6.8 From symbols to indexes

In Julius Ceasar’s famous veni, vidi, vici “I came, I saw, I conquered,” the order of mention of different events mirrors the order in which they took place (Hopper and Traugott 1993: 26). Iconicity of this type has been studied by language typologists and other linguists interested in possible motivations for structural similarities across unrelated languages (Croft 1990: 164–92; Haiman 1980, 1985a, 1985b).

From an anthropological perspective, it is important to ask whether the abundance of iconicity in some languages is related to some specific cultural traits or practices. Some linguistic anthropologists have started to work in this direction. For example, Mannheim (1991) linked the abundance of iconic expressions in Peruvian Quechua to a cultural identification between words and objects.

The Quechua fondness for iconicity corresponds to their orientation toward language in general. For Quechua speakers, language is part and parcel of the natural world. Words are consubstantial with their objects in a deeper sense than in the Western tradition: we have a long standing tradition ... that words stand for their objects and that language is (or at least should be) a mirror of the world. In Quechua culture, words are consubstantial with their objects in the same sense in which the Trinity is consubstantial. Language is both in and of the natural world ... The Quechua identification of word and object helps explain why practical knowledge of the everyday world is identified with knowledge of language and ability to speak and is designated with a single verb stem, yachay, which is usually translated as “to know,” but also can be used to mean “to know Quechua” without any modification and without mentioning the language.

(Mannheim 1991: 184)

These observations are not only a description of language ideology (section 3.5). They are also linked to a series of hypotheses about the direction of sound change – especially the development of glottalization and aspiration. As a linguistic anthropologist, Mannheim is interested in integrating previous structuralist and sociolinguistic analyses of language change with an ethnographically informed study of Quechua speakers’ aptitude for linguistic imagery.

6.8.2Indexes, shifters, and deictic terms

An index is a sign that identifies an object not because of any similarity or analogy with it, but because of some relationship of contiguity with that object. Such a relationship can best be understood by first considering some of the nonlinguistic examples provided by Peirce, namely, a barometer or a weathercock.

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The weathercock is an index of the direction of the wind for two reasons: because it assumes the same direction as the wind and because when we see the weathercock pointing in a certain direction, our attention is drawn to that direction.

A low barometer with a moist air is an index of rain; that is we suppose that the forces of nature establish a probable connection between the low barometer with moist air and coming rain.

A weathercock is an index of the direction of the wind; because in the first place it really takes the self-same direction as the wind, so that there is a real connection between them, and in the second place we are so constituted that when we see a weathercock pointing in a certain direction it draws our attention to that direction ... (1940: 109)

In other words, indices (or indexes, as most scholars prefer today) are signs that have some kind of spatial and/or temporal connection with what they refer to or, more generally, an existential relation with their referent (Burks 1948–49).

Although the importance of the indexical properties of linguistic signs has long been recognized within a number of different theoretical traditions,30 the meaning of the term index varies across some of these traditions. For instance, Charles Bally, a student of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (see chapter 6), used in the 1920s the (French) word indices to refer to expressions that give out information about some aspect of the context or situation in which they are used without having been so designed by the speaker. Thus, a particular pronunciation or lexical choice might inform the hearer about the speaker’s social class (Bally 1952: 60) – this is close to what Labov and others call sociolinguistic markers. For Bally, however, indices are different from signs rather than one of their subtypes. Whereas an index (or French indice) is the product or effect (procès) of a message that was produced for other means, a sign (signe) is a means or procedure (procédé) purposely used by the speaker to inform about something (Bally 1952: 77).

In the functionally oriented linguistic literature published in English, certain types of indices have been called shifters (Jespersen 1923; Jakobson [1957] 1970) and deictic terms (Fillmore 1966; Lyons 1977). The term “shifter” calls attention to the property that linguistic signs like I, you, here, now, yesterday and tense forms have to “shift” their meaning from one context to the next. The term

30Husserl ([1913]1970: 682) spoke of “essentially occasional expressions” and wrote: “‘This’ is an essentially occasional expression which only becomes fully significant when we have regard to the circumstances of utterance, in this case to an actually performed percept.”

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6.8 From symbols to indexes

“deictic” – from “deixis” (originally a Greek term meaning “pointing” or “indicating”) (cf. Lyons 1977: 836) – highlights the spatio-temporal anchoring of linguistic expressions that can only be interpreted vis-à-vis such an anchoring.31

Deixis is the name given to those aspects of language whose interpretation is relative to the occasion of utterance; to the time of utterance, and to times before and after the time of utterance; to the location of the speaker at the time of utterance; and to the identity of the speaker and the intended audience.

(Fillmore 1966: 220)

An extensive analysis of one system of deictic terms that well illustrates the notion of index is Hanks’s (1990) study of language and space in Maya (a Mayan language from the Yucatan, in Mexico). Hanks argued that “deixis, both as a linguistic subsystem and as a kind of act, is a social construction, central to the organization of communicative practice and intelligible only in relation to a sociocultural system” (Hanks 1990: 5). Hanks’s study shows that it is possible to extend structuralist analysis of linguistic forms to complex conceptualizations of the human body as a corporeal field that is routinely used by speakers to make sense of each other’s utterances within a culturally defined living space (see also section 9.5).

6.8.2.1 Indexical meaning and the linguistic construction of gender

While telling stories, describing properties of objects or calling someone’s attention, speakers also manage to do many other things with language that are less detectable but equally effective. By listening to someone giving directions, for instance, we might be able to gather information on where that person comes from, his social class, his familiarity with the surroundings, his relationship with his interlocutors, and maybe even his political views (Brown and Fraser 1979; Brown and Levinson 1979). This is possible because the language we use carries in it a social history, a series of connections to times and places where the same expressions or the manner in which they are articulated have been used before. To refer to this power of language to evoke realities beyond the literal content of what is being talked about, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists in the past used the term social meaning. Now the same concept is conveyed in terms of indexical meanings. For example, one way of thinking about honorifics is to treat them as indexes of particular social identities or relations (see section 6.4).

The notion of indexical meaning has been particularly fruitful in the study of

31The Cognitive Anthropology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, has produced a considerable number of empirical studies on the cognitive and cultural aspects of spatial deixis in several languages. For a useful bibliography on this topic, see Peters, van Gool and Messing (1992).

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the linguistic constitution of gender. McConnell-Ginet (1988) introduced the notion of gender deixis to refer to the phenomenon by which “the particular form of some linguistic unit expresses or means something about gendered properties of the circumstances of language production, the gendered perspective from which an utterance is produced” (1988: 80). That is, certain linguistic expressions come to be associated with either female or male speakers usually because of the types of activities during which they are used or because of a particular attitude or affective stance associated with one gender over another. For instance, in her study of Tzeltal women’s ways of speaking, Brown (1979, 1980) showed that women’s tendency to be supportive and avoid disagreement was linguistically realized, in part, by the use of conversational repeats, whereby a speaker would repeat part of the prior speaker’s utterance, adding an intonation to indicate surprise, interest, or agreement. Sometimes the repeat could also be repeated. Although Tzeltal men also produce repeats, their cycles are not as long and polite as the women’s. In this case, the repeat can be seen as an index of gender. Its extended use is associated with a quality, agreement, that is in turn associated with or seen as appropriate to women. Similarly, in Japanese, the particles zo and ze convey an affective intensity that indicates forcefulness (Uyeno 1971). This is associated in Japanese society with being male. On the other hand, the use of the sentence particle no (Cook 1987) indexes that the authority of the utterance lies with a group, of which the speaker is a member.32 This is a type of stance that indexes, among other values, those associated with being female in Japanese society.

These studies of gender show that we cannot say that certain features (e.g. certain speech acts, lexical terms, morphological markers, intonational patterns, voice quality) always presuppose either male or female identity (McConnellGinet 1988). For example, Brown (1993) found that Tzeltal women are not as polite as usual when they confront one another in court. In this setting, Tzeltal women may disagree, overlap one another extensively, and overtly express hostility, anger, and contempt. This means that instead of saying that certain expressions or linguistic strategies are used only by men and some other expressions only by women, “[w]hat we find ... is that the features may be employed more by one than the other sex” (Ochs 1992: 340).33

Ochs generalized this and other findings by saying that there is a non-exclusive relation between language and gender (Ochs 1992: 340). Typically, the same expressions and strategies associated with gender identity are also associated

32“When the speaker uses no, he/she authorizes what he/she is saying together with his/her group (i.e. the speaker and his/her group hold what he/she is saying to be true)” (Cook 1987: 128).

33For some useful methodological considerations on how to gather and use quantitative evidence for research on gender differences, see James and Clarke’s (1993) critical review of the use of interruptions by men and women.

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