03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.

qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 6

■ Michael Silverstein
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type

Interdiscursivity
Any discursive event of communication can invoke (index) one or more other events in
the nontrivial sense that focal aspects of the ongoing entextualization presuppose that the
indexing and indexed lie within some chronotope of “-eval”ness. Varied processes in dis-
tinct institutional sites in the macrosociological communicative economy shed light on
the contingent varieties of such interdiscursivity. Token-sourced interdiscursivity implies
a reconstruction of a specific, historically contingent communicative event as an entex-
tualization/contextualization structure, complete in all its essentials as drawn upon.
Type-sourced interdiscursivity implies normativities of form and function, such as
rhetorical norms, genres, et cetera. Token-targeted and type-targeted interdiscursivities
concern the characteristics of the indexing discursive event(s) as contingent happenings
or normativities. [chronotope, interdiscursivity, intertextuality, indexicality]

M
y largest point is that interdiscursivity plays on “-evals,” that is, on the logic
of the chronotope in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981:84) sense. This dvandva com-
pound of course should now be familiar to any linguistic anthropologist
studying discourse, denoting the temporally (hence, chrono-) and spatially (hence,
-tope) particular envelope in the narrated universe of social space-time in which and
through which, in emplotment, narrative characters move.1 Bakhtin’s nice coinage it-
self was, of course, pointedly interdiscursive with general cultural appropriation of
theories of the relativity of “space-time” in physics and other sciences (cf. Clark and
Holquist 1984:278ff.), though he achieved better poetic effect in the ordering of syl-
lables by taking “time” before “space.”

Interdiscursivity and Discursive Practice

Discourse as semiotic production, too, has a chronotopic character—no pun in-
tended—in that it can be conceptualized as something that “circulates,” moves vir-
tually through the time and space of social organization. Of course, what actually
happens is that people use language and perilinguistic semiotics on particular occa-
sions of discursive interaction; however, such usage on any particular occasion bears
a potential relationship to discourse on some other occasion or occasions in a phe-
nomenally different spatiotemporal envelope. This in effect draws the two or more
discursive occasions together within the same chronotopic frame, across which dis-
course seems to “move” from originary to secondary occasion, no matter whether
“backward” or “forward” in orientation within the frame.2

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 6–22, ISSN 1055-1360, electronic ISSN 1548-1395.
© 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for per-
mission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

6
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 7

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 7

I use the more conceptually primordial term interdiscursivity here, rather than the
term intertextuality (which we will get to in its due place), and I index by this choice
of stem the primordiality of discourse, the processual, real-time, event-bound social
action that it is our task to analyze, discovering therein textual structures, according
to principles of arrangement of the very signs of discourse. Communicational inter-
discursivity is a relationship of event to event and is projected from the position of
the personnel—authorial and/or animating senders, responsible receivers, nonre-
sponsible monitors, et cetera—of some particular event in respect of one or more oth-
ers. Intertextuality—from which we can caption the “intertext,” a structural principle
of textuality that remains constant or recognizable across discursive events—is a di-
rectionally neutral state of comparability of texts in one or another respect, to be sure.
But as linguistic anthropologists we are, of course, interested in how intertexts are
created, that is, how they are generated in events of communication through tech-
niques of interdiscursivity deployable as role strategies of the participants.
At the outset, moreover, we must keep in focus the kind of semiotic phenomenon
we are dealing with. Hence, to approach interdiscursivity at the level of commu-
nicative events I invoke the appropriate, if more semiotically elementary, sign rela-
tionships of iconicity and indexicality in the Peircean idiom. These are the
characteristic modalities of language in use, rather than the specifically linguistic
property of symbolic form, of full Saussurean abstract signs that are relevant to the
analysis of sentence structures as instances of denotational codes. After all, films,
paintings, theatrical productions, spectacles, events in the depicted universe of a set
of 2002 marketing-year Volkswagen ads, et cetera all have interdiscursivity and even
intertextuality about them—hardly linguistic objects in the strict sense, even if some-
times language is a component medium of their realization as events.
Events of using language (or any other cultural form, for that matter) can be in-
terdiscursive one with (an)other(s) if they seem to form a set of some kind. What
kind of set? A set defined by perceived “likeness” of some sort—hence, “iconicity”;
likeness of one with the other or others in the set, to whatever highly specific or
vaguely schematic degree. And co-membership in a “likeness” set, a class of objects
“like” one another in some respect, is, of course, an “indexical” relationship, a rela-
tionship of co-occurrence within a frame. Now, from what we know about language
and its discursive deployment, in what respect can such discursive events be “like”
one another? They can be alike as to what Bakhtin (1986) terms speech genre, that is,
in respect of entextualization (bounded textual qualities) and/or contextualization
(indexical relations to event frame), in great detail or only in more abstract[able]
characteristics.

The “Poetics” of Intradiscursivity in Relation to Interdiscursivity

Keeping in mind this intuitive notion of interdiscursivity across communicative
events, let us switch now to intradiscursive relationships in order to clarify the semi-
otics of interdiscursivity. Intradiscursivity is what goes on in an arbitrarily small here
and now—a unique, contingent moment of using semiotic media. The generalized
poetics of discourse that founds linguistic anthropology in all variant approaches fo-
cuses on discourse’s coming to intradiscursive textuality—an indexical structure of
“likeness” of certain ones among the sequential units of message form, just the same
relational iconic-indexical type of fact, I maintain, as is also manifest interdiscur-
sively.3 Within discourse events, “likeness” of stretches of semiotic form, the units of
durational unfolding of anything we would term a text, is entirely a function of their
metrically determined positional co-indexicality in some computable metasemiotic,
as Jakobson, of course, long ago (1960) pointed out. These metricalities are phenom-
enally experienced as repetitions, parallelisms, formal crescendos and diminuendos,
“rhythm” more generally, et cetera.
In Jakobson’s conception of the emergence of meaning in all denotational text (an
emergence only at the meta-level), the Saussurean denotational senses of language
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 8

8 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

forms engage in tension with the poetically (metrically) dependent meaning-relations

of text-unit with text-unit. This tension is experienced as trope, or tropic trans-
formation (cf. the etymology of meta-phor!) of expected “literal” denotational value
of language as a function of the poeticalness of parole, which finds its apogee in ex-
plicitly composed poetries and in ritual texts. Generalizing over both kinds of mean-
ing, the structural and the textual, Jakobson starts from Saussurean likeness or
comparability within meaning paradigms, what he terms semantic “equivalence,”
you will recall. In his Delphic formulation (Jakobson 1960:358), words and expres-
sions in actual text always have at least this second relation of “equivalence” beyond
the Saussurean-structural one; “equivalence” as a meaning-phenomenon, he tells us,
in effect gets projected from the paradigmatic “axis of simultaneity” to the syntag-
matic “axis of successivity.”
Such units of unfolding form-(or formedness)-in-time result in a gelling of dis-
course as structure “internal” to itself. That is, there are indexical relationships inter-
nal to the signal form—establishing the message’s texture (Halliday and Hasan
1976:2–3) via a structure of cotextualization—beyond the indexicalities that conform
to sentence grammar in the narrowest sense, like agreement markers across con-
stituents. In multiparty dialogic communication, these cotextual structures will en-
compass spans of turns-at-talk beyond a particular turn-at-talk of any one
participant, generating complex, seemingly hierarchically deep structures of partici-
pation bespeaking the multiplicity of role-relationships/identities in play over the
course of conversational time.4 And notwithstanding this analytically obvious cotex-
tualizing, participants seem to have the intuitive sense, as agents producing dis-
course, that they and their interlocutors are constantly contextualizing as well. That is,
they are making some indexically meaningful—presuppositional and/or entailing—
pragmatic “use” of the semiotic material in entextualized form in some text-”exter-
nal” context: appropriately and effectively doing things with words. Generally,
nonsemiotically astute laypersons recognize this contextualizing indexicality, even if
they do not see that entextualization and contextualization are two sides of the same
semiotic coin. For between any “text” and its “context” is a contingent and time-sen-
sitive work of achieved separation that is always subject to interpretative revision,
both by participants in an event and by analysts of it.
The essential property of such textual structure is that even though it comes into
being through an enunciation (or performance) of perceptible duration “in time,” as
structure it is logically “out of time.” That is, the text-as-emergent is effectively con-
stituted by a set of indexical and (metasemiotically) iconic relationships that have a
semiotically real and logically manifest simultaneity, or, if you will, virtual coevalness
because of their cotextuality. As parsable by the emergence of textuality, the pieces or
chunks of discourse that “count” or carry along the meaning seem to the users all to
be “within” the text and in that sense are copresent in a miniature Bakhtinian chrono-
tope, a within-event relationship. They co-occur in a semiotic here and now, a unit
textual event, not just as a physical arrangement manifest in signal form (where, of
course, the signals unfold in the standard average Saussurean spatiotemporal “line”
of parole).5
So here’s the point of the implied comparison. Intratextual units come into being
and are chronotopically co”-eval” at their plane because they constitute a structure
of indexicality, one unit pointing to the other as its co-occurrent counterpart within
the discursive interaction coming to structure. Parallel to this, interdiscursive rela-
tions across events of using semiotic media also, in effect, constitute relations of
“-eval”; they freeze the chronotope of independently occurrent and experienced social
eventhood in a structure of likeness that is based on the nature of texts in relation to
their contexts of occurrence. Something about the textual—and contextual—qualities
of two events is “equivalent,”6 bespeaking likeness, direct or tropic, in the form of
aligned discursive structures. Note how intra- and interdiscursivity are relational
properties of real-time events and actions. By contrast, when indexically constituted
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 9

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 9

structures of likeness come into being having no chronicity as such—for time as such
is logically obliterated in the symmetric STRUCTURAL RELATIONSHIP of likeness—such a
structure of likeness is termed here intertextuality.7 Under intertextuality, two or more
texts-in-context (individuable objects) become TOKENS OF A TYPE, thus “the same” in
some respect or respects.8 Note how grammar, too, the presupposed denotational
code underlying denotational textuality, is such an achronic condition on all possible
denotational intertextuality, with infinitely many realizable tokens past, present, and
future in a plane of token-level coevalness termed synchrony. Of course, grammar in
its distinctively human form and infinite generative capacity instantiates as well a
different order of semiosis, the symbolic, in addition to the iconic-indexical with
which we have been concerned.

Interdiscursive Indexicalities, Presupposing and Entailing

Interdiscursivity, then, is a structural relationship of two or more situations, and
an indexical one at that. Within any situation in which we participate, we can expe-
rience the relationship by a semiotic act of “pointing-to,” which of course implies
pointing-to from someplace (the arrow or pointing finger starts somewhere and ends
somewhere else). In its situational locatability, interdiscursivity can be seen to be a
strategic positioning of the participants in a semiotic event such that an
inter(co(n))textual structure emerges. It is the intersubjective cover under which par-
ticipants give interpretability, significance, and causal consequentiality to any social
action by stipulating its non-isolation in the domain of interaction. “Aha!” the inter-
actional homunculus calculates, “What is being said/happening . . . is just like that
event of 10 days ago!” “. . . is just like what a president is supposed to say in leav-
ing the presidency!” “. . . will serve me in good stead with the authorities!” The folk
predicate of comparison, (be) just like, reveals the interpreter’s retrospective or recu-
perative relationship either to another discursive event (in what I term a manifesta-
tion of “token”-interdiscursivity) or to an internalized notion of a type or genre of
discursive event (in what I term “type”-interdiscursivity). This presupposing of a
source that can be indexed focuses both sender and recipient upon the characteristics
of the source. The intertextuality as achieved (or as failed of achievement) is “token-
source”d or “type-source”d, in shorthand.
By contrast, within the discursive chronotope, one can attempt in effect to lasso a
token event or an event-type as a consequence of engaging in signaling; one can at-
tempt indexically to entail that some token event or event-type is considered within
an intertext including the current signaling event. One can attempt to entail a target
of indexicality within an intertext. One can launch, for example, a “rereading,” as the
literary brethren term it, of a chronologically prior (clock or calendar) event/text or
determine in and by discourse that there was (must have been) a genre of some kind
of which the current instance is a particular transparent or tropic refigurement or
prefigurement. If successful, the intertextuality achieved through the contingent in-
terdiscursive move will have been “token-target”ed or “type-target”ed in the in-
stance.
I hope it is clear that interdiscursivity is a realizable strategic orientation to achiev-
ing (even, remarking upon) intertextuality at one or two levels of event/text speci-
ficity and from one or the other of the relationally polar perspectives within the
chronotope of “-eval,” or semiotically frozen time that intertextuality implies. Note
particularly that it is not clock or calendar relations of simultaneity and sequential-
ity, “earlier” through “simultaneous” to “later,” that are involved in performing
sourcing or targeting as strategic acts of interdiscursivity. Sourcing and targeting are
placements of the participant role-structure on some communicative occasion as an
indexical origo with respect to which one points to (indexes) an intertextual discur-
sive event or event-type (and frequently as well to its participant role-structure)
within a thus chronotopically coeval—or achronic—envelope. Such interdiscursive
presupposition or interdiscursive entailment achieves textuality in this way, deter-
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 10

10 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

minate formedness of the original, in respect of some aspect of its entextualization

and contextualization. There are degrees of specificity with which this can be at-
tempted and accomplished, to be sure. And as we can readily see (cf. n.1), it is such
interdiscursivity that Bakhtin really was talking about when he used the idiom of a
doubled “dialogism”—having nothing inherently to do with two-party conversa-
tion—for talking about the indexical field of discourse in which any occasion of lan-
guage use lies.

Denotational Interdiscursivity and “Causal Theory” Accounts of Reference

Even within the narrower field of denotational use of language, it is useful to
bring to bear this perspective on interdiscursivity. As Vološinov (1986:65–106) and
Bakhtin himself (1981:288–300) note, the heteroglossic—as opposed to monoglot—
language community is, of course, the empirical reality with which we are, as lin-
guists, always presented. If we could discern no principles of regularity across
occasions of making denotational text, there would be the absence of anything use-
fully termed a language community. At this extreme, we would have only the ex-
quisite uniqueness of forms and their denotational meanings in context presented in
each discursive event; in a sense, there could be no regularity of usage in such a pop-
ulation of language users, a population condemned to an occasion-by-occasion
Babel. At the very opposite extreme, however, we might see the kind of grammatical
norm of a monoglot language community as whatever enables a fully sourceable and
targetable type-level denotational textual structure in everyone’s discursive partici-
pation that perdures over a chronotope termed “synchrony.”
Hence, in this only asymptotically approachable condition, any event of denota-
tional textuality is intertextual under such a community’s discourse-based “gram-
matical” norm with every other possibly sourced or targeted one. Potential for
grammatical intertextuality is thus a degree concept, as perhaps variationist soci-
olinguistics would construe it, and as such provides a sufficient condition, up to any
degree of specificity, for the existence of a type-level synchronic grammatical norm.
Viewed this way, it is an open issue as to what kinds, if any, of semiotic modules of
specifically grammatical—as opposed to discursive/textual—”competence” we need
to explain the facts of denotational regularities among the empirical, as opposed to
“ideal,” membership of a language community. And thus, viewed from the perspec-
tive of discursive events themselves, grammar of the kind assumed axiomatically by
20th-century linguistics in the Saussurean-Bloomfieldian-Chomskian line can be jus-
tified only by showing that every language rests on principles beyond those of intra-
and interdiscursive indexicality and iconicity.9
Another more specifically denotational application of the logic of interdiscursiv-
ity at the general indexical plane is the so-called “causal theory of reference” first de-
veloped by Saul Kripke (1972) and Hilary Putnam (1975) and since subjected to
much philosophical examination. (My last empirical illustration, below, will involve
this.) Rethinking the issues involved in how language users extend objects-of-refer-
ence when a sender of a message uses certain denoting words and expressions, these
authors opened anew the long-standing philosophical issue of the relationship of in-
tensions (“conceptual” regularities of intensional “sense,” in some formulations) to a
language user’s ability to pick out specific entities in communication by using
words.
As writers such as Searle (1969:85–94) remind us, in the flow of denotational dis-
course a “speech act” of referring presumes upon—indexically presupposes the fact
of—there being a descriptive backing to identify an entity as referent for both sender
and receiver. Such descriptive backing is a criterion or condition presumed to be true
of the object being referred to at the particular moment in text-in-context. The idea is
that the referring expression—in English, anything from a syntactically bound zero-
form up to an indefinitely complex noun-headed phrase—in respect of the object of
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 11

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 11

reference at that moment, serves to extend the referent uniquely under those discur-
sive conditions by indexically invoking its associated description or characterization.
Now where do the descriptive backings, the characterizability conditions on ex-
tendable denotata, as I prefer to term them, come from?10 Where, in particular, does
the characterizability condition come from that is associated with your standard av-
erage definite referring expression headed by a common noun, for example, English
(the) man over there with the martini (headed by man)? For some referring expres-
sions, such as personal deictics (English I/we, you) or demonstrative deictics
(this/these, that/those), the characterizability conditions are clearly just descriptions
of the relationship between the extended entity, the “Referent” of the communicative
event, and the persons inhabiting the indexically presupposed roles of “Sender” and
“Receiver” in their spatiotemporal chronotope.11 Hence, I is a referring expression
because when a token of it is used, it invokes-as-true of the Referent that it is identi-
cal with the entity in the role of Sender, et cetera. As I have noted (Silverstein 1976),
these characterizability conditions invoked by various deictic paradigms are inher-
ently metapragmatic in character; they are descriptions of some aspect of the very
context in which tokens of the forms are used.
Proper names are interesting in this respect, and they play a central role in the
Kripke-Putnam approach to the relations of intensions as characterizability condi-
tions on referring expressions to extensions, actual extended denotata in acts of ref-
erence. Though their ideas need much more in the way of sociocultural sensitivity to
constitute an empirical theory adequate to the task, the general observation is that
any use of a proper name as a referring expression is, in effect, either its “baptismal”
use, an event of performative nomination, or a use that harkens back to some such bap-
tism by interdiscursive renvoi. A proper name, recall, is a linguistic form that refers
to some unique individual entity across all possible worlds every time it is used; it
is, as Kripke terms it, a “rigid designator” (1972:269–270). Hence, once a token of the
linguistic form is, on some occasion or other, attached to an entity-as-referent by duly
authorized—that’s key!—baptism, it creates an event-origo in the universe of all pos-
sible worlds calibratable to that event in relation to which all further tokens of the
name will still apply to that unique entity so baptized. Of course, if it is an event of
baptism we are speaking of, it has roles—Sender, Receiver(s), baptized Referent cer-
tainly, Audience perhaps, et cetera—which are inhabited by individuals through
rules of role-recruitment (what kind of person can use what form to what kind of
person referring to what kind of thing, etc.). Every proper name, then, rests on nor-
mativities of a system of role-recruitment in which social differentiations of “natural”
social kinds of entities are stipulated, to varying degrees, both positively and nega-
tively as the inhabitants of the various performative event roles (as we would of
course expect from so-called speech act theory). Parents of a newborn in bourgeois
mainstream America in effect whisper their choice of name to a physician or equiv-
alent named licensee of the state who, filling out a birth certificate, baptizes the
neonate for secular and civil purposes, performatively creating a new individual; a
religious officiant does so, on the recommendation of the parents, creating an indi-
vidual within the religious corporation. For first, given, or “Christian” names, there
are two great, but slightly overlapping, grammatical sets of name-forms such that to-
kens of one set are used when Referent is recruited from the “natural” social category
of males, and tokens of the other set are used when recruited Referent is female. For
some, ethnic categoriality is a basis of role-recruitment of the Referent of a baptism,
whether positively or negatively. And so on. As we see, for baptism as an event, it is
the metapragmatic description of the categories from which Referent and sometimes
Sender, Receiver, Audience, et cetera are recruited to these roles that constitutes
whatever we might call the descriptive backing or characterizability condition on the
proper name form used in the event.
But not only in the event of baptism: ever after. Any subsequent use of a token of
the form that is the proper name of an entity in an event of reference may have its
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 12

12 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

own rules of recruitment, codified by degrees of specificity and positively or nega-

tively, but each such event indexically presupposes that the event of baptism has
taken place, in duly proper (!) fashion; each subsequent use, no matter how strictly
or loosely codified by rules of role-recruitment, is a renvoi, an indexical of interdis-
cursivity, to a presumptive chain of events of usage from baptism to now.12
Recruitment is fluid and can be ad hoc. When, in a discursive system like English, we
introduce a proper name with the referent of which we presume our interlocutor to
be unfamiliar, we supply an appositive descriptive phrase, so as to give a reference
backed in a category of entities from which we are in that very event recruiting the
Referent at that moment: “David, my next-door neighbor.”
Kripke and Putnam’s point, now, is that we can use this insight about proper
names to see that all referring expressions, and especially the noun-heads of referring
expressions, functionally have a kind of proper name chain of events from baptism
to current usage, interdiscursive renvoi, lurking in the recesses of how we extend ob-
jects, how we achieve normatively literal reference to them. With proper names, it is
easy to see that whatever intensional “meaning” there is consists of the metaprag-
matics of the event of baptism and the metapragmatics of any subsequent event of
use, plus the assumption of an unbroken “causal chain” of licensing from the first to
the last. For common nouns, the argument goes something like this. Consider the sit-
uation of an individual recruited to the role of Receiver hearing a token of a term
used to refer successfully for the first time—that is, in effect, the Referent’s baptism
for this dyad of personnel, this Sender and particular Receiver. It is an act of exten-
sion. But if the Receiver is ever to use the linguistic term as Sender in a subsequent
event according to some shared normative rule of use, this person must be able to
generalize to a class of entities that are the correct denotata of the term.
How is this accomplished? Here is where we must understand that baptisms with
common-noun referring expressions grow intensions. From cotextual relations with
other information structured in the event, from characteristics of objects-presented-
at-baptism made salient by mechanisms of discursive and other presentational fo-
cusing, et cetera, people get ideas about what are the “defining characteristics” of the
infinitely large class of “literal” denotata of a term, by in effect reintensionalizing an
extended expression token so as to create an expression-type-to-denotatum-type
concept. Reference objects “like” the one in the baptismal moment—in whatever
consists “likeness,” with clear or “fuzzy” categorial effect13—are the class of now au-
thorized or licensed denotata of a term or expression. A term or expression has got-
ten an intensional “meaning,” such that this component of its intension carries along
with it the history of extensional uses on specific occasions of use.
Putnam terms this event-dependent, sociohistorical component of the intensions
(Searle’s descriptive backing) of referring expressions, their stereotype meanings. We
see that this is within the realm of what Bakhtin formulated in his theory of the es-
sentially interdiscursive (“dialogic”) contextual shading of all words and expres-
sions. Bakhtin focused on how a word or expression comes to index other events of
usage as to Sender, Receiver, et cetera14; Putnam shows that this interdiscursive prin-
ciple penetrates to the very denotational core of words and expressions as our means
of referring to the world of objects insofar these come in classes or categories.

Varieties of Interdiscursive Experience

If interdiscursivity is literally the essence even of referring, it is ubiquitous. We
cannot exhaustively survey such a phenomenon. Rather, I wish to present, within the
framework of interdiscursivity developed above, four examples. They emphasize
my axes of “-eval”ness, illuminating the nature of the phenomena of type-token and
source-target as logical constructs, set against the calendrical or clock-based intu-
itions one might have about retrospective and prospective kinds of time-spanning re-
lationships. I hope they illustrate the utility of the lens of interdiscursivity for
emphasizing the dynamics of language in social formations.
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 13

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 13

1. Anachronistic Interdiscursivity, Highly Type-Targeting and Retrospective

The first example concerns my Humanities 152 students, first-year college stu-
dents of some four spring quarters ago, who lived in a rather different interdiscur-
sive chronotope from me—a fact demonstrated when we read Shakespeare’s The
Taming of the Shrew (ToS). At certain key passages, they found the language hack-
neyed, that is, as though falling below a level of originality one would have expected
of both Shakespeare and a Shakespeare.
The students reacted indeed with a sense of déjà vu from 19th-century and later
literature with which they were familiar, literature that uses all the fulsome adjective-
plus-noun constructions more or less as formulae, compositional ready-mades laden
with connotational (indexical) values working to more effect than their denotational
meanings. Certain contemporary registers of American English are replete with this
kind of compositional unit, in young people’s experience. Look at one of the pas-
sages in question, ToS Induction 1, lines 41ff., spoken to his retinue by a Lord of high
standing and great wealth, contemplating a practical joke on Christopher Sly, the
drunken tinker and beggar they have come upon while he is sleeping it off:15
Even as flattering dream or worthless fancy.
Then take him up, and manage well the jest.
Carry him gently to my fairest chamber,
And hang it round with all my wanton pictures.
Balm his foul head in warm distilled waters.
And burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet.
Procure me music ready when he wakes,
To make a dulcet and heavenly sound.
...
”Flattering dream,” “worthless fancy,” “fairest chamber,” “wanton pictures,”
“warm distilled waters,” “sweet wood,” “a dulcet and a heavenly sound.” And so
on. Some of this Shakespeare himself was probably parodying as hackneyed, but it
is interesting that the students were so intertextually deaf in the way of reading this
language not so much even anachronistically as PANCHRONICALLY: as language frozen
out of time, place, and en/contextualization, in other words as essentially endowed
with the values such overadjectivalization has come to have in our Strunk-and-
White era of modernist prose standard. So they miss the joke that Shakespeare him-
self was playing on the character of the Lord, of course inviting the audience along
with, as well as allowing the proscenium-internal jest to move along as it would!
Again, look at the phrases in Induction 1, ll. 100–127 that the Lord puts into the
mouth of his young page, Bartholomew, who, dressed as Sly’s “wife,” will offer
“kind embracements” and “tempting kisses” and speak to the drunk when he
awakes later in the scheme in “soft low tongue”: herself saying “your humble wife,”
“a poor and loathsome beggar,” et cetera. In our own day, this is like the hackneyed
language of advertising or of restaurant menus reaching a bit too much to offer
“tempting morsels” of adjective-plus-noun pleasures.
All of the boastful language Shakespeare gave to the Padovan suitor Gremio to
say to Baptista, father of the beautiful young Bianca, mocking him before the parterre
as he tried to win her hand in 2:1, ll. 348ff., seemed to miss its effect as well before
we discussed it in class:
First, as you know, my house within the city
Is richly furnishèd with plate and gold,
Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands;
My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry;
In ivory coffers I have stuffed my crowns,
In cypress chests my arras counterpoints,
Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,
Fine linen, Turkey cushions bossed with pearl,
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 14

14 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Valance of Venice gold in needlework,

...

So, reading back purely at the type level of this register-form’s effect in our own
experience, it was difficult at first for the students to appreciate Shakespeare’s art of
ironical voicing as he animates social identities for the delight—and disdain—of his
Elizabethan audience.

2. Benveniste (1966 [1958]) on Delocutionary Verb Forms: Interdiscursivity Goes

Lexico-Grammatic
These emergent lexico-grammatical forms demonstrate a more general renvoi to
token-performative (perlocutionarily successful) utterances as used on some occa-
sion for interpersonal alignment. As verb forms, such delocutionaries16 seem to be
formed from decontextualizable segments of an entextualization successful in en-
tailing (accomplishing) something specific in their originary context-of-performance.
The segments are thus conceptualized as performative formulae, now projected from
a grammatically conforming schema of collocation that can be reproduced on new
occasions of communication, and have thus, as delocutionary lexical forms, become
a phrase projectibly headed with form-class types, whether single words or id-
iomatic collocations of them. So a delocutionary as Benveniste imagines it, though
token-sourced, is type-targeted in whatever future it may have in wider use in lan-
guage.
Note in this connection that so-called “indirect free style” of narrative (see
Banfield 1993; Lee 1997:222–320, among many other discussions) allows a narrator,
inhabiting this role, to take the token-sourced purported words of some narrated-
world (denoted) character (whether “fictional” or as well nonverbally experienced)
and, by a deictic transformation of some of the calibrational categories of utterance
(Silverstein 1993:48–53), to use the very locutions of the character to narrate what the
character thinks, does, says still from the perspective of a narrator. (“So he would, after
all, reveal his real identity,” instead of, “He thought, ‘On second thought, in spite of
whatever, I will reveal who I really am.’”) It would be an exceedingly interesting
study in historical pragmatics to see the relationship between delocutionary con-
structions as conventionalized lexically headed indirect free style narrations of the
selves of characters and the various deictic transpositions that go into indirect free
style narrative.
The point of the delocutionary verb is that token-utterance has been grammati-
cized—turned to type, that is—though still preserving the projectible denotational
skeleton of the phrase-as-uttered as it moves across planes, mediating in this way (cf.
a Bakhtinian [1986] “speech genre”) a relationship between the recuperative token-
sourcing and projective token-targeting by the intervention of grammar, which
schematizes a type that coordinates the two token-poles of utterance.
My faves here in English (one can read Benveniste for French examples) are the
cartoon-delocutionaries. Consider (to) harrumph- [v.i.] < throat-clearing performa-
tive of indexed indignation, as in He harrumphed around the room trying to formu-
late a response. Notice that the stem is inflected for “past punctual” and even has
developed a spatial quasi-distributive in harrumph around, which can be used all by
itself, emphasizing the noisy repetition of the illocutionary act. Again, (to) (tsk)tsk-
(at) [v.pseud. tr.] < tongue-clicking ingressive performative of sorrowful regret, fur-
ther developed for mock or ironic usage, shows up as well as a derived, deverbal
metapragmatic performative, delivered simply as “Tsk tsk!” (cf. “Regrets!” or
“Apologies!”).17 Contrast here as well the perhaps somewhat still more onomatopo-
etic (to) pooh-pooh- [v. tr.] < conventional mouth gesture of displeasure or disgust,
as in No matter how I modified my presentation, she still pooh-poohed the idea. To
tsktsk- has passed through a stage of phonological segmentalization so as to create a
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 15

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 15

lexical item, and it is that lexical item that is now used even in the performative one-
word utterance.
Note how delocutionaries are inflectable with tense, aspect, mode, et cetera as
verbs, nouns, or any other conforming lexical class, as shown as well by Benveniste’s
examples of French saluer (to greet) and such. Etymologically, they are a growing
edge of the metapragmatic vocabulary essential to having grammaticalized explicit
primary performative formulae, Searle’s (1969:30ff.) “illocutionary force indicating
devices.” The fact is, such explicit primary performative verbs come and go in the
history of languages. The set of so-called primary IFIDs grows especially from delo-
cutionary processes that constitute lexical forms themselves ultimately undergoing
all of the normal lexical possibilities for derivation.

3. Bidirectional Interdiscursivity as Trope of “Time Travel”: Austin Powers and

Interdiscursive Cultural Flotsam Moving from and to Both Poles of the Relational
Spectrum
The whole allegorical as well as plot structure of the Austin Powers movies is
based on chronotopicality and on the faux simultaneities across source-target pair-
ings in the 1970/1990-2000 contexts, across which both characters and film audiences
(with different knowledge) time-travel in both directions, note. The perennial villain,
Dr. Evil, is evil precisely because he is always contemporaneous with the here and
now of inevitable change, the perspective of technological—here, sci-fi imagina-
tive—innovation from which his engines of destruction are always to be set in mo-
tion. Dr. Evil is “-eval” incarnate. Only the heroic acts of time-travel in both
directions—allegorically, renvoi or memory and prolepsis (prefigurement)—can
thwart the otherwise un-thwart-able Dr. Evil and his henchmen.
The character Austin Powers is the 1970s pop-cultural, working-class, soft and
foppish underbelly of the charming, urbane, and hyper-masculinely cool jet-setting
British spy. Famously epitomized in earlier times by such actors as David Niven,
such a persona emerged most famously in the James Bond films, starring Sean
Connery, Roger Moore, and others, all based on a series of novels by Ian Fleming.
Thus the series of three Austin Powers films even make reference in their titles to
Bond’s soubriquet, as in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), or to well-
known Bond films, as in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) [cf. The Spy
Who Loved Me (1977)] and Austin Powers: Goldmember (2002) [cf. Goldfinger (1964)].
The over-the-top explicitness of sexuality in the titles is, of course, merely a prelude
to the extraordinary level of winking, allusive crudity of the language and situations
in the films themselves, again, by full-frontal parody, drawing out any of the coy
“mystery” with which such topics had been treated in the cinematic 1960s and 1970s
of the James Bond films and making the latent all too explicit. (And it goes much fur-
ther. Indeed, the density of crude, totally de-eroticizing gags focused on excretion,
both visual and verbal, in which zones and organs of the body involved in sexuality
are completely turned to their excretory functions, hilariously ruins whatever sexual
“mystery” the intertext may have retained.) By the third film, note, a definite genre
had come into being by virtue of the interdiscursivity internal to the series. Mike
Myers, the writer and multi-cast actor (who plays both Austin Powers and Dr. Evil,
among others) has scripted numerous explicit metapragmatic utterances of charac-
ters who make reference to what ought to happen at a certain juncture of an—note
my indefinite article—Austin Powers movie. And, like Gilbert and Sullivan op-
erettas, the specifically genred scenes of one or another sort play upon the very same
gags as composed one or both of the earlier films, to precisely comparable effect. The
mythic world can thus be populated with stock characters who know how to act
when faced with each other in particular kinds of situations.
Observe further that the dangerous, world-threatening situations Austin Powers
finds himself called upon to thwart are caused by the high-tech machinations of a
very 1990s special-effects-action-film shoot-’em-up villain, Dr. Evil, the very contem-
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 16

16 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

poraneity or “eval”ness of whose evil is central to our engagement with the allegory.
Within the filmic diathesis, both characters/periods constitute origines from which
the other is projected, with Austin Powers bringing to the 1990s global pop-cultural
and pop-political horizon an invariantly 1960s/70s sensibility and style that some-
times, like the proverbial stopped clock, is, by chance (Chance the Gardener?), effec-
tive, if generally inappropriate in the new “-eval” context.
In a way, too, for the audience the fun is designed to be the inverse of my students
vis-à-vis Shakespeare; it requires the recognition by the viewers of these films that
the 1970s are gone—good riddance!—in both their Bondesque and Powersian ver-
sions, because the 1990s are so cool, and yet plus ça change . . . . Austin Powers, Dr.
Evil, and the rest of the characters both in the 1970s and in the late 1990s/2000s con-
stantly travel back and forth and encounter each other interdiscursively in the coeval
and noncoeval modes (notwithstanding the Evil Family history!).
Rip Van Winkle, Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless
of the WWII era, various more recent space/time-travel movies, as well, of course, as
“007” constitute the intertexts here of the first-order interdiscursive spoof, which is
merely the starting point for what we might term the “higher” interdiscursivity of
stylistic types within the narrated filmic universe.

4. Register as Interdiscursive Speech Genre: Advertising-Copy “Message”ing of the

Bush-II Presidency and the Proleptic Domination of Clusters of Institutional
Discourses—Type-Targeting, without Denotational Content of Issues and
Propositions
Mr. Bush, like any elected political figure in a politics of recognition, is, of course,
a cornucopia of political “message”; I would maintain that the textuality of his lin-
guistic production must be read in its illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects in re-
lation to contemporary advertising.
Advertising itself lives in the wake of 1976 and 1977 Supreme Court decisions about
advertising “puffery”—exaggerated, perlocutionarily misleading claims—and about
the applicability of “free speech” protections to commercial communication under the
First Amendment. The result, as Richard Parmentier (1994:142–155) has sketched, is
that advertisers have become more and more wary of making actionable—as in law-
suits—specific claims about products and services advertised. Hence, ad copy is com-
posed of text in linguistic and other modalities that paint an inviting picture of a place
of consumer identification the entextualizing reader/listener/viewer is affectively to
be drawn to, to identify with. Such propositional claims as are made tend to be about
someone’s—it could be your, could it not?—attitudes and experiences with products,
in the realm of affective facts, not facts directly about “the stuff,” as it were. Even tech-
nical specifications for commodities like prestige-brand automobiles are immediately
related to how one—hey, you!—can or will feel about, say, going from 0 to 60 mph in
5.3 seconds (or a picture—on television, with musical accompaniment, usually—will
simultaneously illustrate the feeling). There is a whole evolving horizon of creativity
in the poetics of advertising that constitutes an important leading edge of linguistic
usage in the contemporary world, affecting our alignments to registers and to frame-
works of interdiscursivity in interpretation.
Though there has been a dearth of visible-and-listenable raw presidential material
of spontaneous verbal usage since spring of 2000 and particularly since September of
2001,18 it was already clear from earlier recorded examples that Mr. Bush, first as
candidate for the American presidency and then as president, is widely effective be-
cause of the interdiscursivity of his speech with advertising: not much in the way of
propositional content for which he is ultimately responsible; high preponderance of
injunctions and slogans and just de-semanticized combinations of words that create
a Vygotskian (1987 [1934]:139–141) chain-complex, a sometimes only locally organized
internal structure of tropic leaps making an equivalence class (Osama yields
Saddam, for example; rescued Pennsylvania miners yield resuscitated—
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 17

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 17

revenged/redeemed—victims of September 11, 2001, attacks; etc.). That’s why preci-

sion of denotational textuality is just not to the point. The rhetoric of mock- or
pseudo-denotation (with apologies to Jane Hill), as we might term it, is not designed
to engage propositionally with issues, so much as to frame whatever issues are oth-
erwise insinuated into popular political process by the use of identity-structuring
emblems and other indexicals of persona. Much of the spontaneous utterance has the
quality of scenes from Peter Seller’s brilliant film Being There, consisting of a pastiche
of improvisational ready-mades that could have been delivered by Chauncey
Gardiner (Chance the Gardener): “When you have your own money, it means you’ve
got more money to spend.” And so forth.
Here is Mr. Bush-II at a news conference on October 11, 2001, as (enthusiastically
and approvingly!) reported19 (and paragraphed) in the New York Times:
I appreciate diplomatic talk. But I’m more interested in action and results. I am absolutely
determined, absolutely determined, to rout terrorism out where it exists and bring them to
justice. We learned a good lesson on September 11: that there is evil in this world. . . .
And it is my duty as the president of the United States to use the resources of this great
nation, a freedom-loving nation, a compassionate nation, a nation that understands values
of life and rout terrorism out where it exists. And we’re going to get PLENTY OF NATIONS a
chance to do so.

Syntactic blends, malapropisms, contamination of idioms, lack of proper reference

maintenance, register shifts, and so forth.20 But look at some of the ready-mades out
of which the totality is constructed: talk versus action; rout [sic] terrorism out where
it exists > bring to justice; lesson . . . evil; duty – president of the United States > this
great nation = a freedom-loving nation = a compassionate nation; values [sic] of life;
rout terrorism out where it exists. And what is the PROPOSITIONAL content of this ver-
balization in the way of explicitly, let alone precisely, articulating a policy? I daresay
that this is not the point of this interesting piece of poetic structure.
Perhaps this paint-by-emblematic-lexicalization rhetoric—depending on, note,
and invoking Putnamian stereotypes in the process—is, in fact, the most professional
quality semiotic fulfillment of the notion of “perpetual campaigning” that the print
media, in particular, introduced—incorrectly, deflected by whined insinuendo of
RNC interests—about Mr. Clinton, in-office rhetoric continuous with campaign ad-
vertising techniques and useful to the degree that it is completely interdiscursive
with it and pragmatically effective principally in its image.

Notes
Acknowledgments. This article was originally prepared, in telegraphic style, for the sympo-
sium “Intertextuality,” organized by Asif Agha and Stanton Wortham, at the annual meeting
of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, 21 November 2002. On the basis
of revealing reactions to the telegraphy from three referees and from the editors, it has been
considerably expanded while being revised for publication, a process of—one hopes!—clarifi-
cation that thus owes much to my interlocutors, known and unknown.
1. Of course, as many writers have shown in one or another aspect, following Bühler (1990),
the chronotope of the narrated world, where characters (denotata) “live,” is indexically pro-
jected from the here and now of the world of narration, the world of discursive practice.
Grammatical deixis (indexical denotation) of the usual spatiotemporal sort is a central formal
mechanism for calibrating the two universes, as are such paradigmatic deictic markings as
person, mode, et cetera. The deixis necessary to align the two realms and yet keep them inter-
actionally distinct is obviously a relative (and relativistic) one, experienced as “transposition”
of deixis within the world of narration. At the same time, actual tropic deictic transposition—
as in the use of the narrative present tense for non-ongoing narrated events—does, in fact,
occur. Haviland (1993, 1996) and Ochs (1994, 1996, 2004; Ochs et al. 1996), among others, have
explored such transpositions and their effects, Haviland in particular in respect of the roles of
verbal and gestural deixis in achieving “transposition.” As well, Bakhtin’s (1981:301ff.) central
point about the (to him) high-water mark of literary modernity, the realist novel, can be simi-
larly understood. He notes how authors use the natural “heteroglossia” (inherent sociolin-
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 18

18 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

guistic variability) of any language community indexically to create narrative “voices” of char-
acters. Such “voices” exist, of course, only in relation to presupposable social positionali-
ties that variant uses index in the universe of narration shared by a novel’s author and
readership—as well, in realism, by a novel’s characters in its narrated world. See Hill 1995;
Silverstein 1999; Wortham 1996, 2001, 2003; and Koven 2001, 2002 for some applications of
Bakhtinian technique to situations of narration within interactional frames.
Bakhtin further points out that heteroglossia manifests as an inherent macro-sociological in-
terdiscursivity in all discourse, making narration about characters in effect doubly “dialogic”
in a special and idiosyncratic sense of this last term, once explicitly and once implicitly. In het-
eroglossia-based “voicing,” the narrative artist uses phenomena of interdiscursivity to create
component partials, “voices,” of an intradiscursive textual structure. Nevertheless, it is im-
portant to keep the concept of interdiscursivity as developed here for the universe of discur-
sive interaction conceptually distinct from both narrated world (denotational) chronotopes
and from heteroglossia-based “voicing.” This footnote responds, with thanks, to several use-
ful queries of anonymous referees about differentiating these various concepts in the linguis-
tic anthropological literature.
2. Greg Urban has recently (2001) written about Metaculture in relation to regimes of virtual
circulation from originary to secondary to . . . n-ary occasions, generalizing from the specifi-
cally discursive situation, though exemplifying his points principally from the realm of dis-
course, in which the key entity or form is the text, a causally consequential structure of relative
coherence that emerges in and is precipitated by discourse. Some discourse is explicitly
metadiscursive; some only implicitly so. We must be careful, of course, to differentiate the text
in this sense, a completely socio-spatiotemporal entity, from the text artifact, with its “thingy”
quality of potential physical movement through time and space in its own regime of circula-
tion, for example, in the commodity form.
3. I have spelled this out in elaborate detail in a paper at the 1996 San Francisco AAA meet-
ing, “The ‘simultaneity’ of grammar and the ‘poetics’ of simultaneity,” but summarize here.
4. Note that self-styled “Conversation Analysis,” with its unique focus on the adjacency pair
in turn-taking, is hard-pressed to account for these hierarchical layerings—long in the litera-
ture—and the poetic structures formed in interaction with relevantly “equivalent” (cf.
Jakobson) sequential units at some durational remove one from another. (See Goffman 1976;
Merritt 1976; and Silverstein 2003a:197–201, reanalyzing a transcript in Levinson 1983:305.)
The best one can do within the strictures of CA is to model interaction as a kind of interac-
tional-text-level X-bar structure of constituent pair-part fractions, “headed” by a highest-level
interactional “move,” for example first pair-part “request” by someone as the culminative se-
quel to a “pre-request” sequence, perhaps. This is, of course, a theoretical aporia in an ap-
proach that purports to model only earlier-to-later local adjacency structures; worse, it is not
actually locally determinable only “in” transcript.
5. In Silverstein 2003a:197–200 I elaborate the point that text partials seem functionally to
nest one inside another, yielding a kind of hierarchical structure. This results from the fact that
text-forming metricalizations, though subtending different-sized scopes of signal duration, are
laminated one onto another in the total (co(n))textual effect. So, once indexically established,
certain aspects of role inhabitance perdure over interactional event-time, in effect “framing”
other aspects of role inhabitance. In the example referred to here, once each of two interacting
people have assumed the roles of “customer” and “salesclerk,” these identities endure and
frame what emerges in the more fluid and quicker-cycle inhabitance of the roles in conversa-
tional dialogue. Customer and salesclerk alternate as “initiator” and “respondent” of various
adjacency-pair Q-and-A metricalizations of turn-taking, particularly as the salesperson tries
coaxing a necessary piece of information out of his presumed customer—information that
never comes.
6. Recall here Jakobson’s widened usage of the term to mean “having determinate semantic
value one with respect to another,” as denotationally distinct elements within a syntagmati-
cally delimited paradigm or a positionally delimited “poetic function.”
7. Pointing up the importance of the distinction between interdiscursivity, with its event-
based vectorial dynamism, and intertextuality in the sense just introduced, one referee use-
fully noted that “[interdiscursivity] juxtapose[s] texts in such a way as to challenge their
apparent similarity, to construe them as fundamentally not tokens of a type, as in ironic, satir-
ical, and parodic intertextuality” (emphasis added—MS)—to which one can only say, “Yes!
That’s the point!” These are tropic transformations of otherwise cotextual relationships, for ex-
ample, negating a text and its taken-for-granted interpretation by metacommunication, negat-
ing it by subtle substitution, and negating it by exaggeration.
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 19

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 19

8. Here is the birth of the concept of textual genre, though the concept more usefully lies
within a metapragmatics of interdiscursivity as in Bakhtin’s elaboration of the “speech genre”
as the unit of analysis.
9. Indeed, one of the lines of division between self-styled “formalist” and “functionalist” ap-
proaches to language (grammar) is the issue of the reducibility of principles of grammar,
specifically of syntax, to principles of what we are terming here text-in-context. See Nichols
1984 for an early summary of the issues along the formalist/functionalist divide. Hopper and
Thompson (1984, 1993), Hopper (1996, 1997), and Bybee and Hopper (2001) all develop views
that largely eschew a distinct formal organization identifiable as grammar. By contrast, note
the formalist views about the well-defined autonomy of at least syntax put forward by Baker
(2003) and Newmeyer (1998, 2001, 2003).
10. I have treated this matter from a grammaticosemantic and -pragmatic point of view in
two earlier articles (Silverstein 1981, 1987) about the organization of categories of denotation
in relation to types of descriptive backing associated with each of the grammatical types: per-
sonal deictics, demonstratives, anaphors, proper names, relational and absolute status terms,
. . . , abstract nominalizations. Such grammatically (formally) differentiated denotational ex-
pression-types differ systematically in the ingredients of the intensional information commu-
nicated-as-true about denotata by their use. The systematic differences can be captured in the
figure of a multidimensional denotational “space” not unlike the phonetico-phonologic
“space” in which sound segment-types (segmental phonemes) are locatable according to val-
ues of dimensions of contrast (“features” in the case of phonology).
11. See Hanks’ (1992) useful phrasing of the distinction between indexical presupposition of
features of contextual “ground” and relationally picked-out referred-to “figure” in sensorially-
based systems of deixis.
12. Study of “naming systems” in sociocultural anthropology or of “systems of address” in
social psychology and interactional sociolinguistics is all about delimiting the universe of
metapragmatic regimentations on baptism and subsequent events of usage of particular par-
adigms of pragmatic alternants that together constitute an individual’s “name,” “title,” or
equivalently usable linguistic form. Braune 1988 has a good bibliography on this point.
13. Observe that the whole area of refiguring human categorization in terms of prototype
extensional objects-of-reference of terms, of interdiscursively emergent stereotypes about the
class of denotata of such terms, et cetera is consistent with this approach to meaning. See now
Taylor 2003 and Aarts et al. 2004, especially parts II and V.
14. In Silverstein 1998:128-135 and Silverstein 2003a, I have elaborated this dialectic of ex-
tensionalization—(re)intensionalization via the abductive power of linguistic ideology in ex-
plaining how all social indexicality works. Indexicals are not “natural” but are sociocentrically
emergent emblems (conventional iconic indexicals) to the extent they are always already sub-
ject to naturalizing essentializations in the processes of usage.
15. Cited from The Oxford Shakespeare paperback edition (1998), ed. H[arold] J[ames] Oliver
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), from which I was required to teach. The play itself likely
originated ca. 1592, though the text cited comes from a critical collation of quarto and folio ver-
sions of the early 17th century.
16. Benveniste’s (1966:277–285) term in French is verbes délocutifs, and his translator for the
1971 English edition of Problems of General Linguistics, Mary Meek, follows the French deriva-
tional morphology in creating the solecism *delocutive. However, it is clear from Benveniste’s
own account that the underlying nominal base from which he derives his—morphologically
conforming—French term is the French locution, by an analogical parallel, as he explicitly says,
to the Latinate linguistic terms [verbe] dénominatif < nom, [nom] déverbatif < verbe. The English
noun locution-, on the other hand, yields the whole parallel set of adjectives already in exis-
tence in linguistic-pragmatic register based on its English adjectival derivative, locutionary,
viz., illocutionary, perlocutionary. This dictates a conforming adjective delocutionary deriva-
tionally parallel to denominal [verb or adjective] and deverbal [noun].
17. There is another metapragmatic descriptor, in verbal form (to) cluck the/one’s tongue,
in nominal generic form tongue-clucking, that seems to describe the performance of this
sound as a performative of “disapproval” on the part of the tongue-clucker.
18. The Bush-II administration has gone back to the pre-Eisenhower-era practice of redact-
ing and cosmetically editing “official” versions of the president’s “spontaneous” utterances,
carefully negotiating their public quotation and broadcast with media outlets that must, after
all, be admitted into the Executive presence for continued access.
19. The New York Times cheered “Mr. Bush’s New Gravitas” on 12 October 2001, the day fol-
lowing an East Room press conference. “He seemed more confident, determined, and sure of
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 20

20 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

his purpose and was in full command of the complex array of political and military challenges
that he faces,” gushed the editorial page: “Mr. Bush clarified and sharpened his positions on
several important issues.” A not uncharacteristic empirical sample is quoted above.
20. I have indicated each of the most glaring of grammatical, lexical, and stylistic problems
with a distinct font treatment in my citation (not present in the Times transcript).

References Cited
Aarts, Bas, David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova, eds.
2004 Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Baker, Mark C.
2003 Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M.
1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist, ed. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press.
1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, eds. Vern
W. McGee, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Banfield, Ann
1993 Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet Literary History: The Development of
Represented Speech and Thought. In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and
Metapragmatics. John A. Lucy, ed. Pp. 339–364. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benveniste, Emile
1966 Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Braune, Friedericke
1988 Terms of Address: Problems of Pattern and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bühler, Karl
1990[1934] Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Donald Fraser
Goodwin, trans. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Bybee, Joan L., and Paul J. Hopper, eds.
2001 Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Co.
Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist
1984 Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Goffman, Erving
1976 Replies and Responses. Language in Society 5:257–313.
Halliday, Michael A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan
1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman Group Ltd.
Hanks, William F.
1992 The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference. In Rethinking Context: Language as an
Interactive Phenomenon. Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, eds. Pp. 46–76.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haviland, John B.
1993 Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr Pointing Gestures. Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology 3:3–45.
1996 Projections, Transpositions, and Relativity. In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. John J.
Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. Pp. 271–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hill, Jane H.
1995 The Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano Narrative. In
The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Bruce Mannheim and Dennis Tedlock, eds. Pp.
97–147. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hopper, Paul J.
1996 Some Recent Trends in Grammaticalization. Annual Review of Anthropology
25:217–236.
1997 Discourse and the Category ‘Verb’ in English. Language and Communication
17:93–102.
Hopper, Paul J., and Sandra A. Thompson
1984 The Discourse Basis for Lexical Categories in Universal Grammar. Language
60:703–752.
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 21

Axes of Evals: Token versus Type Interdiscursivity 21

1993 Language Universals, Discourse Pragmatics, and Semantics. Language Sciences

15:357–376.
Jakobson, Roman
1960 Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Style in Language. Thomas A. Sebeok,
ed. Pp. 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Koven, Michèle E. J.
2001 Comparing Bilinguals’ Quoted Performance of Self and Others in Tellings of the Same
Experience in Two Languages. Language in Society 30:513-558.
2002 An Analysis of Speaker Role Inhabitance in Narratives of Personal Experience. Journal
of Pragmatics 34:167–217.
Kripke, Saul A.
1972 Naming and Necessity. In Semantics of Natural Language. Donald Davidson and
Gilbert Harman, eds. Pp. 253–355. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
Lee, Benjamin
1997 Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C.
1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Merritt, Marilyn
1976 On Questions Following Questions in Service Encounters. Language in Society
5:315–357.
Newmeyer, Frederick J.
1998 Language Form and Language Function. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2001 Where Is Functional Explanation? Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 37-
2:99–122.
2003 Grammar Is Grammar and Usage Is Usage. Language 79:682–707.
Nichols, Johanna
1984 Functional Theories of Grammar. Annual Review of Anthropology 13:97–117.
Ochs, Elinor R.
1994 Stories That Step into the Future. In Perspectives on Register: Situating Language
Variation in Sociolinguistics. Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, eds. Pp. 106–135. New
York: Oxford University Press.
1996 Linguistic Resources for Socializing Humanity. In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity.
John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. Pp. 407–437. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
2004 Narrative Lessons. In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Alessandro Duranti,
ed. Pp. 269–289. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Ochs, Elinor, Patrick Gonzales, and Sally Jacoby
1996 “When I Come Down I’m in a Domain State”: Grammar and Graphic Representation
in the Interpretive Activity of Physicists. In Interaction and Grammar. Elinor Ochs,
Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, eds. Pp. 328–369. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Parmentier, Richard J.
1994 Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Putnam, Hilary
1975 The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’ In Philosophical Papers, vol. 2: Mind, Language, and
Reality. Pp. 215–271. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R.
1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Silverstein, Michael
1976 Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In Meaning in Anthropology.
Keith Basso and Henry Selby, eds. Pp. 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
1981 Case Marking and the Nature of Language. Australian Journal of Linguistics 1:227–244.
1987 Cognitive Implications of a Referential Hierarchy. In Social and Functional Approaches
to Language and Thought. Maya Hickmann, ed. Pp. 125–164. Orlando, FL: Academic
Press.
03.JLIN.15.1_06-22.qxd 5/12/05 12:09 PM Page 22

22 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

1993 Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function. In Reflexive Language:

Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. John A. Lucy, ed. Pp. 33–58. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
1998 The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. In Language Ideologies: Practice and
Theory. Paul V. Kroskrity, Bambi B. Schieffelin, and Kathryn A. Woolard, eds. Pp. 123–145.
New York: Oxford University Press.
1999 NIMBY Goes Linguistic: Conflicted ‘Voicings’ from the Culture of Local Language
Communities. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 35-2:101–123.
2003a Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. Language and
Communication 23:193–229.
2003b Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to “W.” Chicago: Prickly Paradigm
Press.
Taylor, John R.
2003 Linguistic Categorization. 3rd edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Urban, Greg
2001 Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Vološinov, Valentin N.
1986 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, trans.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, Lev S.
1987 Thinking and Speech. In The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Robert W. Rieber and
Aaron S. Carton, eds. Norris Minick, trans. Vol. 1: Problems of General Psychology. Pp.
39–285. New York: Plenum Press.
Wortham, Stanton E. F.
1996 Mapping Participant Deictics: A Technique for Discovering Speakers’ Footing. Journal
of Pragmatics 25:331–348.
2001 Narratives in Action: A Strategy for Research and Analysis. New York: Teachers
College Press.
2003 Accomplishing Identity in Participant-Denoting Discourse. Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 13:189–210.