Phase 2/Component 2: Construing indexicals

In Phase 1, the discourse analyst describes the narrated events, identifying characters, and cultural models that might serve as resources for social action in the narrating event. In Phase 2/Component 1, the discourse analyst locates deictics, reported speech, and evaluative indexicals that might signal the social action occurring. We focus on these three types of indexicals because of their potential to signal the social actions accomplished through discourse. But how do we know whether a given narrated pattern is in fact a resource for social action in the narrating event? How do we know whether an indexical sign is in fact important to signaling the social action occurring, and how do we know what that sign means? We can only answer these questions by, in Phase 2/Component 2, attending to metapragmatic processes (Silverstein, 1976, 1993). “Metapragmatics” refers to the signs and processes that describe how language performs action. “Metalanguage” is language referring to and characterizing language. “Metasemantics” is a more familiar subset of metalanguage, involving linguistic signs that describe the semantic meaning of linguistic forms (as in explicit definitions). “Metapragmatics” is a less familiar type of metalanguage, describing linguistic signs that sometimes explicitly denote but more often implicitly organize the social action accomplished through discourse.

Metapragmatic models construe indexical signs. A given sign might have more than one potential implication for the social action occurring in the narrating event. In the example of Tyisha the beast in Chapter 1, her utterance “my goal is to win in Nintendo” could have had various implications. It could have pointed to potentially relevant contexts that supported more than one metapragmatic model of the interaction. Perhaps Tyisha just said that while trying to win an academic argument with the teacher, and it did not really matter whether or not she plays video games. Perhaps she was joking when she suggested that video games were one of her primary interests, and perhaps the teachers and students knew that she was in fact a diligent student. Or perhaps she was actually interested in video games to the exclusion of other activities like schoolwork. These are three possible models for construing that utterance and the indexical signs in it. As shown in Chapter 1, the evaluative indexical “Nintendo” in fact came to presuppose a model of intellectually deadening video game activities and students like Tyisha who allegedly favor such activities over intellectually productive ones.

In Phase 2/Component 2, the discourse analyst attends to salient indexicals and the contexts that they make salient, and then infers which metapragmatic models might make sense of this context and thereby describe the social action occurring in the discursive interaction. In other words, the analyst develops provisional accounts of the entextualization occurring in the discursive interaction. In this section, we describe how metapragmatic discourse can be explicit or implicit. Then, we describe two key processes that discourse analysts should focus on as they identify the metapragmatic construals that participants make of salient indexicals. We introduced the first process in Chapter 1: through voicing, speakers identify narrated characters as having identifiable social roles. Through evaluation, speakers position themselves with respect to these voices, taking evaluative stances on the voiced characters, on other features of the social world, and on other participants.