Ordre indexical et “second-order indexicality”

 

(Blommaert, 116) The point of departure is quite simple: indexicality, even though largely operating at the implicit level of linguistic/semiotic structuring, is not unstructured but ordered. It is ordered in two ways, and these forms of indexical order account for ‘normativity’ in semiosis. The first kind of order is what Silverstein (2003) called ‘indexical order’: the fact that indexical meanings occur in patterns offering perceptions of similarity and stability that can be perceived as ‘types’ of semiotic practice with predictable (presupposable/entailing) directions (cf. also Agha, 2003, 2005).

blommaert_indexicality.pdf — Jan Blommaert, Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis: Orders of Indexicality and Polycentricity, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2007, pp. 115-130. Dossier Indexicalité.

silverstein_indexical_order.pdf — Silverstein, M. (2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23, pp. 193–229.

agha_enregisterement.pdf — Agha, A. (2003) The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23, pp.  231–273. Dossier Registres et dialectes.

agha_voice_footing.pdf — Agha, A. (2005) Voice, footing, enregisterment. In A. Agha and S. Wortham (eds) Discourse Across Speech Events: Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Social Life. Special issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1), pp. 38–59. Dossier Voix.

 

1 / Des Registres de la voix à l'Ordre indexical

(Blommaert, 117) ‘Register’ is a case in point: clustered and patterned language forms that index specific social personae and roles, can be invoked to organise interactional practices (e.g. turns at talk, narrative), and have a prima facie stability that cansometimes be used for typifying or stereotyping (e.g. ‘posh’ accents — see Rampton, 2003). Speaking or writing through such registers involves insertion in recognisable (normative) repertoires of ‘voices’: one then speaks as a man, a lawyer, a middleaged European, and asylum seeker and so forth, and if done appropriately, one will be perceived as speaking as such (Agha, 2005). Indexical order, thus, is the metapragmatic organising principle behind what is widely understood as the ‘pragmatics’ of language.

Such forms of indexical order sometimes have long and complex histories of becoming (Agha, 2003 and Silverstein, 2003 offer excellent illustrations) often connected to the histories of becoming of nation-states and their cultural and sociolinguistic paraphernalia — the notion of a ‘standard language’ and its derivative, a particular ‘national’ ethnolinguistic identity (Errington, 2001; Silverstein, 1996, 1998).

silverstein_indexical_order.pdf — Michael Silverstein, Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life, Language & Communication 23 (2003): 193–229.

(Silverstein, 193) The claim of this paper is this: ‘indexical order’ is the concept necessary to showing us how to relate the micro-social to the macro-social frames of analysis of any sociolinguistic phenomenon. Such indexical order comes in integral, ordinal degrees, that is, first-order indexicality, second-order indexicality, etc., in the following general schema of dialectic: any n-th order indexical presupposes that the context in which it is normatively used has a schematization of some particular sort, relative to which we can model the ‘‘appropriateness’’ of its usage in that context. At the same time, there will tend to be a contextual entailment—a ‘‘creative’’ effect or ‘‘effectiveness’’ in context—regularly produced by the use of the n-th order indexical token as a direct (causal) consequence of the degree of (institutionalized) ideological engagement users manifest in respect of the n-th order indexical meaningfulness.

(Silverstein, 194) It is immediately seen that (1) n-th and n+1st order indexical values are, functionally, in dialectic competition one with another; and that (2) in the continued macro-realtime course of things, with sufficient ideological ‘‘oomph’’— force that follows from uniformity, intensity, and sociological spread—n+1st order indexicality would tend to supplant or at least to blend with such n-th order value; so that (3) this dialectical effect of micro-realtime indexicality must therefore constitute a major vectorial force in formal linguistic change.

J'étudierai ailleurs cet article fondamental ainsi que les illustrations d'une «indexicalité du second ordre» qu'on peut trouver dans l'œuvre de Asif Agha. Je prends seulement ici un exemple dans un beau texte récent de Kathryn Woolard.

 

2 / Pourquoi les sons deviennent des icônes

woolard_whyDatNow.pdf — Kathryn A.Woolard, [University of California, San Diego,] “Why dat [vs. that] now?: Linguistic-anthropological contributions to the explanation of sociolinguistic icons and change,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 432–452.

(437-438) Language users everywhere tend to associate particular linguistic forms with specific kinds of speakers or contexts of speaking (a basic assumption of variationist sociolinguistics). Meaning derived in this way from contiguity or association is known in the semiotics of C. S. Peirce (1960) (and others) as indexicality. In Silverstein’s system, which builds on Peirce’s work, first-order indexicality is the pre-ideological but still semiotic work of forming these associations… If first-order indexicality involves a semiotic act of noticing, second-order indexicality brings ideology to bear on the relationship noticed. Silverstein’s second-order indexicality involves the politically and/or morally loaded cultural construal of the first-order indexical association with an intentional content or meaning. At this second level, actors rationalize, explain, and thus inevitably naturalize and ideologize the sociolinguistic associations (indexical relations) that they have registered at the first order.

Cette naturalisation conduit à percevoir les sons comme des icônes sociolinguistiques: indexicalité du deuxième ordre.

Lire d'autres extraits de cet article: Anthropologie et Sociolinguistique

Excellent résumé de cet article par Buchholtz et Hall (2008: 408-409):

buchholtz_hall_sociocultural_linguistics.pdf — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics, Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, 2008: 401–431. Voir pp. 408-9.

The contribution by Kathryn Woolard is centrally concerned with how the linguistic-anthropological concept of linguistic ideology can be brought to bear on an issue long fundamental to variationist sociolinguistics: sound change. As Woolard notes, Silverstein’s (1985) original tripartite conceptualization of the ‘total linguistic fact’ gave equal attention to linguistic form, linguistic ideology, and social use, positioning linguistic ideology as the mediating link between the other two nodes. But linguistic anthropology has tended to focus on the relationship between linguistic ideology and social structure to the exclusion of linguistic form. Although numerous linguistic anthropologists have investigated the ways in which cultural readings of the place of language in social life contribute to the intensification of social hierarchy or the establishment of social identity, few have turned their attention to the potential of these readings for motivating particular kinds of sound change. Woolard addresses this gap by considering why it is that specific linguistic variables come to emerge in particular sociohistorical moments as sociolinguistic icons that drive sound change. Her answer relies on Joseph Errington’s (1985) use of the notion of ‘relative pragmatic salience,’ the phenomenon by which certain classes of morphemes and lexemes, among them personal pronouns and kin terms, are regarded by speakers as more conducive to doing social-semiotic work because of their prominence in mediating social relations. Revisiting a range of studies from both linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists, Woolard suggests that these pragmatically salient elements, by foregrounding specific phonological elements, can also provide ideological motivation for sound change. Her work thus brings together anthropological theories of linguistic ideology with variationist-sociolinguistic work on phonological change, offering an innovative-sociostructural answer to the question of why sociolinguistic icons become iconic.