In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign pointing to (or indexing) some element 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'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 "[t]he single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves" 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 "[t]hat 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. Thus, concludes Silverstein, "[t]he 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.). 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;
  • An object, the entity of whatever kind, with whatever modal status (experienceable, potential, imaginary, law-like, etc.), which is represented by the sign; 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, these forms were called shifters. Silverstein, by introducing the terminology of Peirce, was able to define them more specifically as referential indexicals. Of particular note are: sex/gender indices, deference indices (including the affinal taboo index), affect indices, as well as the phenomena of phonological hypercorrection and social identity indexicality.

Indexical order

In much of the research currently conducted upon various phenomena of non-referential indexicality, there is an increased interest in not only what is called first-order indexicality, but subsequent second-order as well as "higher-order" levels of indexical meaning. First-order indexicality can be defined as the first level of pragmatic meaning that is drawn from an utterance. For example, instances of deference indexicality, such as the variation between informal tu and formal vous in French, indicate a speaker/addressee communicative relationship built upon the values of power and solidarity possessed by the interlocutors. When a speaker addresses somebody using the V form instead of the T form, they index (via first-order indexicality) their understanding of the need for deference to the addressee. In other words, they perceive or recognize an incongruence between their levels of power and/or solidarity and employ a more formal way of addressing that person to suit the contextual constraints of the speech event.

Second-Order Indexicality is concerned with the connection between linguistic variables and the metapragmatic meanings that they encode. For example, a woman is walking down the street in Manhattan and she stops to ask somebody where a McDonald's is. He responds to her talking in a heavy "Brooklyn" accent. She notices this accent and considers a set of possible personal characteristics that might be indexed by it (such as the man's intelligence, economic situation, and other non-linguistic aspects of his life). The power of language to encode these preconceived "stereotypes" based solely on accent is an example of second-order indexicality (representative of a more complex and subtle system of indexical form than that of first-order indexicality).

Sex/gender indices

One common system of non-referential indexicality is sex/gender indices. These indices index the gender or "female/male" social status of the interlocutor. There are a multitude of linguistic variants that act to index sex and gender such as:

  • word-final or sentence-final particles: many languages employ the suffixation of word-final particles to index the gender of the speaker. These particles vary from phonological alterations such as the one explored by William Labov in his work on postvocalic /r/ employment in words that had no word final "r" (which is claimed, among other things, to index the "female" social sex status by virtue of the statistical fact that women tend to hypercorrect their speech more often than men); suffixation of single phonemes, such as /-s/ in Muskogean languages of the southeastern United States;

Many instances of sex/gender indices incorporate multiple levels of indexicality (also referred to as indexical order). The interlocutor of the event "decodes" these verbal messages of affect by giving "precedence to intentionality"; The direct form indexes intimacy and "spontaneous self-expression" in contexts involving family and close friends. Contrarily, distal form index social contexts of a more formal, public nature such as distant acquaintances, business settings, or other formal settings.

Japanese also contains a set of humble forms (Japanese kenjōgo 謙譲語) which are employed by the speaker to index their deference to someone else. There are also suppletive forms that can be used in lieu of regular honorific endings (for example, the subject honorific form of : . Verbs that involve human subjects must choose between distal or direct forms (towards the addressee) as well as a distinguish between either no use of referent honorifics, use of subject honorific (for others), or use of humble form (for self). The Japanese model for non-referential indexicality demonstrates a very subtle and complicated system that encodes social context into almost every utterance.

Affinal taboo index

Dyirbal, a language of the Cairns rain forest in Northern Queensland, employs a system known as the affinal taboo index. Speakers of the language maintain two sets of lexical items: 1) an "everyday" or common interaction set of lexical items and 2) a "mother-in-law" set that is employed when the speaker is in the very distinct context of interaction with their mother-in-law. In this particular system of deference indices, speakers have developed an entirely separate lexicon (there are roughly four "everyday" lexical entries for every one "mother-in-law" lexical entry; 4:1) to index deference in contexts inclusive of the mother-in-law.

Hypercorrection as a social class index

Hypercorrection is defined by Wolfram as "the use of speech form on the basis of false analogy." DeCamp defines hypercorrection in a more precise fashion claiming that "hypercorrection is an incorrect analogy with a form in a prestige dialect which the speaker has imperfectly mastered." Many scholars argue that hypercorrection provides both an index of "social class" and an "Index of Linguistic insecurity". The latter index can be defined as a speaker's attempts at self-correction in areas of perceived linguistic insufficiencies which denote their lower social standing and minimal social mobility.

Donald Winford conducted a study that measured the phonological hypercorrection in creolization of English speakers in Trinidad. He claims that the ability to use prestigious norms goes "hand-in-hand" with knowledge of stigmatization afforded to use of "lesser" phonological variants.

Linguistic and non-linguistic indices are also an important ways of indexing social identity. For example, the Japanese utterance -wa in conjunction with raising intonation (indexical of increasing affect) by one person who "looks like a woman" and another who looks "like a man" may index different affective dispositions which, in turn, can index gender difference.

Oinoglossia (wine talk)

For demonstrations of higher (or rarefied) indexical orders, Michael Silverstein discusses the particularities of "life-style emblematization" or "convention-dependent-indexical iconicity" which, as he claims, is prototypical of a phenomenon he dubs "wine talk". Professional wine critics use a certain "technical vocabulary" that are "metaphorical of prestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly horticulture." This exclusive focus on linguistic expressions represents a narrower construal than is preferred in linguistic anthropology, which regards linguistic indexicality (deixis) as a special subcategory of indexicality in general, which is often nonlinguistic.

Indexicals appear to represent an exception to, and thus a challenge for, the understanding of natural language as the grammatical coding of logical propositions; they thus "raise interesting technical challenges for logicians seeking to provide formal models of correct reasoning in natural language." Other philosophers have described similar phenomena. Tim S. Roberts refers to the question of why a particular organism out of all the organisms that happen to exist happens to be you as the "Even Harder Problem of Consciousness". Herbert Spiegelberg has referred to it as the "I-am-me experience", or the "Ich-Erlebnis" in German. Japanese philosopher Hitoshi Nagai has used the concept of first person perspectives as a way of defining the self, defining the self as the "one who directly experiences the consciousness of oneself".

Similar ideas have been discussed by Thomas Nagel in the book The View from Nowhere. It contrasts passive and active points of view in how humanity interacts with the world, relying either on a subjective perspective that reflects a point of view or an objective perspective that takes a more detached perspective. Nagel describes the objective perspective as the "view from nowhere", one where the only valuable ideas are ones derived independently.

The concept of indexicality has also been applied to the anthropic principle, also known as the observation selection effect. In the book Anthropic Bias, Nick Bostrom investigates how to reason when one suspects that evidence is biased by "observation selection effects", in other words, when the evidence presented has been pre-filtered by the condition that there was some appropriately positioned observer to "receive" the evidence. This conundrum is sometimes called "self-locating beliefs", or "indexical information".

The book first discusses the fine-tuned universe hypothesis and its possible explanations, notably considering the possibility of a multiverse. Bostrom argues against the self-indication assumption (SIA), a term he uses to characterize some existing views, and introduces the self-sampling assumption (SSA). He later refines SSA into the strong self-sampling assumption (SSSA), which uses observer-moments instead of observers to address certain paradoxes in anthropic reasoning.

David Lewis proposed a thought experiment in which there are two omniscient gods. The gods each live in different possible worlds, and know all propositional facts about their particular world. One god lives on top of the tallest mountain and throws manna, while the other lives on top of the coldest mountain and throws thunderbolts. Lewis argued that the gods would still be ignorant about which particular god they are, and that if they lack knowledge but not propositional knowledge, this implies the existence of non-propositional facts. Each world is "centered" around an individual in a way that is indexical rather than propositional.

See also

  • Conversational scoreboard
  • Quasi-indexical

References

  • Arché Bibliography of Indexicals
  • Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms, consisting in Peirce's own definitions and characterizations. See "Index".
  • Demonstratives & Indexicals at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.