Of course, in pragmatic terms, the repeat itself indexes an unsuccessful answer,
and this structural pragmatic message is often reinforced through pitch and intonation.
Thus, although there is nonuptake in a referential sense, there is some pragmatic response
in the subsequent question to the previous answer, the response being a negative indica-
tion about the answer that preceded it. Conversation analysts would approach this as a
form of repair, in which the professor is attempting to prompt the student to correct her
previous utterance.
Collins, “Socialization to Text”; see also Anyon, “Social Class and School Knowl-
edge”; Leacock, “Education in Africa.” On uptake generally, see Collins, “Using Cohesion
Analysis.”
This opens up some interesting comparisons between professorial modes of dis-
cursive control in law classrooms and judges’ approaches to maintaining courtroom con-
trol. See Philips, Ideology. An obvious parallel is the constant control of turns and therefore
shaping of ongoing discourse by attorneys and judges. Id.; see also Atkinson and Drew,
Order in Court.
There are actually a variety of possible procedural wrinkles; for example, the case
may have been shaped by the procedures of the administrative agency whose decision is
under review. For ease of reference I use the trial court as a model here.
Levi, Introduction.
Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, 98–99.
As noted in Chapter 2, anthropological linguists would speak of this as an in-
dexical and iconic relationship, drawing from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. By
“index,” we mean that it carries significance because it points to its meaning in context.
Interestingly, in this case, the language used is also an icon of its meaning; that is, it car-
ries meaning by virtue of a similarity in shape or form (just as, for example, a triangle
can represent a pyramid by virtue of a shared form). See Peirce, Collected Papers; see also
Mertz, “Beyond Symbolic Anthropology.” When these two functions combine to create
an indexical icon—that is, signs carrying meaning both by pointing to context and by
echoing the form of that which they represent—they become particularly potent vehicles
for cultural meanings. See Silverstein, “Metaforces of Power”; Mertz, “Recontextuali-
zation as Socialization.” Silverstein and Parmentier have demonstrated how political
oratory can operate as an indexical icon of the social structure it reinforces. Silverstein,
“Metaforces of Power”; Parmentier, “The Political Function of Reported Speech.” One
interesting implication of this sort of analysis is that the pragmatic structure of language
may, in certain crucial institutionalized situations, work at a level of which speakers are
unaware to make some social outcomes seem natural or inevitable. This subliminal as-
pect of the pragmatic structure of major cultural discourse forms would seem to be of
particular interest in situations where language is used for socialization and the creation
of new social identities.
As we have seen, the structure of classic Socratic classroom discourse mirrors the
ideology it seeks to impart at the same time as it points to aspects of text that are ideologi-
cally significant. If we were to look for the legal equivalent of the “model of the polity”
that is sometimes mirrored and indexed in political rhetoric, the parallel here would be
the core legal model of argumentative discourse as a source of truth. As we will see, this
fundamental trope lies at the heart of the model of justice that is conveyed to law students,
providing epistemological anchoring and normative orientation. In Peircean terms, then,
Socratic classroom discourse is an indexical icon of the worldview it attempts to convey,
and thus can arguably pack a powerful subliminal punch in reorienting students to a new
legal reading of texts.
