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Introduction: Rethinking indirection and the indexical cycle
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Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 279–282 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Editorial
Introduction: Rethinking indirection and the indexical cycle The articles in this special issue represent a number of ‘non-standard’ perspectives on the notion of indirection or indirectness in communication. They differ in focus and in some ways on the definition and usefulness of indirection, but have in common a linguistic anthropological view on the phenomenon, which in turn differs – and ‘rethinks’ – phenomena such as indirection in ways that linguistic pragmatics might not (but which we all think ought to consider). In general, the articles in this issue represent two directions of rethinking. The first rethinking questions the dominance of denotation and the second, the dominance of speaker intentionality. In various ways the authors show that language users rely much more on meaning processes that are not the denotational, or arbitrary symbolic, meaning than we often assume in linguistics and pragmatics; even though pragmatics certainly recognizes that meaning does not stop with denotation, the field often shares the assumption with other areas of linguistics that denotation is primary and more basic. However, the view of indirectness that emerges in the following pages shows that language users in interaction rely on indexical and metaphorical meaning at a basic level. In other words, indexical and metaphorical meaning processes are not something ‘added on,’ or ‘worked out’ (as the morphology of ‘connotation’ suggests) to assemble the basic meanings of utterances in interaction. The privileging of speaker intention by Searle (1969) has been one of the most-critiqued aspects of the speech act approach by linguistic anthropologists. These critiques bring up important issues in linguistic meaning, because they focus us on a debate over ‘where’ such meaning ‘exists,’ if it exists at all (an old philosophical saw, but still one that circulates): speaker, hearer, words, community, interaction, analyst? The most important insight arising from such critiques is to show that how speakers are ‘understood’ is not a universal; while we may be able to make generalizations about all the possible ways that humans make meaning in interaction, the default way of doing so in each culture is variable and not universal. Once this fact is understood, the idea that there is a universal way of representing ‘indirectness’ also becomes problematic, so that we need to look at each culture’s language ideology to understand how the people in that culture (or in a Sprechbund as discussed by Hymes, 1974) might conceive of indirectness. For linguistic anthropologists analyzing culturally contextualized talk in interaction, the destabilization of meaning away from both arbitrarily referring words and speaker intentions has gone from being a whisper to a booming drumbeat over the last 25 years. Analyses such as those by Rosaldo (1982), Duranti (1988), and papers in Goodwin and Duranti (1992) have been instrumental in showing the importance of ‘‘the audience as co-author’’ to take one prominent title in this literature (Duranti and Brenneis, 1986). This work has shown that intentionality-based meaning can be shown to be a language ideology (Schieffelin et al., 1998) of Western philosophy (Wittgenstein notwithstanding) and certainly of the dominant language ideologies of the majority of speakers in these ‘advanced’ cultures. However, even the arbitrary context-free association of words has been challenged by a view that argues that words represent accretions of use rather than dictionary entries, especially when viewed in actual interaction. These approaches draw particularly on Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of voicing. (It might be worth mentioning that there is support for this view from the approach in psycholinguistics and phonetics known as ‘exemplar theory,’ which provides evidence that words are stored as individual memory traces along with the contextual information of each particular use; see Port, 2007.) The contributors to this volume bring up these critiques in different ways, some of which could be seen to be, in fact, indirect. What is most important, I believe, is the variety of meaning-making processes that are discussed by the authors under the term indirectness or indirection. In what follows I will suggest how each contribution connects to these more general ‘rethinkings.’
0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.06.001
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Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 279–282
Marcyliena Morgan brings to light a different sort of indirectness, but one in which power and hierarchy are just as central as with honorifics. Morgan highlights the importance of the cultural sensitivity to different kinds of meaning, and showing how power and political systems can attune interactants to notice or not notice different kinds of meaning, and to use these in different ways. She shows several ways in which indirection is implicated in resistance to, as well as the construction of, racism in the United States. There is always a possible ‘real’ meaning to the forms overtly displayed, such that indirectness provides for covert communication. Morgan thus shows us, in a similar but much more overtly political way than Brown (1980), that indirection can be the default mode for interpretation; indeed, she suggests that one could hardly have a conversation in the African American community without the possibility of others interpreting one’s words in a different way than they are obviously intended. Morgan shows us one way of thinking of indirection beyond illocutionary force, by taking meaning into the realm of the participation framework (Goffman, 1981), again suggesting that these strategies are related originally to the subaltern position of African American culture. In this way, criticism of anyone (but especially whites) can be redirected somewhere else, perhaps to a different addressee, while the overhearer (ratified or not) is the actual, ‘intended’ target. Again, it depends on how the speech is ‘taken’ or ‘taken up’ by others (although not necessarily the addressee), moving ‘perlocutionary effect’ from a peripheral position in the analysis of indirection to front and center. In my article with Elka Ghosh Johnson, a taxonomy of some of these different forms of interaction is attempted, more to show the variety of indirectness types than to claims that this is somehow a ‘correct’ or even complete taxonomy. We base our definition of indirectness on a community understanding of meaning, including various indexical effects. We argue that any aspect of interaction – of which ‘illocutionary force’ is but one – can be accomplished in a non-canonical manner for a particular community. This definitional move addresses both the issue of intentionality and the issue of audience uptake: intentionality and its importance becomes based on the ideologies and ‘default’ understandings of the community, while uptake is always an issue in the meaning of any utterance. Deborah Tannen analyzes family conversations in which speakers voice other family members – a phenomenon she calls ventriloquizing. She shows that ventriloquizing works through a kind of indirectness in which interactants are directed away from the animator or the talk to the identity of the voice being ventriloquized. Tannen reminds us that the processes interactants use in conversation to make indirect meaning are part of a wider toolkit used commonly and unremarkably. She shows how we can see the linguistic meaning processes of abduction (Bateson, 1979), and languaging (Becker, 1995), analogical tropes (Friedrich, 1986), and dialogicality (Bakhtin, 1986) as processes of indirection, but ones that are common and in fact a ‘‘design feature of language’’ (Hockett, 1960). Readers will no doubt recognize the ventriloquizing that Tannen identifies as something they experience quite commonly as they recruit other voices to do interactional work they would themselves not do overtly, so again we find that these other ways of thinking about indirection are common. By drawing on Bakhtin, Bateson, Becker, and Friedrich, she shows us also that indirection is common – even basic – to the way that all meaning works in language. That the challenges to standard conceptions of indirection in this volume rely mostly on data from the United States shows that the rethinking of indirection is in fact something that needs to be a focus in every analysis, not just in ‘exotic’ cultures such as Western Samoa and the Ilongot. Nevertheless, we do have Susan Philips’ article focusing on Tongan culture and speech practices, particularly the use of honorifics in that language. Philips shows that honorific terms in Tongan are derived indirectly using processes of metaphor and semantic bleaching, but then further shows that in actual interaction the meanings of honorifics emerge from this vagueness largely by repetition and accretion. Honorifics are often assumed to fairly clearly convey hierarchical relationships, but Philips shows that Tongan honorifics reveal another facet of indirection phenomena, one that takes places more by accretion than by bypassing. Moreover, she shows how the Tongan language ideology surrounding honorifics makes the indirect process relevant. That is, there is a ‘standard’ ideology about what honorifics do and how they are used. We could see these as ‘direct’ uses of the honorifics, in that they are being used in the usual, presupposed manner. However, Philips shows that other uses can be employed, and that the meanings created by these uses tend to ‘sneak up’ on, in this case, the audience. This is an important way of realizing indirect meaning in context, because it is not simply several different elements that combine in proximity to one another in interaction, but the sequential and intertextual across a time span in interaction that allows a meaning to develop. The meanings of earlier uses of the honorifics therefore inform, and are reconfigured by, the later uses of the same form. Silverstein’s article was originally the discussant part of the panel upon which this special issue is based, and still performs some of that function in this volume, helpfully finding threads of commonality in the articles and making some striking theoretical conclusions. Silverstein goes the furthest of any of these articles towards completely throwing out the intentionality baby with the illocutionary bathwater. Like Tannen, he returns more generally to how
Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 279–282
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meaning works in language, and especially how indexicality is at the basis of that meaning. But he goes further to argue that indirectness is a ‘‘cover term’’ that has little analytic value, mainly because the ways in which indirectness can work (the actual tropes) are so varied and unpredictable. In other words, like Tannen he argues that indirection is basic to meaning in language, but then suggests that as a term ‘indirectness’ is not as useful as indexicality or the more specific phenomena analyzed by Tannen. He shows how the indirectness normally taught in textbooks on pragmatics and linguistics is based on a culturally bound ideology about how language works. Silverstein goes on to provide examples of some of the differing ways that language is seen as direct and indirect in different cultures. In one example, Silverstein explains how we might see the Worora (Western Australia) mother-in-law avoidance register as indirect, largely though the use of a limited set of words that imply that the speaker will be vague and thus as ‘uncommunicative’ as possible (which is the goal when speaking to a mother-in-law in this culture). This vagueness or non-specificity is an interesting current running through several of the articles in this issue. The honorifics discussed by Philips are the most obvious parallel: these honorifics, just as in the Worora mother-in-law register, are subject to ‘semantic bleaching,’ and are used when talking to specific personages. We could certainly argue that these two cases are indirectness, if what we understand by that is somehow ‘‘intending to mean more than you say.’’ However, in neither case is the use exceptional, and moreover users of these languages do not rely on elaborate logical reasoning to ‘recover’ the intention, and while we could rely on Gricean approaches to arrive at the meanings in use, this route nevertheless relies on specific cultural knowledge (for example, to recover the relevance of the use of an honorific). It makes more sense to jump through the kinds of tropic and abduction reasoning suggested by Tannen to assemble a coherent meaning for the terms. Of course, a knowledge of the ways the cultures themselves think about language (or at least the people in the cultures think, respond to, and talk about language) is essential if these vague and semantically bleached uses are to make any sense at all. Silverstein even shows that the direction of the reasoning – from general to specific – relies on culturally bound reasoning processes. It is not just Silverstein then, but all the articles taken together, that suggest the radical possibility that meaning is ‘indexicality all the way down,’ and that arbitrary symbolic meaning is meaning with so much indexical accretion that users fail to notice it. Thus, indirection is an indexical problem because, as it is traditionally conceived, it represents, as Silverstein points out, a creative rather than presupposing indexical use of some linguistic form. That is, when I use a question about one state of affairs (‘‘Have you had the time to read over my article?’’), I may be taken to be creatively indexing a requesting act as well (‘‘Please tell me what you thought of that article’’). Examples such as these, and especially the classic ‘‘Can you pass the salt?’’ are often understood by students in courses on pragmatics or discourse as being direct uses, and of course Brown and Levinson (1987) have a place for instances such as this: conventionalized indirectness. That is, the actual (grammatical) indirectness is not even seen as indirectness anymore because the form has, in effect, become the conventional ‘illocutionary force indicating device.’ I find that some students are baffled by this idea – they insist that ‘‘Can you pass the salt?’’ despite its grammatical form, is a direct request for the salt because only a young child or a weird linguist would provide the cheeky ‘‘Yes, I am capable of passing the salt’’ answer (which, note, is the answer that takes an extra beat to process for native speakers of American English). This example shows how indexicality often works in cycles, such that creative indexical uses (uses not expected from ‘rules of use’), when repeated widely enough in a community, come to be used with a presupposing understanding (that they become the unremarkable ‘rules of use,’ and are noticed when not observed more than when they are observed). To return to indirection, then, we find that we can argue some instances of indirection are completely creative, and that there needs to be some Grice-ish reasoning in order to assemble the meaning of an utterance. However, (especially in certain cultures, often termed ‘high-context,’ although such binary characterizations of all human cultures are inevitably problematic), we also can argue that indirection becomes more widely conventionalized into the ‘rules of use’ (this process is well-represented in the examples discussed by Morgan). Moreover the general pattern of creatively re-using one linguistic form for another can easily be expanded away from the speech act realm and into areas such as participation framework and figure, as shown by Tannen and Kiesling and Ghosh. Finally, a community may develop forms that have a pointedly vague context-free denotation in the local language ideology, and in fact rely on a creative indexing – or multiple creative indexings – in order to assemble a contextualized meaning, as shown by Philips and Silverstein. The point then is that this cycle of indexicality is not something fixed, but one that is potentially layered, as a formerly presupposing index (or direct use) is used creatively, and then is taken up by enough users in the community that the creative use evolves into the presupposed use, and so on. In addition, the path of such a cycle will be formulated partially through the linguistic and other ideologies of the community of language users. The implications for indirectness are simply that once a linguistic form or strategy is used in an ‘indirect’ manner enough, its use becomes presupposed –
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indirectness is expected and thus ceases to really be indirect. Of course, this cycle is often (as in English) held at bay by metapragmatic discourses and ideologies of language that valorize the context-free meanings of words and grammar. More importantly, these articles show that indirection is basic to human meaning. As Tannen points out and illustrates, the general processes of analogical, metaphorical reasoning are the basic stuff of human understanding, not just human art (ideas that Tannen identifies with Bateson, Becker, and Friedrich). More than anything else, the articles in this volume show us the importance of this observation, and provide some ways of beginning to think about this kind of meaning in interaction and culture in a more systematic and nuanced manner. Philips’s discussion of the use of honorifics shows the creative and more flexible ways that the honorifics are deployed by different speakers, even though they are in the same situation. In her case, one of the reasons to use different honorifics is to portray a different persona (or identity) or stance with respect to an audience. The use of honorifics is part of this verbal art, and the art would be less (or at least different) without them. The examples in Kiesling and Ghosh show a similar focus on verbal art and creativity in language use and meaning. None of the articles here suggests that indirectness as it is classically formulated, denotational meaning, and intentionality are never the basis for language users’ meaning in interaction. Rather, they suggest that these are but one type of possible meaning that users may orient to metapragmatically and culturally. This view complicates how we understand pragmatic meaning considerably because it means we must find a different basis for the meaning in language use. (Notice that meanings in dictionaries or grammars are not necessarily a problem, because they represent specific ideologies of organizing language in a context-free state; we could imagine more context-based reference materials as well, such as ethnographies of speaking (Hymes, 1974; Saville-Troike, 2002) or functional grammars Halliday and Mattiessen, 2004.) I hope that readers will find this possibility as intriguing as I have, and perhaps be inspired to look at their own language studies in a different way. References Bakhtin, Mikhail M., [1952–1953] 1986. The problem of speech genres. In: Emerson, C. and M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. The University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 60–102. Bateson, Gregory, 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Ballantine, New York. Becker, Alton L., 1995. Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Brown, Penelope, 1980. How and why are women more polite: some evidence from a Mayan community. In: McConnell-Ginet, S., Borker, R., Furman, N. (Eds.), Women and Language in Literature and Society. Praeger Publishers, New York, pp. 111–136. Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen, 1987. Politeness: Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Duranti, Alessandro, 1988. Intentions, language, and social action in a Samoan context. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 13–33. Duranti, Alessandro, Brenneis, Donald (Eds.), 1986. The Audience as Co-author. A special issue of Text 6(3). Friedrich, Paul, 1986. The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy. University of Texas Press, Austin. Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Goodwin, Charles, Duranti, Alessandro, 1992. Rethinking Context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Halliday, M.A.K., Mattiessen, Ian, 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar, third edition. Arnold, London. Hockett, Charles F., 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203, 88–96. Hymes, Dell, 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Port, Robert, 2007. How are words stored in memory? Beyond phones and phonemes. New Ideas in Psychology 25, 143–170. Rosaldo, Michelle Z., 1982. The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 1 (2), 203–237. Saville-Troike, Muriel, 2002. The Ethnography of Communication: An Introduction. Blackwell, Malden, MA. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Woolard, Kathryn A., Kroskrity, Paul V., 1998. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Searle, John R., 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Scott Kiesling is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. His research in sociolinguistics focuses on the areas of language and gender, style shifting and stance, ethnicity, language change, and social meaning in language. He is currently pursuing social meaning and language change in Pittsburgh speech, and is working on a pilot project on the development of awareness of social variation in small children (this is not a reference to his own small children!).
Scott Kiesling* University of Pittsburgh, Department of Linguistics, 2816 CL, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA *Tel.: +1 412 624 5916; fax: +1 412 624 6130 E-mail address: [email protected] 25 May 2009
Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 279–282 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Editorial
Introduction: Rethinking indirection and the indexical cycle The articles in this special issue represent a number of ‘non-standard’ perspectives on the notion of indirection or indirectness in communication. They differ in focus and in some ways on the definition and usefulness of indirection, but have in common a linguistic anthropological view on the phenomenon, which in turn differs – and ‘rethinks’ – phenomena such as indirection in ways that linguistic pragmatics might not (but which we all think ought to consider). In general, the articles in this issue represent two directions of rethinking. The first rethinking questions the dominance of denotation and the second, the dominance of speaker intentionality. In various ways the authors show that language users rely much more on meaning processes that are not the denotational, or arbitrary symbolic, meaning than we often assume in linguistics and pragmatics; even though pragmatics certainly recognizes that meaning does not stop with denotation, the field often shares the assumption with other areas of linguistics that denotation is primary and more basic. However, the view of indirectness that emerges in the following pages shows that language users in interaction rely on indexical and metaphorical meaning at a basic level. In other words, indexical and metaphorical meaning processes are not something ‘added on,’ or ‘worked out’ (as the morphology of ‘connotation’ suggests) to assemble the basic meanings of utterances in interaction. The privileging of speaker intention by Searle (1969) has been one of the most-critiqued aspects of the speech act approach by linguistic anthropologists. These critiques bring up important issues in linguistic meaning, because they focus us on a debate over ‘where’ such meaning ‘exists,’ if it exists at all (an old philosophical saw, but still one that circulates): speaker, hearer, words, community, interaction, analyst? The most important insight arising from such critiques is to show that how speakers are ‘understood’ is not a universal; while we may be able to make generalizations about all the possible ways that humans make meaning in interaction, the default way of doing so in each culture is variable and not universal. Once this fact is understood, the idea that there is a universal way of representing ‘indirectness’ also becomes problematic, so that we need to look at each culture’s language ideology to understand how the people in that culture (or in a Sprechbund as discussed by Hymes, 1974) might conceive of indirectness. For linguistic anthropologists analyzing culturally contextualized talk in interaction, the destabilization of meaning away from both arbitrarily referring words and speaker intentions has gone from being a whisper to a booming drumbeat over the last 25 years. Analyses such as those by Rosaldo (1982), Duranti (1988), and papers in Goodwin and Duranti (1992) have been instrumental in showing the importance of ‘‘the audience as co-author’’ to take one prominent title in this literature (Duranti and Brenneis, 1986). This work has shown that intentionality-based meaning can be shown to be a language ideology (Schieffelin et al., 1998) of Western philosophy (Wittgenstein notwithstanding) and certainly of the dominant language ideologies of the majority of speakers in these ‘advanced’ cultures. However, even the arbitrary context-free association of words has been challenged by a view that argues that words represent accretions of use rather than dictionary entries, especially when viewed in actual interaction. These approaches draw particularly on Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of voicing. (It might be worth mentioning that there is support for this view from the approach in psycholinguistics and phonetics known as ‘exemplar theory,’ which provides evidence that words are stored as individual memory traces along with the contextual information of each particular use; see Port, 2007.) The contributors to this volume bring up these critiques in different ways, some of which could be seen to be, in fact, indirect. What is most important, I believe, is the variety of meaning-making processes that are discussed by the authors under the term indirectness or indirection. In what follows I will suggest how each contribution connects to these more general ‘rethinkings.’
0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.06.001
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Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 279–282
Marcyliena Morgan brings to light a different sort of indirectness, but one in which power and hierarchy are just as central as with honorifics. Morgan highlights the importance of the cultural sensitivity to different kinds of meaning, and showing how power and political systems can attune interactants to notice or not notice different kinds of meaning, and to use these in different ways. She shows several ways in which indirection is implicated in resistance to, as well as the construction of, racism in the United States. There is always a possible ‘real’ meaning to the forms overtly displayed, such that indirectness provides for covert communication. Morgan thus shows us, in a similar but much more overtly political way than Brown (1980), that indirection can be the default mode for interpretation; indeed, she suggests that one could hardly have a conversation in the African American community without the possibility of others interpreting one’s words in a different way than they are obviously intended. Morgan shows us one way of thinking of indirection beyond illocutionary force, by taking meaning into the realm of the participation framework (Goffman, 1981), again suggesting that these strategies are related originally to the subaltern position of African American culture. In this way, criticism of anyone (but especially whites) can be redirected somewhere else, perhaps to a different addressee, while the overhearer (ratified or not) is the actual, ‘intended’ target. Again, it depends on how the speech is ‘taken’ or ‘taken up’ by others (although not necessarily the addressee), moving ‘perlocutionary effect’ from a peripheral position in the analysis of indirection to front and center. In my article with Elka Ghosh Johnson, a taxonomy of some of these different forms of interaction is attempted, more to show the variety of indirectness types than to claims that this is somehow a ‘correct’ or even complete taxonomy. We base our definition of indirectness on a community understanding of meaning, including various indexical effects. We argue that any aspect of interaction – of which ‘illocutionary force’ is but one – can be accomplished in a non-canonical manner for a particular community. This definitional move addresses both the issue of intentionality and the issue of audience uptake: intentionality and its importance becomes based on the ideologies and ‘default’ understandings of the community, while uptake is always an issue in the meaning of any utterance. Deborah Tannen analyzes family conversations in which speakers voice other family members – a phenomenon she calls ventriloquizing. She shows that ventriloquizing works through a kind of indirectness in which interactants are directed away from the animator or the talk to the identity of the voice being ventriloquized. Tannen reminds us that the processes interactants use in conversation to make indirect meaning are part of a wider toolkit used commonly and unremarkably. She shows how we can see the linguistic meaning processes of abduction (Bateson, 1979), and languaging (Becker, 1995), analogical tropes (Friedrich, 1986), and dialogicality (Bakhtin, 1986) as processes of indirection, but ones that are common and in fact a ‘‘design feature of language’’ (Hockett, 1960). Readers will no doubt recognize the ventriloquizing that Tannen identifies as something they experience quite commonly as they recruit other voices to do interactional work they would themselves not do overtly, so again we find that these other ways of thinking about indirection are common. By drawing on Bakhtin, Bateson, Becker, and Friedrich, she shows us also that indirection is common – even basic – to the way that all meaning works in language. That the challenges to standard conceptions of indirection in this volume rely mostly on data from the United States shows that the rethinking of indirection is in fact something that needs to be a focus in every analysis, not just in ‘exotic’ cultures such as Western Samoa and the Ilongot. Nevertheless, we do have Susan Philips’ article focusing on Tongan culture and speech practices, particularly the use of honorifics in that language. Philips shows that honorific terms in Tongan are derived indirectly using processes of metaphor and semantic bleaching, but then further shows that in actual interaction the meanings of honorifics emerge from this vagueness largely by repetition and accretion. Honorifics are often assumed to fairly clearly convey hierarchical relationships, but Philips shows that Tongan honorifics reveal another facet of indirection phenomena, one that takes places more by accretion than by bypassing. Moreover, she shows how the Tongan language ideology surrounding honorifics makes the indirect process relevant. That is, there is a ‘standard’ ideology about what honorifics do and how they are used. We could see these as ‘direct’ uses of the honorifics, in that they are being used in the usual, presupposed manner. However, Philips shows that other uses can be employed, and that the meanings created by these uses tend to ‘sneak up’ on, in this case, the audience. This is an important way of realizing indirect meaning in context, because it is not simply several different elements that combine in proximity to one another in interaction, but the sequential and intertextual across a time span in interaction that allows a meaning to develop. The meanings of earlier uses of the honorifics therefore inform, and are reconfigured by, the later uses of the same form. Silverstein’s article was originally the discussant part of the panel upon which this special issue is based, and still performs some of that function in this volume, helpfully finding threads of commonality in the articles and making some striking theoretical conclusions. Silverstein goes the furthest of any of these articles towards completely throwing out the intentionality baby with the illocutionary bathwater. Like Tannen, he returns more generally to how
Editorial / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 279–282
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meaning works in language, and especially how indexicality is at the basis of that meaning. But he goes further to argue that indirectness is a ‘‘cover term’’ that has little analytic value, mainly because the ways in which indirectness can work (the actual tropes) are so varied and unpredictable. In other words, like Tannen he argues that indirection is basic to meaning in language, but then suggests that as a term ‘indirectness’ is not as useful as indexicality or the more specific phenomena analyzed by Tannen. He shows how the indirectness normally taught in textbooks on pragmatics and linguistics is based on a culturally bound ideology about how language works. Silverstein goes on to provide examples of some of the differing ways that language is seen as direct and indirect in different cultures. In one example, Silverstein explains how we might see the Worora (Western Australia) mother-in-law avoidance register as indirect, largely though the use of a limited set of words that imply that the speaker will be vague and thus as ‘uncommunicative’ as possible (which is the goal when speaking to a mother-in-law in this culture). This vagueness or non-specificity is an interesting current running through several of the articles in this issue. The honorifics discussed by Philips are the most obvious parallel: these honorifics, just as in the Worora mother-in-law register, are subject to ‘semantic bleaching,’ and are used when talking to specific personages. We could certainly argue that these two cases are indirectness, if what we understand by that is somehow ‘‘intending to mean more than you say.’’ However, in neither case is the use exceptional, and moreover users of these languages do not rely on elaborate logical reasoning to ‘recover’ the intention, and while we could rely on Gricean approaches to arrive at the meanings in use, this route nevertheless relies on specific cultural knowledge (for example, to recover the relevance of the use of an honorific). It makes more sense to jump through the kinds of tropic and abduction reasoning suggested by Tannen to assemble a coherent meaning for the terms. Of course, a knowledge of the ways the cultures themselves think about language (or at least the people in the cultures think, respond to, and talk about language) is essential if these vague and semantically bleached uses are to make any sense at all. Silverstein even shows that the direction of the reasoning – from general to specific – relies on culturally bound reasoning processes. It is not just Silverstein then, but all the articles taken together, that suggest the radical possibility that meaning is ‘indexicality all the way down,’ and that arbitrary symbolic meaning is meaning with so much indexical accretion that users fail to notice it. Thus, indirection is an indexical problem because, as it is traditionally conceived, it represents, as Silverstein points out, a creative rather than presupposing indexical use of some linguistic form. That is, when I use a question about one state of affairs (‘‘Have you had the time to read over my article?’’), I may be taken to be creatively indexing a requesting act as well (‘‘Please tell me what you thought of that article’’). Examples such as these, and especially the classic ‘‘Can you pass the salt?’’ are often understood by students in courses on pragmatics or discourse as being direct uses, and of course Brown and Levinson (1987) have a place for instances such as this: conventionalized indirectness. That is, the actual (grammatical) indirectness is not even seen as indirectness anymore because the form has, in effect, become the conventional ‘illocutionary force indicating device.’ I find that some students are baffled by this idea – they insist that ‘‘Can you pass the salt?’’ despite its grammatical form, is a direct request for the salt because only a young child or a weird linguist would provide the cheeky ‘‘Yes, I am capable of passing the salt’’ answer (which, note, is the answer that takes an extra beat to process for native speakers of American English). This example shows how indexicality often works in cycles, such that creative indexical uses (uses not expected from ‘rules of use’), when repeated widely enough in a community, come to be used with a presupposing understanding (that they become the unremarkable ‘rules of use,’ and are noticed when not observed more than when they are observed). To return to indirection, then, we find that we can argue some instances of indirection are completely creative, and that there needs to be some Grice-ish reasoning in order to assemble the meaning of an utterance. However, (especially in certain cultures, often termed ‘high-context,’ although such binary characterizations of all human cultures are inevitably problematic), we also can argue that indirection becomes more widely conventionalized into the ‘rules of use’ (this process is well-represented in the examples discussed by Morgan). Moreover the general pattern of creatively re-using one linguistic form for another can easily be expanded away from the speech act realm and into areas such as participation framework and figure, as shown by Tannen and Kiesling and Ghosh. Finally, a community may develop forms that have a pointedly vague context-free denotation in the local language ideology, and in fact rely on a creative indexing – or multiple creative indexings – in order to assemble a contextualized meaning, as shown by Philips and Silverstein. The point then is that this cycle of indexicality is not something fixed, but one that is potentially layered, as a formerly presupposing index (or direct use) is used creatively, and then is taken up by enough users in the community that the creative use evolves into the presupposed use, and so on. In addition, the path of such a cycle will be formulated partially through the linguistic and other ideologies of the community of language users. The implications for indirectness are simply that once a linguistic form or strategy is used in an ‘indirect’ manner enough, its use becomes presupposed –
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indirectness is expected and thus ceases to really be indirect. Of course, this cycle is often (as in English) held at bay by metapragmatic discourses and ideologies of language that valorize the context-free meanings of words and grammar. More importantly, these articles show that indirection is basic to human meaning. As Tannen points out and illustrates, the general processes of analogical, metaphorical reasoning are the basic stuff of human understanding, not just human art (ideas that Tannen identifies with Bateson, Becker, and Friedrich). More than anything else, the articles in this volume show us the importance of this observation, and provide some ways of beginning to think about this kind of meaning in interaction and culture in a more systematic and nuanced manner. Philips’s discussion of the use of honorifics shows the creative and more flexible ways that the honorifics are deployed by different speakers, even though they are in the same situation. In her case, one of the reasons to use different honorifics is to portray a different persona (or identity) or stance with respect to an audience. The use of honorifics is part of this verbal art, and the art would be less (or at least different) without them. The examples in Kiesling and Ghosh show a similar focus on verbal art and creativity in language use and meaning. None of the articles here suggests that indirectness as it is classically formulated, denotational meaning, and intentionality are never the basis for language users’ meaning in interaction. Rather, they suggest that these are but one type of possible meaning that users may orient to metapragmatically and culturally. This view complicates how we understand pragmatic meaning considerably because it means we must find a different basis for the meaning in language use. (Notice that meanings in dictionaries or grammars are not necessarily a problem, because they represent specific ideologies of organizing language in a context-free state; we could imagine more context-based reference materials as well, such as ethnographies of speaking (Hymes, 1974; Saville-Troike, 2002) or functional grammars Halliday and Mattiessen, 2004.) I hope that readers will find this possibility as intriguing as I have, and perhaps be inspired to look at their own language studies in a different way. References Bakhtin, Mikhail M., [1952–1953] 1986. The problem of speech genres. In: Emerson, C. and M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. The University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 60–102. Bateson, Gregory, 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Ballantine, New York. Becker, Alton L., 1995. Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Brown, Penelope, 1980. How and why are women more polite: some evidence from a Mayan community. In: McConnell-Ginet, S., Borker, R., Furman, N. (Eds.), Women and Language in Literature and Society. Praeger Publishers, New York, pp. 111–136. Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen, 1987. Politeness: Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Duranti, Alessandro, 1988. Intentions, language, and social action in a Samoan context. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 13–33. Duranti, Alessandro, Brenneis, Donald (Eds.), 1986. The Audience as Co-author. A special issue of Text 6(3). Friedrich, Paul, 1986. The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy. University of Texas Press, Austin. Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Goodwin, Charles, Duranti, Alessandro, 1992. Rethinking Context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Halliday, M.A.K., Mattiessen, Ian, 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar, third edition. Arnold, London. Hockett, Charles F., 1960. The origin of speech. Scientific American 203, 88–96. Hymes, Dell, 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Port, Robert, 2007. How are words stored in memory? Beyond phones and phonemes. New Ideas in Psychology 25, 143–170. Rosaldo, Michelle Z., 1982. The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 1 (2), 203–237. Saville-Troike, Muriel, 2002. The Ethnography of Communication: An Introduction. Blackwell, Malden, MA. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Woolard, Kathryn A., Kroskrity, Paul V., 1998. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Searle, John R., 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Scott Kiesling is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. His research in sociolinguistics focuses on the areas of language and gender, style shifting and stance, ethnicity, language change, and social meaning in language. He is currently pursuing social meaning and language change in Pittsburgh speech, and is working on a pilot project on the development of awareness of social variation in small children (this is not a reference to his own small children!).
Scott Kiesling* University of Pittsburgh, Department of Linguistics, 2816 CL, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA *Tel.: +1 412 624 5916; fax: +1 412 624 6130 E-mail address: [email protected] 25 May 2009