How Israelis Represent the Problem of Violence in Their Schools 163speaker‘s ̳conservativeness‘.^72 For example, a writer/speaker would be labeled ̳conservative‘
if they believed that the school should establish stricter control over students, but also if, by
extension, they called for stricter control of the mass media, or the government‘s control of
school boards (in the name of stricter measures). Note then how the dominant ideology again
both constrains and supports the common causal propositions that constitute the focal
discursive construction by indexing regular identities at a second logical order of analysis
(and we speak semiotically here of a logical second order simply because it presupposes the
propositional one in order to function). This indexical functioning joins with the causal
propositions to form regular component parts of the social life of this discursive practice.
That the political principle for this second-order indexical system relating to speaker
identity emerges from an officially dominant political ideology about Israeli society, in ways
not unlike a comparable one in the United States, is not surprising. As the problem of school
violence (and other ̳similar‘ social problems) are framed at least in part by this highly
conscious, dominant ideology, an explicit position taken on the problem, such as a causal
explanation of it or even a proposed solution, is tantamount to signaling a complicated but
widespread form of in-group/out-group membership with respect to the speaker‘s (or writer‘s)
status in the national collectivity as a whole.
WITHIN AND ACROSS DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS
The above example is not in any way intended to exhaust a look at the indexical life of
the focal discursive construction. Different oppositions could be set up to motivate a virtually
unlimited number of overlapping indexical functions. Even based on only the kinds of causal
propositions considered here, newspapers could index ̳conservative‘ vs. ̳liberal‘ or
̳objective‘ vs. ̳sensationalistic‘ identities, to name but two ideologically supported and thus
widespread oppositions. Similarly, without any further explanatory details, consider some of
the possible analytical perspectives that could emerge by comparatively crossing some
typology of the propositions themselves with typologies relating to: genres of newspaper
writing; periods of time; types of writer identity; types of reader/audience identity; types of
relative writer-audience framings; types of represented interactional framings involving direct
and indirect speech; and types of combinations of the propositions themselves as instances of
other kinds of linguistically-mediated interactional acts such as arguments, insults and
defenses, to name but a few. That this is not intended to be a complete list is the relevant
point. Rather it demonstrates two preliminary conclusions emerging from the analysis above.
First, many other overlapping indexical meanings could be discovered as constitutive
elements of this discursive construction. Second, to make assumptions about where and how
to find propositional regularities for any particular discursive construction is to create the very
(^72) Though this can be seen in the data often this is so only through a complex inference. One has to have additional
evidence about the way in which the writer (or quoted speaker) is being framed. It is rare that this political
identity was explicitly stated in the newspapers studied here. Context did often make it obvious however. That
said, the dominant form of evidence for this claim was ethnographic. Being one who obviously brought up this
issue quite often in contexts of social interaction, I was often made aware (sometimes painfully so) of the
identity indexicals that were involved. Moreover as the television media often relies on political oppositions to
frame the structure of its content, I witnessed it in action numerous times in that context as well.