – not, note, distributionally based autonomous structuralism as such, within which the
original version of Chomsky’s “transformational” grammar and its various developments easily fit (cf.
also the work of Zellig Harris, Chomsky’s sponsor). And in turn, it is Chomsky’s own set of
penumbral obiter dicta in his various writings that in our own times have become the litmus tests of
true membership in the professional networks of otherwise undefinable “generativist” linguistics or
“linguistic ‘theory’.” The irony is too palpable.
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: “Time”
it a stuff like our physical, or as Whorf suggests, really folk-metaphysical,
conceptualization of the timeline, a distinct, one-dimensional, infinitely
divisible, and cardinally measurable order of empirical reality? Is that what
people are doing in using a grammatical “tense” form, just a clumsy and
less quantitative indication of where on this physical timeline an event
happened or is happening or will happen?
Probing deeper into the easy comparativism of Boasian (or Bloomfieldian)
relativism of structural contrast and structural calibration, Whorf interro-
gates the very nature of “time” in the SAE folk-metaphysics by showing that
SAE-“time” is plausibly to be modeled as an example of a cultural concept in
the sense noted above; and, further, that the folk-misrecognition of the
nature of their “tense” categories in SAE languages such as English is driven
by purely folk-metaphysical beliefs extraneous to the nature of “tense” as an
indexical category, but expectable within the whole cultural order of SAE
fashions of speaking about social practices of event calibration (on which, as
Max Weber, among others, long ago pointed out, capitalism and related
matters depend).
Consider, then, the disjunction Whorf constructs between the gram-
matical category of “tense” and the SAE folk-grammatical understanding
of it as a “time”-coding. Tense is an indexical category, each discursive
instance of which points to (presupposes) another event – call it the
calibrating event – in relative ordering to which some denoted event or
state of affairs is predicated; the orderings are sequential and non-
sequential, the non-sequential implying at least partial overlap or simulta-
neity. When the calibrating event is subsequent to the predicated event, we
communicate a so-called past event; in other systems, when the predicated
event is subsequent to the calibrating one, we communicate a so-called
future event. In the default instance, the calibrating event is presupposed
to be the event in which the token is communicated, though some highly
developed tense systems use derived, secondary calibrational events as well.
“Tense” is “about” event-simultaneity versus event-sequentiality in the
sense that this is what comparative structural analysis of languages reveals
to be the underlying Saussurean etic-framework in terms of which regu-
larities of particular systems can be recognized.
In the universe of eventhood, tense discursively anchors each event or
state of affairs predicated in using a particular finite-clause structure to the
event of communication itself (or its determinate surrogate), and hence
helps to create an orderly representation of a textually manifest world
tethered to the primordial and universally available calibrating event, the
instance of communication itself. Whorf observes, in passing, that the
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phenomenological experience of the realm that tense is, in this sense,
“about” is in the feeling of duration and the intuitive feeling of things
getting later; this captures the event (interval) nature of all predicables and
the inherently relative seriality of all subjective consciousness of those
intervals.
But though the grammatical category of tense may have nothing inher-
ently to do with measurable clock-time, it is this, as Whorf would put it,
folk-metaphysical content that is regularly understood by SAEs to be the
very dimension or variable of the context of use to which the category
points. And not just a qualitative and relativistic (ordinally characterizable)
division into a realm of “pastness,” of “futurity,” and, residually, of
“presentness,” but an SAE understanding of precisely measurable cardinal
points along a timeline. Where and how does this sense emerge of the
transparency of the tense-indexical category to physical time-as-measured,
Whorf asks. His analysis is, on the one hand, constructive and, on the
other, historical, as must be the case with any dialectical fact.
Constructively, Whorf starts with the most characteristic way that SAE
physical time is manifested in language: with measure phrases, noun
phrases denoting “how much” time. These go together with the histori-
cally evolved systems of time-reckoning in the institutional framework of
which we calibrate and adjust all social activity, revolutionized by the
technology of the clock in fourteenth-century Europe. The spring-
mechanism clock was invented somewhere near the Rhine Valley by
; before that, even sundials were subject to all kinds of perturbation
in respect of the mensuration of intervals of duration and specific points of
possible social calibration, like “meet me at such-and-such place at thus-
and-so time.” (Note as well that observations of “natural” cyclicity have as
a consequence moved from being primordial – e.g., the “day” as a sun-
cycle on its own unique terms – to being cardinal measures – e.g., the
“day” as -hours’ measurable duration, measurable from any arbitrary
event-point.) Measure phrases for SAE clock-derived “time” have become
part of a larger “fashion of speaking” about culturally presumed physical
dimensionalities of the universe of experience that, Whorf proposes, emerge
in the space constituted by the pressures of grammatical analogy and the
social practices of measurement with clocks and other paraphernalia of
culture refashioned in the image of clock-time.
First, to consider the grammatical analogy, notice the facts Whorf
sketches in English (Figure .). A measure phrase like three minutes in
the realm of time is analogous to a measure phrase like three centimeters in
the realm of linear space. In general, these measure phrases have the
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: “Time”
[three [minute- <of>] + (se., ‘<time>’ ) ‘mass’-noun measure phrase
analogous to
[three [centimeter- <of>] + s <space-> ] ‘mass’-noun measure phrase
in the more general analogical paradigm where:
founded form:
[three [teaspoon - <of>] + s <sugar->] ‘mass’ -noun measure phrase
cf. [three sugar + s] standardized ‘count’-noun measure rel. to
context
[three teaspoon + s of sugar] surface form
cf. [three teaspoon + s ([of sugar]) measure phrase /material composition
on the analogical base of:
founding form:
[three statue + s ([of wood])] material composition
[nine event + s ([of reference])] instrumentality
[five matter + s ([of [(some) delicacy]])] manner
[seven consequence + s ([of truth])] origin
[Two gentlemen ([of Verona])] provenance/provenience
Measure phrases of ‘time’ are, in fact, historically derived from measure phrases for
mechanism-internal distance (‘space’), since the invention of clocks, e.g.,
L. (pars) minuta ‘1/60th part of a degree of angular distance’ … > … E. minute
L. (pars minuta) secunda ‘1/60th of a pars minuta [of angular distance]’ … > … E. second
Figure . Analogies of measure phrases in English.
grammatical properties of other measure phrases involving so-called “mass”
nouns, where, to use a numeral indicator of extensiveness, a special
measuring quantum, a unitization, must be used in the form of a
(surface-structure) plural-bearing “count” noun, not unlike so-called
numeral classifiers in measure phrases in many languages of the world.
Notice that the great category of “count” nouns can be directly pluralized
with a numeral, and that any English noun communicates a “mass” or
“count” (Saussurean) sense depending on which type of measure phrase it
is used in. Thus note three teaspoons of sugar – the “stuff” or “substance”
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of sugar, coded with a mass noun, unitized into teaspoon-sized units –
versus three sugars – three standard measures-of-(count-noun)-sugar,
whichever those happen to be in the context for which used, or three
(structural or other realm) types of sugar. So, Whorf is showing that the
parallelism of the words minutes or centimeters serves as semantico-
grammatical unitization, count nouns that are used in measure phrases
just like teaspoons (or teaspoonfuls); each such unitization codes a cultur-
ally conventional bounded region or shape or structure of dimensionalities
within a topography of qualia.
Now, consider the grammatical analogy more centrally. As we would
now say in a more precise consideration of the analogical pressures on
measure phrases, the so-called founding forms, the ones that here have
exactly the same distribution of surface lexical forms but are organized
according to a different, and much more general, semantic projectivity, are
noun phrases of material composition (three statues of wood), of instru-
mentality (nine events of reference), of manner (five matters of some
delicacy), of origin (seven consequences of truth), or provenance/prove-
nience (Two Gentlemen of Verona), and ultimately the general-purpose
prepositional genitive or surface-possessive that mixes the coding of seman-
tic agency and patienthood as well (three paintings of Rembrandt –
executed by him or depicting him?, eight figurines of Jackie O – from her
collection or depicting her?, etc.). In this much larger and more freely
formed set, both “mass” and “count” nouns can occur after the preposition
of; the communicated relationship between the two lexical nouns (e.g.,
painting- and Rembrandt-) has multiple semantico-grammatical possibil-
ities and, most importantly, in such phrases both lexical nouns bear their
full and autonomous properties as grammatical-categorial classes, types of
noun-codings. Hence, Whorf notes, the semantico-grammatical composi-
tionality of the founding form-type suggests itself as structuring the
measure phrase construction as well; in short, people intuitively “read”
the measure phrase as a kind of noun phrase of suggested material compo-
sition – spoonful-s, centimeter-s, and minute-s being understood as “count”
entities that are “substanceless forms” and sugar-, length-, and time- being
understood as “mass” entities that are “formless substances” given “form,”
that is, dimensionalized boundedness in a quality-space, by such now-
naturalized denotata as spoonfuls, centimeters, and minutes. In so doing,
such denotata seemingly take on the concrete projectivity of tables and
chairs. (Folk-realism, in Whorf’s account, always awaits its nominalist
critique, such as have been forthcoming in the Lockean tradition from
Bentham to Korzybski and beyond.)
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: “Time”
Figure . Clock face as iconic indexical of the spatialization of “time.”
Free for commercial use, DMCA; www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-eznxf.
So, the measure phrase applying to “time” is armed with its analogical
semantic analysis spread from the more freely formed of-constructions via
measure phrases for spatial experiences. Why “space”? As is clear from looking
at the history of the clock in SAE-speaking places, the revolution in time was
not merely the existence of the technology but, more particularly, the creation
of a metapragmatic terminology through which was enabled the calibration of
one positioning of the pieces of a clock – pointers as figures against dials as
ground, for example – with another position in a timepiece, as well as of one
time piece with another, creating an institutionalized set of practices of
representation (on this, see, e.g., Thompson ; Le Goff ; Dohrn-
van Rossum ) (Figure .).
It is this that gradually made the universe of time-reckoning practice an
encompassing one as well. The universe that is so reckoned seems to be an
autonomous one, available to consciousness through the iconic-indexical
representation that the spatial configuration of the representational devices
have with the – dare we say? – “temporal” configuration of the now-
singled-out represented dimension or quality of what we are experiencing
as individuals now among our fellow time-reckoners, the durational sense
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DEICTIC CATEGORY: Tense*
Indexes context with respect to
[metaphysical content]
ANALOGICAL PROCESSES IN:
Measure phrases as
‘fashions of speaking’
get baptismal describe/represent
validity from
AUTHORIZING PRACTICE:
Interval MENSURATION by clocks,
charts, etc. that free relative
placement of events from
indexical intelligibility
* calibrates validity-frame of denoted state of affairs with
respect to reference event, as: ‘sequential’ vs.‘non-sequential
[=‘simultaneous’]. Default reference-event = event of
communication.
Figure . Whorf’s Messrs./Mmes.’ Everybody on “time.”
of getting later. In fact, every count noun denoting a unit of “time”
originated in the technology of spatial measurement in the revolution in
timepieces – think of English minute- or second- – or was a qualitative
term, like Latin hora (borrowed from Greek) that was pressed into service
in the expansion of this fashion of speaking so as to become a measure unit
in its proper hierarchy of divisions (see, e.g., Landes ; Kula ;
Dohrn-van Rossum ).
So, here is what Whorf happened upon, in the best sense of the “Eureka!”
of scientific discovery (see Figure .): a social practice of humans
Whorf on Emergent Cultural Concepts: “Time”
recognizable by its iconically–indexically representational entextualization
(textual structure, no matter in physical form) – a mechanism which pictures
the very realm of which it is a consequential part: the circular, cyclic motion
of the moon, sun, and stars as earth’s heaven. The metapragmatic descriptors
for describing that iconic-indexical textual structure become the descriptors
for what the textual structure represents. Thus, the expressions for measur-
ing “space” in the timepiece microcosm analogically become expressions for
measuring “time” in the macrocosm of the experiential universe and the
cosmic beyond. But the expressions of measure for “space” are already
locked into a pervasive analogical field as a fashion of speaking directly from
the grammatical structure of modified noun phrases, from which the mea-
sure of “space” becomes the measure of a stuff with all the properties of other
“mass” nouns.
So, setting aside the question of whether or not this folk-metaphysical
understanding of “time” is “scientifically correct” – which is of no conse-
quence in the instance – Whorf asserts that it is a folk-metaphysical
emergence. (If it is correct then Europe, or “The West,” as it is called,
has contributed to the furtherance of humanity’s fitness-to-environment
by it, just as America has contributed bourbon or Liederkranz cheese or
time-share condominiums to the whole world for its irreversible better-
ment.) That is, “time” is a concept projected onto the universe from a
coming together of an historical condition of social and technological
practice, for which a certain metapragmatic discourse comes into being,
with an historical condition of language structure.
By itself, as Whorf makes abundantly clear, the social practice shared
among the membership of a group using calibrational clocks is not sufficient
to produce the cultural concept of “time.” Nor is having measure phrases as
a grammatically provided-for type of surface expression of language, used for
denoting extents or quantities. It is crucially the specific entextualization
structure as indexical icon of its represented realm, together with the
language-generated analogical pressure on the folk-semantic “reading” of
the lexical categories that occur in the metapragmatic expressions used
to describe that practice, that yield the beginnings of the SAE “time”
concept.
There are different degrees of abstractness, as shown in the way cultural
concepts manifest in relation to contexts from which they emerge. Some
are more directly physical, as in the indexical icon of states of the cosmos
that is clock-time-reckoning; some are more directly entextualized as
elaborate contextual structures, as in William Safire’s brilliant “coloration”
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of politics in discussed above. And some, as we see below in
discussing Thai cultural concepts of “edibility,” are more abstractly related
to indexically anchored social practice. So how, in the more general
consideration of what Whorf happened upon, can we see how cultural
concepts vary in the way that similar dialectical spaces are generated, but
nevertheless seem to bring together parallel factors? It is to this question we
concertedly turn below.
Metalevel Constructivity and Thai Edibility Concepts
How abstract or implicit are structures of ‑onomic knowledge that seem to
be indexically invoked each time we use a particular word or expression in
relation to other words and expressions to make denotational text? Here,
the study of the “edibility” (vs. “inedibility” or non-“edibility,” which are
two different things) of animal life for Thai villagers is of interest to us,
because here is a revealing example of the difference between structures of
lexically explicit ‑onomization and actual cultural conceptualization, which
appeared some years back in one of Stanley Tambiah’s ([])
contributions to the long-running, though in my opinion ill-conceived,
“debate” on other peoples’ rationality-in-classification by cultural con-
cepts. Tambiah described the apparent – practically evidenced and ver-
balizable – beliefs of Thai villagers about differences of “edibility” of the
universe of lexically namable faunal types. So, each time a particular
faunal nominal expression is used in discourse, from among an elaborately
taxonomized set of such, such beliefs are, of course, potentially cued as
The debate – which recalls the perennial “(pre-cultural) rationality” versus “culture” debates that
flare up every time social anthropologists and philosophers rediscover the problematic question of
mind-in-society – is framed in precisely the same terms as the question of the universality versus
“cultural relativity” of various aspects of linguistic form and function, to wit, the universality versus
“cultural relativity” of “rationality,” of “moral sentiment,” et cetera. Are every culture’s classifications
of the phenomena of the experienceable world “rational” in some sense? In modern times, within
structural-functional and structural anthropological traditions, this formulation is most derived from
the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and some famous, and even infamous, contributions to it have
involved anthropologists investigating systems of “totemism,” of “magic” and “witchcraft,” among
other things, and approaches to “apparently irrational beliefs” among “primitive” peoples. Note,
among others, the lines of philosophical and anthropological worry in the twentieth century from
Franz Boas and Lévy-Bruhl on through to Evans-Pritchard, Marshall Sahlins, and Gananath
Obeyesekere. Notable way stations, in terms of which Tambiah’s involvement can be construed,
include Leach ; Lévi-Strauss ; Douglas ; Wilson ; Hollis and Lukes ;
Tambiah :–.
Metalevel Constructivity & Thai Edibility
Figure . Edibility ascriptions of domesticated and forest animals among
Thai villagers.
Adapted from S. J. Tambiah, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit,” Ethnology Vol. ,
No. (), Table , p. . Copyright © , University of Pittsburgh, reprinted with
permission.
contextually relevant cultural concepts about the named fauna (in
Putnamian terms, differentially indexed as stereotyped cultural beliefs).
The problem for us in a curious way is that local ascriptions of edibility –
a projected “property,” to be sure, predicable as true or false of every type of
named creature in Thai villagers’ belief – seem to be askew from two points
of view.
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On the one hand, as shown in Figure ., when we construct careful
taxonomies of types of animals, according to the Thai villagers’ own
verbalizable “---” relationship, this categorial structure bears
no transparently direct relationship to the ascribed property of “edibility.”
If such a property is shared stereotypic knowledge, it is communicated
indexically, constituting in this way – but not as a taxonomic principle of
discourse coherence – much of the direct as well as the figurative discursive
rationality of text-making use of animal names (in unproblematically
smooth discursive interaction focused on human relations to potential
faunal foodstuffs, for example). Among non-human ‘creatures’ (tua) and
in particular ‘animals’ (sad), some ‘domesticated animals’ (sad baan) are
‘edible’ and some, not; some forest animals (sad paa) are edible and others
not. Similarly, for ‘water animals’ (sad naam). On the other hand, “edibility”
proscriptions, restrictions, preferences, or prescriptions have little “natural”
basis beyond local cultural beliefs. For example, there seems not to be a
relation to what is in some physical sense “available” easily, or biochemically
“harmful,” or explicable by any of the myriad Western a priori optimizations
or minimax calculi that inform various crypto-rationally-reductive theories
like per capita protein capture, or energy expenditure, and so on as the
“really real” meaning of the only apparently (mystified) cultural concept of
“edibility.”
As Tambiah’s data show (see Figure .), the concept of “edibility” is a
degree concept that peaks in the Goldilocksesque “juuuust right” middle
of an abstract cultural structure of homologies across inhabitable and indexi-
cally anchored role-relations with fauna and others. This homology draws
together stereotypically conceptualized animal habitat and stereotypic
animal behavior with two other systematizations of inhabitable domains
of Thai village life. One is kinship, articulated in terms of ascriptively
legitimated versus performatively legitimatable marriageable persons in an
exogamous, though cognatic, kinship universe. The other, anchored to a
local, house-centered understanding of concentric social and cosmic
spaces, is the stereotypic spatial perquisites of humans of various classifi-
catory categories.
“Edibility,” as an implicitly communicated concept Thai villagers have
about nameable fauna, thus turns out to be: () indexically anchored in the
cosmos via a point of connection in this world; () the reflex in animal-
type ascriptive projections of a more abstract structure of conceptual
relations across a number of domains; and () a degree concept, much
like “incest” and other seriously relational matters, of which “edibility”
appears to be one. Whatever it seems to those who invoke the concept,
Figure . Parallelism across rules of human exogamy, rules of human domestic access, and rules of edibility of animals among Thai villagers.
Adapted from S. J. Tambiah, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit,” Ethnology Vol. , No. (), Table , p. . Copyright © , University
of Pittsburgh, reprinted with permission.
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“edibility” is clearly not merely a property to be projected as inherent in
objects themselves – not a property of the individuable denotata of a
lexicon of folk-scientific fauna terms. And whatever taxonomy or other
kind of semantic structure that can be induced on the set of such terms,
these orderings are independent of this important – and, for fauna,
ubiquitous – cultural concept. Let us elaborate a bit.
As to (), indexical anchoring: this cultural concept of “edibility” is
dependent upon a radial from a center point. This
becomes apparent in the locally structured conceptualization of zones of a
village microcosm-to-macrocosm, organized first around the internal struc-
ture of the living quarters of the house of a head of household and then,
second, includes the various corresponding locations of the house’s under-
croft. Then, it includes the village of several houses; then, it includes its
surrounding land for flooded rice cultivation; then, it includes its surround
in the (uncleared) forest; and then, it notes what may lie beyond. The
stereotypic house itself, as shown in Figure . (top), is, in effect, linearly
zoned starting from the point on the northeast corner of the sleeping room
where the Buddha’s statue and ritual altar connect the house – and its head
of household – to the cosmic realm. The line moves next to the west of
that origo or anchoring point, and then to the south out to the entrance
platform, then below to the undercroft (see Figure . – bottom),
duplicating the arrangement, then outside and into the macrocosm of
the village and then beyond to other villages, et cetera.
Privileges of access to these zones are isomorphic with an egocentric
kinship structure centered on the stereotypic male head of household
(note, not on a marriageable child). Marriage and thus legitimated, non-
incestuous sexual relations for a young woman of such a household, and
ultimately a son-in-law’s access to the sleeping room (west side!), are
permissible, indeed stereotypically expected, in the mid-range of the
kinship classification in the homologue of Figure ..
() The abstract structure of analogies anchoring ascriptive “edibility” to
other kinds of experienced social relations follows in the realm of relations
of humans to animals. In fact, the implicit conceptual metaphor – “edi-
bility” (as ego’s comestible) is homologous to “(available) sexuality” (as
ego’s legitimate marriage object) – is, as we might expect, ritually literalized
as “figuration” and thus made actually experiential in cases where expiation
is necessary for an incestuous (too close) marriage in this cognatic system.
Both parties to a relatively more incestuous union have to “eat” from the
same “tortoise shell” (a pun on the older lexeme for vagina) in public, a
metaphor of the sexuality of “omnivorous” dogs, it is thought. Note how
Metalevel Constructivity & Thai Edibility
Figure . Plan of Thai villager’s elevated house and of its ground-level undercroft.
Adapted from S. J. Tambiah, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit,” Ethnology Vol. ,
No. (), figures –, pages , . Copyright © , University of Pittsburgh, reprinted with
permission.
Lecture : Knowledge
the couple indexically-iconically perform this public act of self-mortification
to overcome the taboo they have violated in marrying (Tambiah
[]:–, ).
It is to be expected, of course, that an abstract concept that is culturally
normative is thus anchored in the figuration of ritual, such practice autho-
rizing its default invocation as knowledge of the world in the everyday
usage of the linguicultural community; whether or not any individual
who uses a faunal term “believes” is, of course, not to the point. The abstract
structure authorizing this cultural concept is made flesh, as it were, in this
ritual site, (re)authorizing its experienceable force in everyday life, itself
experienced in a space that is orderly and indexically anchored around the
house-altar.
“Edibility,” as (), a degree concept, moves across a space of animal types
designated by the various faunal terms – a culturally stipulated serial
structure, then – according to stereotypic habitat along the microcosm-to-
macrocosm ordered path from the origo of cosmic anchoring. The animals of
the innermost household realms (according to the distance function
implied), like cats, are taboo for eating – disgusting in fact; buffalo, normally
kept in the space under the highly regulated sleeping quarters, can be eaten
only with ritual circumspection; chickens and ducks are edible; . . . bears,
elephants, tigers at the opposite extreme are “inedible,” as are monkeys, who
correspond iconically in the deep forest macrocosmic realm to humans in
their microcosmic, house-centric realm, the empirically lived-in village.
(There is, in fact, a whole iconic logic of correspondences of edibility and
non-edibility across major spatial realms, as Tambiah describes.)
So “cultural” concepts turn out to be just that, revealed in cultural
practices – among them, the always indexical social action of using
language – and in a non-trivial way. They are empirically investigable
once we abandon the expectation that cultural concepts are analogues in
“folk-science” to lexically coded concepts of one particular view of theory-
based Western science. Thai villagers do not have an articulated “theory”
as such of “edibility,” yet they know which fauna are relatively “edible” and
which not, as the organization of their social practices made clear to
Tambiah. And we have been concerned to show through this example
that it is this presumptively shared knowledge that people rely on. They
indexically access it and experientially renew it each time words and
expressions are used in the emerging “poetic” structures of denotational
and interactional textuality, especially as the form of interaction ritual
figurates role-identities of social action in relation to it.
Completing the Arc
QA8 An’ you[B] wént to undergraduate [school]
hére ór RB8 [ ] in Chicago át, uh, Loyola
ÓhÓhÓhÓhÓh! I[A]’m an óld Jesuit boy
myself[A], Oh áre ya[A]?
QB1 Where’d you[A] gó?
unfortunately
Ó:h yéah, yeah
RA1 [ ] Georgetown, down in Washington
Figure . Mr. A and Mr. B doing language in culture and culture in language.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-thing-ness of Culture,” Signs and Society
Vol. , No. (), figure . Published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of Semiosis
Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Copyright © Semiosis Research
Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; used by permission.
Completing the Arc
With this key point, and by way of conclusion, let’s return to the
interactional manifestation of the pantomime of discourse, as found in
the socio-spatio-temporal locus of the dyadic interaction. Recall from
Lecture the University of Chicago experiment that involved Mr. A,
our old friend, and now we meet his second conversational partner of that
day in February , Mr. B. (In Lecture we analyzed Mr. A’s first
conversation, with a Ms. C.) Now, we are fully prepared to appreciate that
the connection between denotational entextualization – conveying infor-
mation – and interactional entextualization – co-constructing a consequen-
tial social event – is mediated not merely by grammatico-semantic and
grammatico-pragmatic machinery, but rather and moreover by cultural
conceptualization, ‑onomic knowledge (that can be created on-the-spot, to
be sure!) that locates those who invoke it in particular social locations in
communities of practice, and in relation to each other.
I’ve published several analyses (see Silverstein a, a, ) of the
longer two-participant conversation between these two graduate students at
the University of Chicago, but here I want to focus very specifically on the
mechanism of culture here revealed. So let us home in on a tiny but revelatory
snippet of that face-to-face signifying practice, shown in Figure ..
Instructed by experimenters to have a conversation, Mr. A (recall, a
second-year Law School student, whose words are transcribed on the left)
has already been for some time the persistent questioner of Mr. B, a first-
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year graduate student in the School of Social Service Administration
(whose words are transcribed in the right column). Mr. A has been trying,
it will emerge, to find out Mr. B’s undergraduate institution. After a
lengthy digression about the state of Iowa, where Mr. B said he had
“lived,” Mr. A makes precise his request for information: “An’ you[B]
wént to undergraduate [school] hére ór [in/at Iowa]?” Sitting, as they
were, on the premises of the University of Chicago Law School, within
its campus, “here” might be the very same university or any other outfit in
Chicago, or, in fact, in the whole state of Illinois (as opposed to Iowa,
which has been the contrastive reference, a distinct state bordering the
state of Illinois to the west). Observe Mr. B’s careful, if seemingly hesitant
response: “[ ] in Chicago át, uh, Loyola.” (By the rules of American
English grammar, note the “in” versus “at” distinction – place versus
organizational affiliation – on which Mr. B’s response plays.) Mr. B is
using the short form of the institutional name, Loyola University of
Chicago, in , principally a commuter and evening college without
much of a campus before its rebranding in the last decade or so.
Now why would Mr. A be so concerned with this particular bit of
biographical information about Mr. B? Among the American bourgeoisie
(especially, in those days, principally the male professional bourgeoisie) –
note the demographic identifiers already thick on the ground – an important
emblem of identity is the old school tie, as it were, punning on the item of
sartorial display that indexically links one to an institution of undergraduate
tertiary education. Mr. A’s interest as a persistent questioner is hardly
random, then; his questioner’s part of the co-participation in this event of
“Getting to Know You” does not, in fact, seek random biographical facts.
His interest rests, to be sure, on a cultural affordance that thus valorizes –
more precisely, gives context-defining indexical salience to – Mr. B’s response,
thickening the intersubjective context by this differentiating revelation that
his old school tie is not, in fact, the University of Chicago, one of the possible
“here”-s up to this point, but Loyola University in the same city.
But what does Mr. A make in the way of significance – in fact, of
indexical signification – of this piece of information? “ÓhÓhÓhÓhÓh!”
he exclaims in recognition, “I[A]’m an óld Jesuit boy myself[A],” adding,
with a wide, fixed grin of mock self-deprecation, a characteristic index of
male–male in-group interactional style, “unfortunately.” Observe what he
has achieved interactionally: how he has not only ratified a conceptual – a
denotational – understanding of Mr. B’s descriptor, Loyola, but has also
framed its indexical signification for the identity work that is developing
the interactional text here, the genre of consequential event in which he and
Completing the Arc
Figure . Conceptual space of undergraduate affiliations of Messrs. A and B.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-thing-ness of Culture,” Signs and Society
Vol. , No. (), figure . Published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of Semiosis
Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Copyright © Semiosis Research
Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; used by permission.
Mr. B are engaged, “getting to know” one another in some thickening of
mutually relevant as well as mutually revealed biographical detail. Mr.
A has just placed himself as well as Mr. B within the umbrella of Jesuit
institutions of tertiary education, presumably those in North America,
both Mr. A and Mr. B enjoying the status of “old boys,” that is, former
students, now graduates, within that framework (see Figure .). (Had
the term of address existed at that time, it’s almost certain Mr. A would be
saying, “Hey, dude, I’m an old Jesuit boy myself!” with Mr. B responding
“Dude!” instead of – as he does in – “Oh áre ya[A]?”.)
But what does a cultural insider know about those Jesuit institutions of
tertiary education? (Or even cultural outsiders like US News and World
Report or Princeton Review?) Observe that there is, in fact, a schema of
cultural knowledge that is being indexed, pointed to and drawn upon, in
this little exchange. Not only are there twenty-eight such institutions in
North America, which can be diagramed as a multi-branched taxonomy of
equivalent exemplifications of the superordinate category, as shown in
Figure ., these exemplars are as well differentially ranked or seriated
(indicated by the unequal sign >) as to a hierarchy of prestige of credential,
perquisites of campus and post-campus life, institutional comparabilities to
institutions beyond the Jesuit set, et cetera. Thus, when Mr. B, in a perfect
mirror-image sequence opener, asks Mr. A “Where’d you[A] gó [to under-
graduate school]?” Mr. A responds with his exquisitely chiasmatic expres-
sion, elaborating first his Jesuit institution followed by the gratuitous
reference to its city, matching Mr. B’s “in Chicago.” He responds, “[ ]
Georgetown, down in Washington,” the gratuitousness of the place-name
Lecture : Knowledge
Figure . Conceptual space of professional school affiliations of Messrs. A and B.
Reproduced from Michael Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-thing-ness of Culture,” Signs and Society
Vol. , No. (), figure . Published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of Semiosis
Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. © Semiosis Research Center at
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; used by permission.
confirmed by Mr. B’s backchannel response that does not even wait for
this information but overlaps it. (Imagine a response like “MIT, a school in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.”)
A piece of interactional work has been done, to be sure, clarifying for
each other who – that is, socioculturally speaking, tokens of what social
types – our interlocutors are or, more carefully put, have become in
interaction. Messrs. A and B are “placed” in the real-time of interaction
by virtue of their emblematic placement with respect to the cultural
conceptualizations that have been invoked and attached to each in the
course of their conversation. They have managed conversationally to
double their intra-Chicago status asymmetry (see Figure .), established
at the very outset by their having mutually revealed their relative places
within the hierarchically status-conferring partonomy of the University of
Chicago, now diagrammatically renewed by their emblematic old
school ties within the seriation taxonomy of Jesuit institutions of
higher education.
Much that follows in the rest of their videotaped interaction rests on this
earlier structure of interactional co-participation, to which each has cer-
tainly contributed but which neither has completely controlled. Note that
insofar as performance of social statuses is concerned, one generally does
not flat-footedly denote one’s status (though children do this in pretend-
play role-taking all the time with explicit metapragmatic stipulations, such
as “You are the child and I am the daddy, so I’ll tell you what to do!” [see
Sawyer ]). There is no Austinian explicit primary performative, no
Completing the Arc
would-be “behabitive” construction (Austin ) of the form “I statusize
myself relative to you thusly.” It is rather the case that intersubjectively
understood relative statuses are invoked, ratified, or contested as part of the
ongoing co-construction of the role relationality, the mutual coordination,
of participants in social events.
All interaction is of this nature, whether face-to-face, as here, or medi-
ated by text-artifacts. As we indexically invoke the (presupposed) cultural
knowledge that gives interactional effect to what we say, by choice of
expression we explicitly introduce such pieces of cultural knowledge into
interactional space-time, in effect we “create” context, such that this
knowledge can be indexically called upon later in the interaction as a
now given resource for self–other alignment. For instance, the fact that
Mr. B eventually reworks and interactionally upgrades status to turn the
Getting to Know You occasion into something of a therapy session –
precisely the kind of event for which he is being trained as a social worker –
enlisting Mr. A as his unwitting client, means that contexts, identities, and
relationships are emerging through interaction.
Were Mr. A and Mr. B really engaging in a contest of status, an
interactional text of “One Upmanship” rather than just “Getting to
Know You,” at the point of noting their “old school ties,” Mr. A would
definitely be “up” and Mr. B “down.” But that is not the point here. It is
important to see that there is a particular mechanism of signification at
work in the orderliness with which signs – here, words and expressions –
are introduced into the intersubjective space between participants getting
to know one another by alternating-turn question-and-answer, the devel-
opment of a social “context” that comes to frame them with ever more
specificity. With respect to such context, the words and expressions in
their grammatical and co-textual configurations do effective social work by
drawing upon or presuming upon – indexically presupposing, we say –
schemata of socially locatable knowledge of the universe – here, political
geography, institutions of education, et cetera – rendering each partici-
pant’s interactionally relevant relative position a consequence of location
within and perspective on such knowledge. The knowledge is, as it were,
“made flesh” in the interactional here-and-now as participants co-construct
an interactional text, a co-participatory “do[ing] things with words.”
And as the word here is “made flesh” by its boundaries latching on to
‑onomic partitions of the universe, the “here” – the context – becomes
fleshy as well.
The most crucial point is this: All contextual and contextualizing
signification is fundamentally indexical in character, as signs invoke
Lecture : Knowledge
particular knowledge schemata identifiable with social positionality, atti-
tudes, et cetera in social formations, and make such social positionality,
attitudes, et cetera “real” and consequential for themselves and for others
co-present or referred-to in the here-and-now. We do not engage in social
interaction merely to convey information, to make propositions about or
representations of a distinct and separate world, notwithstanding our
“official” ideology of language (and of many other sign systems). That
official ideology hides the real work of semiosis behind its screen of
representational inertness (a screen sometimes itself interactionally useful;
see Silverstein a). Once we properly understand what is “cultural”
about interactional semiosis – potent context-defining and context-
transforming indexicality – and once, most importantly, we learn how to
lay it bare through analysis, we see that every event even of so-called
“politics” – let alone political economy – is really composed of an inter-
actional “poetics” all the way down.
Now, our arc is complete, for we have learned through myriad examples
that so-called denotational referring and modally predicating, when looked
at from the perspective of the cultural concepts that are conveyed is, in a
sense, “interaction ritual” – as Erving Goffman dubbed it – with a general
semiotic functionality no different from that we discerned in explicitly
constituted ritual, as we discussed in the first part of our arc (Lectures
–). Being ritual, it can succeed or fail in its functional consequentiality;
that is, as we’ve developed with our notion of enregisterment (Lecture ),
the very cultural conceptualizations central to its poetics can gain a life in
the interdiscursive realm of seemingly denotational usage, can circulate and
emanate to other social domains, or they can disappear.
It’s very much like what we’ve seen for standardization and other modes
of enregisterment (Lecture ), where some authority establishes itself over
what is the top-and-center of valued usage, thought in a folk misrecogni-
tion to be from “nowhere in particular.” You will remember as well from
Lecture , the possibility that certain usages emanate from ritual centers
and perform or confer identity on users in the manner of the two-tiered
Eucharistic mode we analogized between Christian religious ritual and the
discursive rituals of talking about wine (and other potable liquids and
comestibles) in certain ways.
Moreover, communities of metapragmatic discursive practice exist where
words and expressions are used in certain enregistered ways in producing
genred texts-in-contexts by identifiable social kinds of speakers/addressees
authorized so to do. Every successful event of “literally” referring or
predicating rests not only on there being a universe of possible referents,
Completing the Arc
as positivists think, but on a socioculturally constituted community of
referrers/predicators and those referred-to/predicated-to. It’s sociocultural
reality “all the way down,” in which, as you can see, grammar is the
mechanism for supplying default, asymptotically de-contextualized voice-
from-nowhere-in-the-community stereotypy (a.k.a. differential intensional
prototypes) after all the other kinds of intensional prototypy (a.k.a. socio-
linguistically locatable stereotypy) does its work.
The doctrine of “literal denotation,” as we called it in Lecture , is
essentially an appeal to a socially un-locatable authoritative ritual baptism of
an extension-as-prototype and numerous other denotata related to that
prototype intensionalized along many different axes of “likeness.” In
relation to a prototype exemplar at the extensional plane – the lower edge
of the post-Lockean rectangle, recall! – the key issue is how this exemplar is
intensionalized – ascribed properties – on some basis or other such that it
differentially anchors or differentially belongs to a class or category of
denotata anchored by an intensional prototype (that is, a set of values in
a multidimensional quality-space).
And so, it turns out that the dogma of “literalness,” we might say, is a
post-Enlightenment cultural concept about language-and-conceptualiza-
tion. Such a cultural concept analytically is not useful for the study of
language in culture. Moreover, it is sustained – as is so much of cultural
‑onomic knowledge – only by faith, and only in discourse and (interac-
tion) ritual (though not by a faith in discourse or ritual): the very things
that the Enlightenment tried to eradicate from our understanding of
language-and-conceptualization. It is precisely these that we have found
necessary to understand the workings of language in culture and culture in
language. Ironically enough.
Editorial Acknowledgments
E. Summerson Carr, Susan Gal, and Constantine V. Nakassis
As readers of Michael Silverstein’s works know, his published papers are
always carefully annotated with the places they have been delivered as
“talks,” the persons who invited him to speak or write, and the thanks to
those who commented and contributed in different ways to the finished
product. Tragically, he cannot append that form of acknowledgment to
this book. Michael Silverstein died in July , after a year of illness and
in the midst of editing and polishing the manuscript of this book. To
follow his usual practice of providing a natural history of this text seems a
fitting form of acknowledgment to those devoted colleagues who partici-
pated in bringing this book to publication.
Some background to the text is already mentioned in his Preface. The
book’s form and tone mirror its origin as a set of lectures delivered at
the Linguistic Society of America’s (LSA) Summer Institute, held
at the University of Kentucky – Lexington (July –August , ).
These lectures were themselves condensed versions of the graduate course
“Language in Culture” that Silverstein had taught almost annually at the
University of Chicago since . A set of anonymous readers for
Cambridge University Press had delivered their reviews and recommenda-
tions, leading the Press to offer a contract in the spring of .
Faced with a terminal diagnosis of brain cancer in the summer of ,
Michael decided that two professional projects were most important to
him. The first was to teach “Language in Culture” in the autumn quarter
at the University of Chicago, which he did. The other was to finish this
book. He had already written a response to the Press’s reviewers. What
remained was the work of revision and editing, most urgently to assure that
his latest thinking would be highlighted and the connections among the
lectures made smoother, and, in some cases, the examples more fully
Editorial Acknowledgments
explicated. We proposed to him and organized a series of three “book
workshops” that would enable him to discuss the lectures and possible
revisions in detail with close colleagues. He immediately dubbed the corps
his “Book Posse.” At these workshops, we invited him – sometimes
provoked him – to express his intentions and plans about emphases,
clarifications, and refinements that had emerged since he delivered
the LSA lectures. This ensured the continuity of his ideas and his voice
in the text. The workshops followed the arc of the book as he envisioned it
(see Introduction). In each session, there were discussants responsible for
each chapter, as well as a moderator and a scribe. The sessions were also
recorded. Lectures – were the subject of the first workshop, with
Richard Bauman, Robert Moore, and Judith T. Irvine as designated
discussants; Lectures – were considered at the second workshop, led
by Kristina Wirtz and Michael Lempert; and at the final one, Asif Agha,
John Lucy, Paul Manning, and Elizabeth Mertz led the discussion of
Lectures –. In accord with long-established ritual traditions, and as
facilitated by Mara Tapp’s warm hospitality, a festive multi-course dinner
with drinks followed each workshop. The Lichtstern Fund of the
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, generously supported
these efforts.
With written commentaries by discussants in hand and with a tran-
scription of Michael’s commentary from each workshop, we embarked on
the work of smoothing, polishing, and in some cases expanding the
clarifications as Michael directed. In all cases, we consulted what he had
already written; indeed, many of Michael’s publications were themselves
rewritten and refined versions of his “Language in Culture” course lectures,
as they themselves developed over the decades, which were then the basis
for further refined and transformed lectures. To frame the lectures he gave
at the LSA Summer Institute, Michael had written up a “narrative
arc” summarizing the course of the Lectures, which was combined with
elements from his Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago to
form the Introduction to this book. As he could, Michael read and made
corrections as we finished with each chapter. His changes were duly
incorporated and he approved the edited versions of the Preface,
Introduction, and Lectures –. He was not able to correct the remaining
lectures. But in these, as in the earlier ones, we relied – when necessary –
on published versions of earlier analyses he had made of the same or similar
empirical examples, as well as on his commentary and responses to
questions at the workshops. The entire manuscript was then graciously
Editorial Acknowledgments
and meticulously read and reviewed by Robert Moore and Nicholas
Harkness, who offered helpful comments and advice for its improvement.
We are deeply grateful to all the workshop participants for their collab-
oration on this project which, we believe, presents a succinct yet integrated
overview of Michael Silverstein’s life project in the way he intended. We
wish to especially thank Michael’s wife, Mara Tapp, for her indispensable
support and encouragement in this process, as well as Michael’s children,
Ariella Silverstein-Tapp and Grant Silverstein-Tapp. We thank Rachel
Howard and Gina Broze for help securing permissions, Emily Kuret for
help in redesigning and redrafting Figures ., ., ., ., ., .,
., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., Perry Wong for
bibliographic assistance, Eman Elshaikh for compiling the index, and
Hannah McElgunn for logistical assistance, as well as Helen Barton and
Isabel Collins at Cambridge University Press, and Sue Browning, copy-
editor, for their support of this project.
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Index
address terms, , –, cognitivism, , ,
and orders of indexicality, , color, , –, –, –
adjacency pair, , , , , , , , , , and indexicality, –,
, – Berlin and Kay study, –, , –,
alignment, , , , , , , , ,
, , , cultural concepts of, , –
analogy, , , , , –, denotational domain of, , , ,
analogical pressure, , , , perception of, ,
Austin, John L., –, –, perceptual prototypes of basic color terms,
authority, –, , –, , , , political coloration, ,
, commodities, , –,
authorizing text, , commodity fetishism,
awareness, , , , , , See also limits communicative event, , , –, , ,
of awareness; metapragmatics; reflexivity , ,
and indexicality, , ,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, , , – comparison, , , , ,
baptism, , , , etic framework, ,
Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay, –, See also of languages,
color Whorfian calibration of languages,
Bloomfield, Leonard, , –, , – Conklin, Harold, –
Boas, Franz, –, , See also Boasian context, , , , , , , , , , ,
comparativist tradition See also contextualization
Boasian comparativist tradition, , –, and indexical relationship to text,
, , presupposition and entailment of, –, ,
body, the, , , , ,
Brenneis, Don, –, contextualization, , , , , , See also
Brown, Roger and Albert Gilman, , –, entextualization–contextualization
thickening, , , , ,
co-textuality, , , , , ,
calibrating event, covering law, , ,
calibration, See comparison cultural categories, See cultural concepts
categoriality, –, , , , , , cultural concepts, , –, , , –,
, , See also color; phonology– –, , –, –, , ,
phonetics; See also cultural concepts See also cultural knowledge
Chomsky, Noam, , , and color, –
chronotope, , and grammatical categories, –
circulation, –, , , , , degree concepts, ,
–, , See also emanation of time, –
coding, , , –, , , –, relationship to grammatico-semantic and
, , –, , grammatico-pragmatic categories,
coffee talk, –, vs. Saussurean concepts,
Index
cultural knowledge, , , , , , , , discursive interaction, , , ,
, , , , , , , See also Durkheim, Émile,
cultural concepts dynamic figuration, , , , , –, ,
categorial knowledge, , , –, , , , , See also
cosmic knowledge, , , , ritual
ethno-metapragmatic knowledge, ,
metapragmatic knowledge, Eckert, Penelope,
-onomic knowledge, , , , , , emanation, , , –, , –,
, , , , –, See also –, , , , –, ,
cultural concepts See also circulation
culture, , , , , and register,
and enregisterment, centers and peripheries,
,
deference, , , , –, of cultural concepts,
politeness, , site of, –,
deictics, See deixis Enlightenment, the, , , , , , , ,
deixis, –, –, , , , , , , , –, ,
, –, , , language and rationality, , ,
and gesture, post-Lockean rectangle, , –, ,
and honorification, , , , , ,
and metricalization, theory of ideas, ,
and space, , , , , , theory of language, , ,
deictic categories, enregisterment, –, –, , –,
deictic paradigms, , –, , –, , , See also
of person, register; standardization
orīgō, , and indexicality, , –
tense, , –, , – disenregisterment,
delocutionary derivation, entextualization, –, , –, , , ,
denotation, , , , , , –, , , , , , , See also
, entextualization–contextualization; textual
doctrine of literal denotation, , –, coherence
, and ritual, ,
emergent denotational structure, denotational vs. interactional,
denotational domain, , , , –, poetics of,
, , , entextualization–contextualization, , , , ,
and color, , , –, ,
and grammatical categories, and cultural knowledge,
and intensional categories, dialectics of, , , , , , ,
denotational indexicality, , See also deixis of ritual,
denotational text, , , –, –, , , poetics of,
, Ervin-Tripp, Susan, ,
diagram, , , , , , ethno-metapragmatics, –, , , ,
diagrammatic iconicity, , –, –, , , , , ,
dialectic, , –, , , –, , , , , , , , See also
, , , , , , See also metapragmatics
entextualization–contextualization and ideology, ,
between intension and extension, , explicit ethno-metapragmatic regimentation,
dialectically duplex indexical register effect,
folk metaphysics, –,
emergence of concepts, Eucharist, the, , ,
of extensionalized categories, event, See communicative event
of indexicality and enregisterment, evidentiality, , , See also deixis
of orders of indexicality, expertise, , , –, –, ,
dimensions of contrast, , , , ,
discourse markers, technical terms,
Index
extension, –, , , –, , , identity, –, , , –, , , , , ,
See also referentiality , , –, –, , ,
extensionalization, , –, , , –, , , , , See also social
–, indexicality
and register, , ,
fashion, , , emblem of, , , , ,
fashions of speaking, , –, – voicing, –, ,
folk models, See ethno-metapragmatics ideology, , , , , –, , ,
formal distantiation, , , –,
function and function, and indexicality,
and register,
Gal, Susan, and social stratification,
Gapun, Papua New Guinea, – and standardization, , ,
Taiap, –, linguistic, –, , ,
Tok Pisin, , naturalizing,
Geertz, Clifford, indexicality, , , , , , , , ,
gender, , , , –, , –, , , , See also social
and address terms, indexicality
and pronouns, and color, –,
grammatical gender systems, – and deixis,
naturalization, , , and enregisterment, –, ,
vs. sex, – and grammar,
genre, , , , , – and register, –,
Getting to Know You event, , , in language-in-use,
See also Mr. A and Mr B; and Mr. A and indeterminacy of, ,
Ms. C indexical anchor, ,
Goffman, Erving, , , indexical entailment, –, , , ,
gossip, , –
grammar, , , , , , , , , , indexical inoculation, , , –
, , , indexical loading, , ,
grammatical concepts, indexical presupposition, , , , –,
grammatical structure, ,
structuralist view, indexical variance, , , , ,
grammatical categories, –, , , loss of,
–, , , , , , , , meta-indexicality, –
, , non-denotational,
and cultural concepts, – non-referential,
greetings, , , , presupposition and entailment,
Grice, Paul, , Indo-Fiji, ,
talanoa, –,
Hanunóo, –, institutions, , , –, , , , ,
heteroglossia, –,
honorification, , , –, See also intension, –, –, , See also sense
deference; address terms and stereotype,
deictics, intensional categories,
registers of, intensional conceptualization,
Hopi, intensional prototype, –, , , ,
hyper-meta-semiosis, , , , , , –, , , , ,
as category-anchor,
iconicity, , circulation of,
diagrammatic, differential, , , ,
iconism, , , See also iconicity interaction ritual, , , , , , –, ,
iconicity and indexicality, , , , , , See also ritual
, , , here-and-now, , , ,
Index
interactional text, –, , , , , , , metapragmatic consciousness, , , ,
–, , , , , , , , , , , See also awareness and reflexivity
, , , , , See also discursive metapragmatic function, , ,
interaction; communicative event metapragmatic unconscious, , , See also
interdiscursivity, –, , , , , limits of awareness
, , , –, , –, reflexively calibrated metapragmatic function,
,
interpretant, – meta-semiosis, , , , See also
intersubjectivity, , , , metapragmatics
intertextuality, See interdiscursivity metricalization, , , , –, , , , ,
Irvine, Judith, – , , , –, , , , , See
also entextualization and poetics
Jakobson, Roman, , misrecognition, –,
Javanese speech levels, Mr. A and Mr. B, –
Mr. A and Ms. C, –, , ,
Kulick, Don, – Mursi, –,
Labov, William, , , – naturalization, –, , , , See also
language community, –, , , See also rhematization
speech community natural icon,
language shift, , nomenclaturism,
language, contrasting conceptions of, , – nomic calibration,
denotational view of language, ,
Enlightenment theory of language, , , oinoglossia, , –
See Enlightenment, the -onomic knowledge, See cultural knowledge
language as indexical system, order of indexicality, , , ,
language as social action, and ideology, ,
language in culture, dialectics of,
mental organ view of language, second-order indexicality, , , –,
late capitalism, , , ,
law, –, ,
and truth, – pantomime, –, , , , ,
courtroom interaction, –, – parallelism, , ,
lexicalization, Peirce, Charles Sanders,
lifestyle, , , Peircean semiotic, , ,
limits of awareness, , , , , , Legisign, –
See also awareness; metapragmatics; reflexivity Sinsign,
linguistic relativity, , –, –, , symbol,
– perception, , , ,
logic, – performativity, , , –, , –
and address terms, –
Malinowski, Bronislaw, , and gender,
mands, –, explicit primary performatives, –, –,
Matoesian, Gregory, ,
measure phrase, – illocutionary force, ,
message, –, , , , , See also denotation of identity, ,
and context, perlocutionary force, ,
and entextualization, philosophy of language, ,
and reference, phonology–phonetics, –
metalanguage, , , and categoriality, –
metapragmatics, , –, , –, , distributional class, –, –
, , –, , , , intensional prototypes, , –
and ideology, , –, –, phonetic vs. phonological facts,
discourse of time, – phonologico-phonetic reality,
Index
phonology–phonetics (cont.) efficacy of, , ,
sound, , , , , , , , poetic function of, ,
text, –, –
poetics, –, , , , , , , , transubstantiation,
, , See also deixis; metricalization role, –, , , –, , , , ,
and politics, , , See also communicative event
of entextualization, monitor/audience,
poetic structure, , production format, ,
positivism, , , , See also reality recruitment, , , ,
power, , , , , ,
pragmatic paradigm, , –, , –, , Safire, William,
, –, , , , , , , Sapir, Edward, , , , –
, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, , See also linguistic
and indexical inoculation, relativity
and linguistic ideology, Saussure, Ferdinand de, –
and register, , Saussurean account of sense and signification,
pragmatics, , , , –, , , See also
prestige, , , , , , , structuralism
production format, Schiffrin, Deborah, –
pronouns, See address terms segmentation
Putnam, Hilary, – sentence,
word,
qualia, –, , , sense, –, , , , –
shibboleth, –, –, –, , ,
reality, , , , –, , , , , –, ,
recording communication, and performativity, ,
reference, , –, , , , See also and register, ,
denotation shifter,
depleted referentiality, sign’s eye view, , , ,
literal, –, , signification, –, , , See also
truth or falsity, , Saussurean account of sense and
reflexivity, , , –, –, , , , signification
, , , , , See also awareness; indexical, , , , , –, ,
metapragmatics
reflexive calibration, simple lexeme hypotheses,
register, , , –, , –, –, , social action, , , , , See also
, –, , , –, –, performativity
, –, , , , , See also social coordination, , –, , –, , ,
shibboleth –,
effect, , –, mutual coordination, , , ,
standard register, –, , , social differentiation, , , , , , –, ,
relativism, , , , , –, , , , , –
rhematization, , , , See also and register,
naturalization and standardization, ,
rhetoric, – social distantiation, –, ,
ritual, , , , , –, , –, , , social indexicality, , , , , , , , ,
, See also dynamic figuration –, –, , , –, ,
and cosmic orders, , –, – , , , , –,
and cultural knowledge, as dialectic process,
and emergence of cultural concepts, social type, , , , , , , , , –,
and emergent text, , –, , , , –, ,
and identity, , , , See also identity
and sites of emanation, and register, ,
anti-ritual, – sociolinguistic division of denotational labor,
centers of, –
Index
sociolinguistic variation, –, , , , textual coherence, –, , , , ,
, , –
sound, See phonology–phonetics pragmatic vs. logical,
speech community, , register-coherence,
speech-act theory, See performativity textuality, ,
stance, emergence of,
standardization, , –, –, , poetics of emergent,
Thai edibility concepts, –, See also cultural
and ideology, , concepts
and power, third-wave variationism,
and social stratification, , time, –
and the state, analogy to space, ,
anxiety and insecurity, –, , as cultural concept,
cone of, , –, transcription,
deviation from standard, , translation, ,
gradient, –
hypercorrection, , universality, , , –,
standard, , , , , See also voice etic and emic, ,
from nowhere of grammatical categories,
status, , , , –, , , , , ,
– value, , –, –, , , , ,
address terms, –,
asymmetry, –, , emanation of, ,
stereotype, , , indexical, , , , , , , ,
denotational, , ,
stratification, , , , , , See also variation, See sociolinguistic variation
social differentiation voice, –, See voice
structuralism, –, –, –, See also and identity,
Saussurean account of sense and voice from nowhere, , ,
signification and doctrine of literal denotation,
style, – vs. identity-laden somewhere,
systematicity, , , , ,
Weber, Max,
text, , , , –, , , , , See also Whorf, Benjamin Lee, , , , , ,
denotational text; interactional text; –, –, , –
entextualization Whorfian view of grammatical categories,
double organization of, comparison of English and Hopi, –,
poetic structure of a, overt vs. covert categories,
text/context, See entextualization– wine talk, See oinoglossia
contextualization Wolof society,
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