In comparison to an index or an icon, a symbol is an arbitrary sign and they only exist because of the way people interpret them. Symbols are conventional signs, elements of habit to do with cultural assumptions. They denote a certain type of thing rather than a general thing and have to have a connection to know what a symbol means. A symbol in use always includes an index for example: symbols used in the Apache cultural codes of speaking are grounded on habit and law although the frame of reference is an index used when a symbol is in use. (Lecture Notes, 7/10/’03). Examples of a symbol are language in general, numbers, Morse code, traffic lights, and national flags.
In this essay I would like to discuss the role of indexicality in the data of four of the authors on the reading list they are; Emile Benveniste, 1971 Subjectivity in Language, Loudes de Leon, 1998, The Emergent Participant, Erving Goffman, 1981, Footing in forms of Talk, and finally Asif Agha, 2003, The Social life of Cultural Value.
Emile Benveniste
According to Benveniste it is the oral, spoken and written language that makes it so distinctive, he argues there was never a time that human beings did not have a language and therefore language is an invention. Language is used as an instrument of communication because no other form of communication is more effective. The English language explained as words in a dictionary is an abstract system and does not belong to the person until a pronoun is used. The use of personal pronouns provides the means of subjectivity in language and without the expression of person in a language there is no such thing. Benveniste suggests that it is only in Far Eastern languages that the use of pronouns is left out. Language has ‘I’ in it and “when I speak therefore I constitute myself as a subject” (Benveniste, 1971:224). ‘I’ has a unique property that distinguishes it from anything else and so self-awareness is a product of ‘I’ therefore ‘I’ indexically refers to the context of utterance. Index has to do with contiguity ‘I’ comes into being as well as ‘you’ and constitutes social relations.
In a conversation where A says ‘I love you and B replies ‘I love you too’ ‘I’ is the utterance in both these statements, although they become acts of re-centring and one takes on the point of view of the other. When you talk to another person in fact you are exchanging pronouns, for example you as ‘I’ becomes you as ‘you’ in a reciprocal relationship. Therefore the individual is only a product of discourse and designates the speaker; when you engage in a conversation you are bringing into being two different characters. In a conversation ‘I’ inhabits A and B and the difference is in seeing something from the outside rather than the inside. All language is based on acts of centring; centred on the person with whom the conversation is taking place (Lecture Notes, 14/10/’03).
Different types of talk or speech events have different participation frameworks ‘You’ and ‘I’ are the simplest of the frameworks and are used as the social relationship of speech. Mass is a speech event with many events happening in the one ritual. Weddings are used to relate socially and a way of analysing verbal reaction therefore before there are social relations you have to have ‘I’ and ‘you’. The use of time in language; past tense, future tense separated by the present is grounded on the particular time of the act of speaking. It is grounded indexically to the pronouns in use within language. (Benveniste, 1971:227). In linguistics, time is self-referential or self- reflexive and deixis refers to indexical signs within language. These signs are the demonstratives, adverbs and adjectives which are used to arrange the “spatial and temporal relationship around the subject taken as the referent.” (Benveniste, 1971:226).
Loudes de Leon
This model of linguistic participation was derived from Goffman’s (1974, 1981) analysis of the speaker/hearer dyad as form of interaction. (de Leon, 1998:135). This participation structure advocates the child model; these children are taught to participate at a very young age. This participation may involve gestures, gaze direction, body-movements with little or no vocalisation other than gurgling; which is treated as a meaningful part of the child’s development by the adults and parents. Children are taught to speak even before they are actually able to, and at a very young age their social participation begins. This suggests a deep level of interaction between the parents and young children. Every gesture and sign is taken up and interpreted by the adults. Everything they do is communicative and every utterance is meaningful which is signified by the response of the adult to the child. (Lecture Notes, 21/10/03).
Returning to Pierce’s triadic model of signs for an example, the gurgle of the child is the representamon; the gesture or sound uttered by the child. The interpreton is the response by the adult to the child and the object is whatever intention the adult thinks the child wants or needs. From this early stage the children learn to interpret their actions as meaningful because the adults do. In the conversation between the grandfather, Mal and her mother Mel is embedded as speaker by her grandfather and her mother is the addressee. Even though Mel cannot answer her grandfather’s words she uses her gaze and shifts in position to follow the interaction between them (de Leon, 1998:147). Even though Mel is still unable to speak she still engages with her grandfather through perception, nearness, and the verbal clues used by her grandfather. On one level he is talking to the child and on the other level to the mother, by telling the child what to say he is teaching the child how to participate.
The change from the immediate participation framework to the performed one is indexed through the input of Mel and her role as Speaker prompted by her grandfather ‘say to her’.(de Leon, 1998:148).
Erving Goffman
At the beginning of Goffman’s article he shows how sensitive he is to subtle
nuances of interaction. He refers to Nixon and his exchange with a female reporter about her wearing slacks. This is an illustration of ‘footing’ and every interaction has these social relationships between participants which move from one footing to another. By moving Miss Thomas to a different social role Nixon changed the ‘ground’ of her participation; she became a sexualised object. He moves from formal governmental speech (while bill signing) and switches to a more informal type of speech (small talk) which switches from ‘dialect’ to ‘standard’ or from one code to another. Indexicality in this instance is the shift in footing from one form of speech to another and indexes can respond to a situation or create one referring to the past or the future (Goffman, 1981:125).
In Goffman’s dyadic model of conversation the ‘floor’ is exchanged between two participants in talk. These are ratified participants who are mutually acknowledged to be participating in the conversation, often indexed by formulaic opening and closing or greetings and farewells. In a conversation there are many types of non-ratified participants such as eavesdropper, over hearer and bystanders. Therefore the relation of a participant to the utterance is participation status and the other people in the group the participation framework an example of this is how the Apache were addressed as ‘targets’ in Keith basso’s book Wisdom sits in Places. (Lecture Notes, 9 /11/’03)
All conversations are not interactive as in the case of political addresses, lectures, poetry reading’s etc. There are different ways that a show constructs an audience, usually there is one speaker and an audience; they give the floor to the speaker and rarely get a chance to take it. In radio and TV broadcasts there are absent audiences and yet the announcer seems to be talking as if to one person which is a conversational mode of address but merely a simulated one. This is an indexical projection of a conversational framework onto a broadcast framework and is termed ‘embedding’. Stage actor’s entire interaction is framed as if it was a ‘self enclosed make belief realm’ (Goffman, 1981:139).
All types of verbal interaction have their own particular participation frameworks involving participants in particular types of ‘footing’. The role of speaker contains multiple social roles involved in speaking and according to Goffman these fall into three categories: Author, who is someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded: Animator, the person who actually utters the utterance and the Principle, the person whose words are being spoken whose beliefs are being told and someone committed to what the words say. By changing the speakers footing the footing of the listener is also changed (Lecture Notes, 11/11/’03).
Asif Agha
In his article Agha discusses the register of Standard British English now called Received Pronunciation or RP. Accordingly RP is a socially valued accent that most people in Britain are aware of. The term ‘accent’ names a folk concept and the contrast between accents or sound patterns distinguishes one group from another. Therefore ‘accent’ is not a monadic sound pattern but a pattern related to a framework of social identities (Agha, 2003:232). The identity of the speaker and the utterance
is acknowledged indexically as the social identity of the person but according to Agha (2003:233) your accent is determined by the geographical area that you come from. RP is an accent from the ‘locality’ that is indexical of a speaker’s class, education and is important as it erases the geographic sources of the speaker.
The circumstances where accent’s become recognisable, identifies the speakers social identity and their social class. Agha discusses a Liverpudlian accent which is recognised as a working class accent before being recognised as a British one. He cites Wells (1982,vol.1:33) “A Liverpool accent will strike a Chicagoan primarily as being British, a Glaswegian as being English, an English southerner as being northern, an English northerner as being Liverpudlian, and a Liverpudlian as being working class. The closer we get to home, the more refined are our perceptions.” RP is spoken only by a small few of the British population and there is a variety of speech for different situations media, government, and lecturing and these are emblems of the speaker’s status. Talk is a certain way of making a claim on who you are and prescribes the social personae. It is systematically linked to the values in society. One of the ways speakers differentiate between accents is to recognise the phonetical differences heard in utterances. (Agha, 2003:235).
Agha (2003) uses a cartoon with two characters to show the social failure of one man and the obvious and the aristocratic bearing of the other. There is no language used just various signs to visually show the improper behaviour of ‘Mr.Slim’ in his dress, posture, gait and gestures. It expresses ‘cross-modal icons or images of personhood’ a paradigm which compares the two images. One is of a lower class person and the other of an upper class person. Therefore anyone reading this cartoon would immediately assume the accents: the upper class gentleman was speaking RP and the lower class gentleman was not. (Agha, 2003:239). The moment you have accent as register and the fact that register is linked to the social personae, accent becomes an index which points to the presence or absence of social culturation. Accent indicates the social personae you inhabit and a role alignment with particular values, these particular styles or values are also icons. Indexical icons are therefore powerful kinds of ideological symbols: rough people talk in a rough way and refined people talk in a refined way. (Lecture Notes, 16/12/’03).
Society is built through acts of speaking with differences in role relationships and interaction. Goffman uses the metaphor of ‘footing to describe where you stand with other people. They begin on one footing and change to a different one depending on the interaction between them through the action of speaking. Pierce’s theory of signs is questioned by, amongst others, Beth Singer who argues that the major fault in his theory is that is not general enough: “it defines the term ‘sign’ as ‘sign of’ and thus makes it essential to a sign that it stands for something else.” (Cited in Colapietro 1987:205). Bakhtin uses a description of a kind of indexicality that is verbal utterances seen also as social interaction. Systems of speech come from the stratification of society and the division of labour which affects the way people speak and the way society is organised (Lecture notes, 25/11/’03).
In conclusion, the recent interest in the study of indexicality has shown that it is a universal feature of languages and more complicated than first thought. Indexicality cannot be understood without looking at the social and cultural contexts of speech although Hanks (2000) suggests that the abstractness and the amount of terms that describe indexicality, raise the question of agreement to the subject. As indexicality is based on contiguity it must be defined in relation to ‘local standards of copresence and relevance’ and that the structure and interpretation of indexicality is culturally specific. (Hanks, 2000).
Bibliography
Agha, A. 2003. The Social Life of Cultural value. Language and Communication 23(3-4):231-273.
Benveniste, E. 1971> Subjectivity in Language. Chapter 21 of Problems in General Linguistics. Mary Elizabeth Meek, transl. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press.
Colapietro, V. 1987. Is Pierce’s Theory of Sign Truly General? Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 18:285-310.
De Leon, L. 1998. The Emergent Participant: Interactive patterns in the socialisation of Yzotzil (Mayan) infants. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8(2):131-161.
Goffman, E. 1981. Footing in Forms of Talk. Philadelphia:University of Pensylvannia Press.
Hanks, W. F. 2000. Indexicality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology9(1-2):124-126.
Lecture Notes: 30/9, 7/10, 14/10, 21/10, 9/11, 25/11, 16/12/2003.
Pierce, C.S. 1931-1958 Icon, Index and Symbol. Chapter 3 of Book 2, Collected papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
De Saussure, F. 1974. Course in General Linguistics. Wade Baskin, Transl. London; Fontana/Collins.