the study of signs. When focusing on “signs,” scholars are able to study all varieties of
communicative signaling, including but not confined to linguistic communication. See
generally Mertz and Parmentier, Semiotic Mediation. A common analytic division distin-
guishes several ways that language (or signs generally) carries meaning: (1) semantics: the
decontextual meaning that is given by conventional “definition”; for example, when I say
“rose,” you can interpret what I am saying in part because you know that the word “rose”
generally indicates flowers of a certain kind; (2) pragmatics: the meaning that develops
from contexts of speaking; for example, it is pretty difficult to understand the actual mean-
ing or referent of a phrase such as “this rose” without knowing about the context in which
it was spoken (because the word “this” generally indicates things that are close by in such
a context of communication)—thus part of the meaning of that phrase when it is used (the
pragmatic part) comes from its context, for example, from the existence of a flower that is
situated close to the speaker of the utterance; (3) syntax: the meaning that relies on the
groupings of words into phrases, one with another, in utterances; for example, our deci-
phering of the phrase “this rose” also depends in part on the relationship of the two words
to one another and our understandings of what it means to string these two particular words
together in this way (a word of the syntactic Determinant category followed by one of the
Noun category, making up a regular phrase type).
- See Silverstein, “Shifters” and “Metapragmatic Discourse.” For work that simi-
larly focuses on the social context of discourse and language socialization, see Bakhtin, The
Dialogic Imagination; Vygotsky, Collected Works, vol. 1; Wertsch, Vygotsky and the Social
Formation of Mind. - For early scholarship pointing the way on this issue, see Kurylowicz, “Deictic
Elements”; Prague School, Melanges Linguistiques. - Contrast this view with the attempts of self-appointed language “purists” to keep
language static (e.g., the efforts of pundits such as William Safire to chastise people for
“incorrect” and otherwise shocking shifts in language use), and you will understand why
anthropological linguists take particular pleasure in poking fun at those who would at-
tempt to police and stop grammatical variation or change. See Silverstein, “Monoglot
‘Standard,’ ” 15. Scholars focusing on how social power issues emerge around fights over
language would add that “correct” usage almost always reflects which speakers in a so-
ciety have greater or less power, status, and/or prestige. - When we refer to previous contexts of speaking, linguists would say that we are
speaking “interdiscursively.” - Gumperz, Discourse Strategies; Duranti and Goodwin, Rethinking Context; Duranti,
Linguistic Anthropology. Brenneis has consistently drawn our attention to the role of
coproducers of narrative as well as to the role of the audience in structuring speech, par-
ticularly in legal and political discourse. Brenneis, “Grog and Gossip” and “Performing
Passions”; see also Duranti and Brenneis, The Audience as Co-Author. - See Silverstein, “Limits of Awareness.” Creative acts of language use, playing
against past routinized usages, enter the shared reservoirs of grammar and discourse struc-
tures to change them. Thus, a new form of poetry at once draws on existing understand-
ings of what poetry is and has been, plays against those previous understandings, and alters
future understandings. This kind of process is at work all over in the law, in politics, and
in society generally. For example, Victor Turner tells us that Beckett changed the notion
of the martyr in deploying commonly shared symbols to creative new use. See Turner,
Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. - See (Ochs-)Keenan, “Sliding Sense of Obligatoriness”; Parmentier, “The Politi-
cal Function of Reported Speech”; Silverstein,”Metaforces of Power in Traditional Ora-
tory.” This relationship, which is at once iconic (mirroring) and indexical (relying on
Notes to Pages 18–19 231