We now recognize that the “realities” of meaningful social practices emerge from people’s situated experience of indexical semiotic processes that constitute them.
We ought, perhaps, to resign ourselves to enjoying the fact that it’s indexicality all the way down,
that in any sociocultural phenomenon nothing is manifest beyond this indexicality
except semanticoreferential language and its further developments
Michael Silverstein (1998: 128, emphases added).
This piece offers a perspective on linguistic anthropology, specifically on the iteration that emerged in the United States around the model of (meta)pragmatics, with the charismatic figure of Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) at its heart. Context is crucial to this model. Let us begin accordingly by considering the context of this article—in France, in the present moment.
In France, the uptake of Silverstein’s writings and (meta)pragmatics more broadly has been aleatory and intermittent. Three landmarks must be cited: In 1975, Silverst...
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