20 Introduction
scholars, researchers studying language are stressing the centrality of social con-
text and human creativity in the analysis of how the potentials inherent in language
structures actually play out in everyday life. Previous work had, for the most part,
investigated the aspects of language structure or usage that are in some sense pre-
supposed when we speak.^36 We could concentrate, for example, on the fact that
using a highly formalized register of speech tends to convey social distance and
reinforce or create authority (“Yes, sir”). This is an aspect of meaning that is pre-
supposed before and apart from any particular instance of speaking. However, as
Silverstein’s research has demonstrated, exclusive focus on this dimension of speech
use can lead us to underestimate the creative, contextual, and contingent aspects
of human social interaction and speech. So, to continue our example, use of a highly
formalized register (“Yes, sir!”) in a joking tone, suddenly, with someone you have
just gotten to know a bit better, could actually convey and create intimacy. (Note
that it would do so by pushing both of you to suddenly focus on dimensions of the
context that cause the use of distant, formal language to seem anomalous—a con-
text that is continually emerging in the ongoing interaction between you.) This
aspect of meaning is contingent, created in the moment by particular speakers.
Obviously, any adequate model of linguistic meaning would need to consider both
presupposed backdrops and ongoing creativity in language use in order to achieve
a thorough understanding of how we forge, rupture, and maintain social relation-
ships in and through language.
Another interesting discovery emanating from the systematic study of language
use is the growing interest in the reflexive, or metalevel of language: the way lan-
guage is pointing to itself as it is used. We see this, for example, when we examine
indigenous speakers’ own understandings of how language works, otherwise known
as their “linguistic ideologies.” As Kathryn Woolard and Bambi Schieffelin explain,
summarizing several strands of thought in the field, the concept has been used in
a number of ways:
Linguistic/language ideologies have been defined as “sets of beliefs about language
articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language struc-
ture and use”... with a greater social emphasis as “self-evident ideas and objectives
a group holds concerning roles of language in the social experiences of members as
they contribute to the expression of the group” and “the cultural system of ideas about
social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political
interests”... and most broadly as “shared bodies of commonsense notions about the
nature of language in the world.”^37On the one hand, language ideology can operate at a broad, conscious level,
as when a social group is consciously linked with a form of speech that is taken to
mirror their identity (if a stigmatized subgroup of a population, for example, is
linked with a “lower” form of speech). Susan Gal and Judith Irvine would charac-
terize this as a form of iconicity or mirroring, one of several distinctive semiotic
processes that they identify as part of the process of linguistic ideologization.^38 On
the other hand, language ideology can also operate at a more subtle microlevel. It
turns out that how we conceive of the details of speaking is a central part of the
structuring of everyday discourse, not just an accidental or incidental aspect.^39 At