Indexicality

In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a ''sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.

The modern concept originates in the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, in which indexicality is one of the three fundamental sign modalities by which a sign relates to its referent (the others being iconicity and symbolism). Peirce, C.S., "Division of Signs" in ''Collected Papers'', 1932 897 Peirce's concept has been adopted and extended by several twentieth-century academic traditions, including those of linguistic pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and Anglo-American philosophy of language.

Words and expressions in language often derive some part of their referential meaning from indexicality. For example, ''I'' indexically refers to the entity that is speaking; ''now'' indexically refers to a time frame including the moment at which the word is spoken; and ''here'' indexically refers to a locational frame including the place where the word is spoken. Linguistic expressions that refer indexically are known as deictics, which thus form a particular subclass of indexical signs, though there is some terminological variation among scholarly traditions.

Linguistic signs may also derive nonreferential meaning from indexicality, for example when features of a speaker's register indexically signal their social class. Nonlinguistic signs may also display indexicality: for example, a pointing index finger may index (without referring to) some object in the direction of the line implied by the orientation of the finger, and smoke may index the presence of a fire.

In linguistics and philosophy of language, the study of indexicality tends to focus specifically on deixis, while in semiotics and anthropology equal attention is generally given to nonreferential indexicality, including altogether nonlinguistic indexicality.

In linguistic pragmatics

In disciplinary linguistics, indexicality is studied in the subdiscipline of pragmatics. Specifically, pragmatics tends to focus on deictics—words and expressions of language that derive some part of their referential meaning from indexicality—since these are regarded as " e single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves" Indeed, in linguistics the terms ''deixis'' and ''indexicality'' are often treated as synonymous, the only distinction being that the former is more common in linguistics and the latter in philosophy of language. This usage stands in contrast with that of linguistic anthropology, which distinguishes deixis as a particular subclass of indexicality.

In linguistic anthropology

The concept of indexicality was introduced into the literature of linguistic anthropology by Michael Silverstein in a foundational 1976 paper, "Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description". Silverstein draws on "the tradition extending from Peirce to Jakobson" of thought about sign phenomena to propose a comprehensive theoretical framework in which to understand the relationship between language and culture, the object of study of modern sociocultural anthropology. This framework, while also drawing heavily on the tradition of structural linguistics founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, rejects the other theoretical approaches known as structuralism, which attempted to project the Saussurean method of linguistic analysis onto other realms of culture, such as kinship and marriage (see structural anthropology), literature (see semiotic literary criticism), music, film and others. Silverstein claims that " at aspect of language which has traditionally been analyzed by linguistics, and has served as a model" for these other structuralisms, "is just the part that is functionally unique among the phenomena of culture." It is indexicality, not Saussurean grammar, which should be seen as the semiotic phenomenon which language has in common with the rest of culture.

Silverstein argues that the Saussurean tradition of linguistic analysis, which includes the tradition of structural linguistics in the United States founded by Leonard Bloomfield and including the work of Noam Chomsky and contemporary generative grammar, has been limited to identifying "the contribution of elements of utterances to the referential or denotative value of the whole", that is, the contribution made by some word, expression, or other linguistic element to the function of forming "propositions— predications descriptive of states of affairs". This study of reference and predication yields an understanding of one aspect of the meaning of utterances, their ''semantic meaning'', and the subdiscipline of linguistics dedicated to studying this kind of linguistic meaning is semantics.

Yet linguistic signs in contexts of use accomplish other functions than pure reference and predication—though they often do so simultaneously, as though the signs were functioning in multiple analytically distinct semiotic modalities at once. In the philosophical literature, the most widely discussed examples are those identified by J.L. Austin as the performative functions of speech, for instance when a speaker says to an addressee "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow", and in so saying, in addition to simply making a proposition about a state of affairs, actually enters into a socially constituted type of agreement with the addressee, a wager. Thus, concludes Silverstein, " e problem set for us when we consider the actual broader uses of language is to describe the total meaning of constituent linguistic signs, only part of which is semantic." This broader study of linguistic signs relative to their general communicative functions is pragmatics, and these broader aspects of the meaning of utterances is ''pragmatic meaning''. (From this point of view, semantic meaning is a special subcategory of pragmatic meaning, that aspect of meaning which contributes to the communicative function of pure reference and predication.).

Silverstein introduces some components of the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce as the basis for a pragmatics which, rather than assuming that reference and predication are the essential communicative functions of language with other nonreferential functions being mere addenda, instead attempts to capture the total meaning of linguistic signs in terms of all of their communicative functions. From this perspective, the Peircean category of indexicality turns out to "give the key to the pragmatic description of language."

This theoretical framework became an essential presupposition of work throughout the discipline in the 1980s and remains so in the present.

Adaptation of Peircean semiotics

The concept of indexicality has been greatly elaborated in the literature of linguistic anthropology since its introduction by Silverstein, but Silverstein himself adopted the term from the theory of sign phenomena, or semiotics, of Charles Sanders Peirce. As an implication of his general metaphysical theory of the three universal categories, Peirce proposed a model of the sign as a triadic relationship: a sign is "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity." Thus, more technically, a sign consists of

* A ''sign-vehicle'' or ''representamen'', the perceptible phenomenon which does the representing, whether audibly, visibly or in some other sensory modality;''Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms''
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* An ''object'', the entity of whatever kind, with whatever modal status (experienceable, potential, imaginary, law-like, etc.), which is represented by the sign; and
* An ''interpretant'', the "idea in the mind" of the perceiving individual, which interprets the sign-vehicle ''as'' representing the object.

Peirce further proposed to classify sign phenomena along three different dimensions by means of three trichotomies, the second of which classifies signs into three categories according to the nature of the relationship between the sign-vehicle and the object it represents. As captioned by Silverstein, these are:

*''Icon'': a sign in which "the perceivable properties of the sign vehicle itself have isomorphism to (up to identity with) those of the entity signaled. That is, the entities are 'likenesses' in some sense."
*''Index'': a sign in which "the occurrence of a sign vehicle token bears a connection of understood spatio-temporal contiguity to the occurrence of the entity signaled. That is, the presence of some entity is perceived to be signaled in the context of communication incorporating the sign vehicle."
*''Symbol'': the residual class, a sign which is not related to its object by virtue of bearing some qualitative likeness to it, nor by virtue of co-occurring with it in some contextual framework. These "form the class of 'arbitrary' signs traditionally spoken of as the fundamental kind of linguistic entity. Sign vehicle and entity signaled are related through the bond of a semantico-referential meaning" which permits them to be used to refer to any member of a whole class or category of entities.

Silverstein observes that multiple signs may share the same sign-vehicle. For instance, as mentioned, linguistic signs as traditionally understood are symbols, and analyzed in terms of their contribution to reference and predication, since they arbitrarily denote a whole class of possible objects of reference by virtue of their semantic meanings. But in a trivial sense each linguistic sign token (word or expression spoken in an actual context of use) also functions iconically, since it is an icon of its type in the code (grammar) of the language. It also functions indexically, by indexing its symbol type, since its use in context presupposes that such a type exists in the semantico-referential grammar in use in the communicative situation (grammar is thus understood as an element of the context of communication).

So icon, index and symbol are not mutually exclusive categories—indeed, Silverstein argues, they are to be understood as distinct modes of semiotic function, which may be overlaid on a single sign-vehicle. This entails that one sign-vehicle may function in multiple semiotic modes simultaneously. This observation is the key to understanding deixis, traditionally a difficult problem for semantic theory.

Referential indexicality (deixis)

In linguistic anthropology, ''deixis'' is defined as referential indexicality—that is, morphemes or strings of morphemes, generally organized into closed paradigmatic sets, which function to "individuate or single out objects of reference or address in terms of their relation to the current interactive context in which the utterance occurs.". ''Deictic'' expressions are thus distinguished, on the one hand, from standard denotational categories such as common nouns, which potentially refer to any member of a whole class or category of entities: these display purely semantico-referential meaning, and in the Peircean terminology are known as ''symbols''. On the other hand, deixis is distinguished as a particular subclass of indexicality in general, which may be nonreferential or altogether nonlinguistic.

In the older terminology of Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson

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