Languages & Linguistics
Indexicality
Indexicality refers to the way language is used to point to specific people, places, or times. It is the ability of language to refer to the context in which it is used, and it is an important aspect of communication. Indexical expressions include pronouns, demonstratives, and tense markers.
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9 Key excerpts on "Indexicality"
eBook - PDF- Kenneth Kong(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
indexical meaning (e.g. temporal, spatial, social identity, social act, social activity, affective or epistemic meanings) to particu- lar forms (e.g. interrogative forms, diminutive affixes, raised pitch and the like)’ 134 Linguistic realizations (400–1). According to Ochs, a linguistic index is ‘a structure. . . that is used variably from one situation to another and becomes conventionally associ- ated with particular situational dimensions such that when that structure is used, the form invokes those situational dimensions’ (411). This is a very useful notion explaining why there are always discrepancies in the functions of a linguistic feature. While extensive research has been conducted in conversations from this perspective, little attention has been paid to written discourse. Under the Indexicality principle, there are two sub-principles: universal culture principle and local extent principle. The universal culture principle posits that there are certain universal truths about the linguistic indexicals across different languages and cultures. For example, in most of the cultures, linguistic forms are used to index different situational and social dimensions. Also, similar resources are employed to index epistemic categories such as certainty versus uncertainty and affective categories such as happiness/unhap- piness. These universal features constitute the ‘humanity’ across different cultural groups in the world. Nevertheless, as we all know, we are also different in sharing views, objectives and so on, because ‘local culture is constituted in part by the myriad of situational specific valences that link time, space, acts, activities, and identities’ (Ochs (1996: 428).
eBook - PDFSingapore English
Structure, Variation, and Usage
- Jakob R. E. Leimgruber(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Example (2) is fully deictic, in that the meanings of we, here, and in two hours are all irrecoverable without personal, spatial, and temporal context. (1) a. Books have pages. b. I have several books. (2) We shall meet again here in two hours. Non-referential Indexicality is what sociolinguistics is most interested in: for instance, pronunciation variants such as a glottal stop for the intervocalic /t/ in words like butter do not add anything to the semantics of the lexical item or to the truth value of the utterance – such variants are, after all, called allophones of a single phoneme, thus highlighting their status as variants that are unable to create minimal pairs. Nonetheless, at a sociolinguistic level, the pronunciation of butter as [b2P@] most definitely carries (or indexes) some social meaning. It is the description of this social meaning that a sociolin- guistic analysis grounded in Indexicality seeks to address. Ochs (1992: 339), for instance, gives the example of how American pre-adolescent children use pitch range to index gender, at an age when their actual, physical voice is as yet undifferentiated. An addition to the theory of Indexicality is the concept of indexical orders (Silverstein 2003). Indexical speech acts can be conceptualised as consisting of a first level of Indexicality, which is essentially pragmatic in nature, of a second, metapragmatic order, and possibly even of ‘higher’ orders of in- dexicality, with conventionally recognised discourses such as ‘life-style em- blematisation’ (Silverstein 2003: 222). To illustrate this ranking, a first-order, pragmatic index can be found in the distinction, made in many languages, between formal and informal second-person singular pronouns, the so-called T/V distinction (from French tu and vous, being respectively the informal and the formal version of the second-person singular subject pronoun). In
eBook - PDF- Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
1 Kaplan’s theory of Indexicality The modern theory of Indexicality owes much to philosophers of language, who were interested in the foundations of semantics, and more specifically in the general form of the procedure by which sentences are interpreted. The standard theory, due to David Kaplan, has three main tenets (Kaplan 1977/1989, 1978). Philippe Schlenker, Paris (France) and New York (USA) 17 Indexicality and De Se reports 563 (i) The interpretation function, henceforth written as [[ . ]] , must be relativized to a context parameter in addition to the other parameters (e.g., time, world, assignment function) which are independently necessary for the analysis of non-indexical expressions. (ii) Contexts are ontologically distinct from other parameters; in particular, they are strictly more fine-grained than individuals, times or possible worlds. In fact, it is often helpful to think of a context c as a triple of the form < c a , c t , c w > , where c a , c t and c w are respectively the agent (also called ‘speaker’ or ‘author’), the time and the world of c (for some applications it is useful to add a hearer coordinate c h or a location coordinate c l ). (iii) Unlike other parameters, which can typically be ‘manipulated’ by various operators, the context parameter remains fixed throughout the evaluation of a sentence. Purported operators that violate this condition are called ‘mon-sters’, and are claimed by Kaplan not to exist in natural language (though they can easily be defined in a formal language). (i) is generally accepted. But (ii) and (iii) need not be. Let us first consider (ii). Some authors (e.g., Stalnaker 1981, 1999; von Stechow & Zimmermann 2005) have attempted to develop theories of Indexicality in which contexts are ontologically on a par with some other parameter—in Stalnaker’s case, the world parameter.
eBook - PDF- Herman Parret(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Meaning and Indexicality in Communication 21 occasionally capable of reference in given contextual conditions and in presence of the object of reference. Such a theoretical distinction does not hold as a criterion for classifying signs in reciprocally exclusive sets. Taken in this way, it would obviously fail. If, in our everyday experience, we easily find pure indexes— a gestual hint, for instance— we cannot normally find pure expressions. Actually, in our communicative experience, we see but expressions working as indexes:[...] alle Ausdrücke in der kommu-nikativen Rede als Anzeichen fungieren. Sie dienen dem Hörenden als Zeichen für die 'Gedanken' des Redenden, d. h. für die sinngebenden psychischen Erlebnisse desselben, sowie für die sonstigen psychischen Erlebnisse, welche zur mitteilenden Intention gehören 9 . This circum-stance however is not an argument for dismissing the distinction between indexes and expressions, but rather for reinterpreting it as a relevance criterion for distinguishing, within a complex phenomenon, between es-sential properties and occasional ones: between what an expression happens to be in given circumstances and what it is as such 10 . So, whilst our experience offers us expressions which work as indexes, the criterion allows us to see, beyond the immediate evidence of the indexical function, the essential property of expressions: their significance. Whereas the in-dexical function is, however effectual, a purely occasional function ex-pressions share with nonlinguistic indexes, their autonomous significance is the essential, necessary and sufficient property of linguistic expressions. An index out of work is no more an index; an expression out of work is still an expression. Its significance is not dissolved by the loss of the context of an occasional use.
eBook - ePub- Yoko Hasegawa(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
2.4. Indexical Meaning 2.4.1. Indexicality Consider the following three passages:A. おれさあ、先月、検査したんだけど、コレステロール高いんだっ てさ。だから、肉食うのやめたんだ。最初はかなりきつかったけ ど、慣れると、野菜もけっこうおいしいよね。B. うちな、先月、検査してもろたら、コレステロール高いて言われ たんよ。そやから、菜食主義に変えてみたんや。最初はちょっと きつかったんやけど、この頃は野菜もおいしいって思うようにな ってん。C. 先月、健康診断をいたしましたが、コレステロールが少し高いの だそうです。それで、菜食主義に転向いたしました。最初はつら かったのですが、慣れると、野菜もおいしいものだと思うように なりました。While they are more or less synonymous regarding propositional and expressive meanings, they evoke different information about the speakers and their speech situations. The speaker of A is likely a man, while the speaker of B is likely a woman from the Kansai region. The A and B speech situations are casual conversations; C is uttered in a more formal situation such as a job interview. Could such information/meanings be attributable to specific words in the text? In A, for example, in many dialects, including that of Tokyo, the use of ore normally signals that the speaker is a male. Is the information regarding the speaker’s sex then part of the meaning of ore?In recent years, following the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) (Peirce and Hoopes 1991), these types of meanings are accounted for in terms of Indexicality, i.e. the relationship between a linguistic expression and its context.13 Indexicality is defined as follows: a sign A indexes information C when the occurrence of A can imply the presence or existence of C (Lyons 1977: 106). For example, when we say “Smoke means fire,” smoke is an index that implies the presence of fire. In another example, the presence of ore implies that the speaker is male, as well as that the speech situation is casual, or, if the speaker is in fact a woman, that the speech is in a dialect such as that of Saitama prefecture, where ore is used by both sexes. Let us refer to such meanings as indexical meaning.According to this view, language practice involves indexing a multiplicity of sociocultural significances (i.e. meanings), including the spatiotemporal locus of the communicative situation (i.e. deixis, e.g. I, you, here, there, now, then
- N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, Jack Sidnell(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
allows others as addressees or audiences intuitively to “place” us as well. (Things do, of course, become exceedingly complex when explicit meta- pragmatic consciousness of such matters is taken into account, a point to which we return below.) Finally, as emphasized by Mikhail Bakhtin, no face-to-face micro-context of discursive interaction is an island. One of the central components of Indexicality in any particular context is defined by strands of ‘interdiscur- sivity’ (see Agha and Wortham 2005) that link a current message segment- in-co(n)text to other occasions of use – to emphasize: linked not just by the existence of an underlying grammatico-semantic type – through which identities of role incumbents emerge in degrees and kinds of congruent alignment across occasions, and as well as do the generic (< genre) char- acteristics of the current communication. Like Benveniste’s (1966: 277–85) ‘delocutionary’ predicates, metapragmatic descriptors that reproduce indexically pregnant forms so as to denote the social act of using them, textual ready-mades iconically reproduce or “cite” and thereby remotely index (in a “renvoi”) the contextual conditions under which they have earlier occurred, or those under which they ought later to occur, placing a current communicative situation in a kind of chain of interdiscursivity as such cited (or to-be-cited) material comes to structure the co-textuality of form. Indeed, such chained interdiscursivity with recognizably genred text interacts with the deictics of evidentiality in the plane of denotation already described; here, too, one is making indexical claims about how the personnel of a current communicative event participate in and align with/against various institutional networks of communication and the values maintained in-and-through them.
eBook - PDF- J.L. Mey(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Elsevier Science(Publisher)
Jakobson studies the indexical factor in verbal lan-guage in ‘Shifters, verbal categories and the Russian verb’ (1971 [1957]). The indexical function in verbal signs is carried out by a special class of grammatical units he calls ‘shifters.’ As characterized by Jakobson, shifters are ‘symbol-indexes’ because their dominant aspect is given in the combination of Indexicality with conventionality ( see Jakobson, Roman ). An example of shifters is the personal pronoun. On one hand, I is conventional because we can only know what it means if we know the convention on the basis of which we interpret it as referring to its object under some aspect (a person considered under the aspect of speaking subject) and therefore as situated on the same interpretive trajectory as ego , je and moi , ich , io , etc. From this point of view, the sign I is a symbol. On the other hand, in order to refer to its object, that is, to the speaker, it must be in an ‘existential relationship’ with it. Therefore, I is also an index. The personal pronouns I and you may be interpreted as referring alternatively to the same ob-ject , according to whether it carries out the function of ‘speaking subject’ or ‘subject spoken to.’ This multiplicity is possible on the basis of a convention and at once on the basis of the fact of functioning as an index in the literal sense of a pointing finger. Indexicality plays a fundamental role in verbal lan-guage. As Sebeok observed (1991: 128–143), Peirce highly valued the function of shifters owing to the connection between verbal language and its referents. Designations – exemplified by the various types of deixis, including verbal tenses – said Peirce: . . . are absolutely indispensable both to communication and to thought. No assertion has any meaning unless there is some designation to show whether the universe of reality or what universe of fiction is referred to.
eBook - PDFThe Theory of Descriptions
Russell and the Philosophy of Language
- G. Stevens, Michael Beaney(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
140 6 Extending the Theory II: Indexicality If the theory of descriptions is to be a proper part of a theory of nat- ural language semantics, it must be compatible with all other proper parts of the whole theory. These will include theories of linguistic phenomena such as anaphora, tense, nominalization, and many oth- ers. As Neale (1990: 10) observes, the best approach the natural lan- guage semanticist can take here is a modular one, dealing with each phenomenon in a piecemeal fashion and subsequently piecing them together. It is well beyond the scope of this book to deal with all of the phenomena that demand explanation. In this concluding chap- ter I want to focus on one in particular: Indexicality. However, the phenomenon is, I will argue, so central that it has repercussions for other important and puzzling linguistic phenomena including the semantics of propositional attitude reports. As this book is not just concerned to defend the theory of descriptions, but also to defend Russell’s philosophy of language in general, I will focus particularly on Russell’s work on Indexicality. Russell’s work in this area has received very little attention (and even less positive appraisal). I want to show, however, that there is more value in Russell’s analysis of Indexicality than it has thus far been given credit for. The bulk of Russell’s writ- ings that I will draw on are to be found in his later works, particularly An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and Human Knowledge. These two books, the last two real philosophical books that Russell wrote, are often dismissed as inferior in quality to his earlier work. A subsidiary aim of this chapter, therefore, is to continue a project that I began in my (2005) of challenging this negative appraisal of Russell’s later philosophical output.
eBook - PDFPsychology of Language
A Critical Introduction
- Michael A Forrester(Author)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
In many instances the aim is to uncover how language 'hooks on to', underpins or influences mental states, propositional attitudes, states of mind, or whatever. However, within the recent history of linguistics there has been increasing interest in a functionalist account of language: what language means in context. The emphasis changes from concerns with individual thinking and its relations to language, to considerations of why we might use any particular utterance in context. We noted earlier that as soon as you ask this question then you move the spotlight away from certain fon ns of fon nal analysis (e.g . truth-conditional logic) onto topics such as com-munication, intentionality, interaction and princ iples of co-operation. If our aim is to understand the function of language in context, then one of the most promising routes for doing so is through the study of deictic ten ns. Deixis 59 Deixis Deixis, derived from the Greek word for pointing or indicating, is a grammatical term for a group of words and phrases which anchor an utterance to the context of its occurrence. Deictic terms can only be understood with reference to the situation in which they are used. Levinson (1983) provides an interesting example where he asks us to imagine find ing a bottle at the seaside, and in it there is a note which reads: (1) Meet me here in a week with a stick about this big. How are we to understand what the writer meant when he/she penned this note? Who is the 'me '? Where is the 'here '? When was this note written (which week)? Relative to what is 'this ' stick big? Although we might be able to infer certain things about such a note, it is simply impossible to fully comprehend the communicative intention of the person who wrote the letter. Likewise, consider the occasional confusion we feel when somebody asks us to move something from over 'here ' to over 'there.
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