Non-Referential Indexical Phenomena

Examples of non-referential forms of indexicality include sex/gender, affect, deference, social class, and social identity indices. Many scholars, notably Silverstein, argue that occurrences of non-referential indexicality entail not only the context-dependent variability of the speech event, but also increasingly subtle forms of indexical meaning (first, second, and higher-orders) as well [8].

Sex/Gender Indices

One common system of non-referential indexicality is sex/gender indices. These indices index the gender or “female/male” social status of the interlocutor. There are a multitude of linguistic variants that act to index sex and gender such as:

^ word-final or sentence-final particles: many languages employ the suffixation of word-final particles to index the gender of the speaker. These particles vary from phonological alterations such as the one explored by William Labov in his work on postvocalic /r/ employment in words that had no word final “r” (which is claimed, among other things, to index the “female” social sex status by virtue of the statistical fact that women tend to hypercorrect their speech more often than men); suffixation of single phonemes, such as /-s/ in Muskogean languages of the southeastern United States; or particle suffixation (such as the Japanese sentence-final use of -wa with rising intonation to indicate increasing affect and, via second-order indexicality, the gender of the speaker (in this case, female));

^ morphological and phonological mechanisms: such as in Yana, a language where one form of all major words are spoken by sociological male to sociological male, and another form (which is constructed around phonological changes in word forms) is used for all other combination of interlocutors; or the Japanese prefix-affixation of o- to indicate politeness and, consequently, feminine social identity [5].

Many instances of sex/gender indices incorporate multiple levels of indexicality (also referred to as indexical order) [8]. In fact, some, such as the prefix-affixation of o- in Japanese, demonstrate complex higher-order indexical forms. In this example, the first order indexes politeness and the second order indexes affiliation with a certain gender class. It is argued, that there is an even higher level of indexical order evidenced by the fact that many jobs use the o- prefix to attract female applicants [5]. This notion of higher-order indexicality is similar to Silverstein’s discussion of “wine talk” in that it indexes “an identity-by-visible-consumption [here, employment ]” that is an inherent of a certain social register, (i.e. social gender indexicality) [8].

Affect Indices

Affective meaning is seen as “the encoding, or indexing of speakers emotions into speech events” [1]. The interlocutor of the event “decodes” these verbal messages of affect by giving “precedence to intentionality” [1]; that is, by assuming that the affective form intentionally indexes emotional meaning.

Some examples of affective forms are:

R diminutives (for example, diminutive affixes in Indo-European and Amerindian languages indicate sympathy, endearment, emotional closeness, or antipathy, condescension, and emotional distance);

R ideophones and onomatopoeias;

R expletives, exclamations, interjections, curses, insults, and imprecations (said to be “dramatizations of actions or states”);

R intonation change (common in tone languages such as Japanese);

R address terms, kinship terms, and pronouns which often display clear affective dimensions (ranging from the complex address-form systems found languages such a Javanese to inversions of vocative kin terms found in Rural Italy) [1];

R lexical processes such as synecdoche and metonymy involved in affect meaning manipulation;

R certain categories of meaning like evidentiality;

R reduplication, quantifiers, and comparative structures;

R inflectional morphology.

Affective forms are a means by which a speaker indexes emotional states through different linguistic mechanisms. These indices become important when applied to other forms of non-referential indexicality, such as sex indices and social identity indices, because of the innate relationship between first-order indexicality and subsequent second-order (or higher) indexical forms.

Deference Indices

Deference indices encode deference from one interlocutor to another (usually representing inequalities of status, rank, age, sex, etc.) [9]. Some examples of deference indices are:

[ T/V Deference Entitlement

The T/V deference entitlement system of European languages was famously detailed by linguists Brown and Gilman [2]. As previously mentioned, T/V deference entitlement is a system by which a speaker/addressee speech event will lead to perceived disparities of ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ between interlocutors.

T-forms are used in systems where the speaker is

1) superior and solidary,

2) equal and solidary, and

3) inferior and solidary to his addressee.

V-forms are used when the speaker perceives themselves to be

1) superior and not solidary,

2) equal and not solidary, and

3) inferior and not solidary.

Silverstein comments that while exhibiting a basic level of first-order indexicality, the T/V system also employs second-order indexicality vis-à-vis 'enregistered honorification' [8]. He cites that the V-form can also function as an index of valued “public” register and the standards of good behavior that are entailed by use of V-forms over T-forms in public contexts. Therefore, people will use T/V deference entailment in

1) a first-order indexical sense that distinguishes between speaker/addressee interpersonal values of ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ and

2) a second-order indexical sense that indexes an interlocutor’s inherent “honor” or social merit in employing V- forms over T-forms in public contexts.

In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language has second-person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee.

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