The aim here is to clarify the nature of what have come to be called in the literature, following Silverstein (1976: 48–51), METAPRAGMATIC phenomena. In particular, the aim is to clarify the distinction between metapragmatic FUNCTIONS of two semiotic types and between such metapragmatic functions and metapragmatic DISCOURSE. Signs functioning metapragmatically have pragmatic phenomena — indexical sign phenomena — as their semiotic objects; they thus have an inherently “framing,” or “regimenting,” or “stipulative” character with respect to indexical phenomena. In this way, as illustrated in the accompanying chapters, the metapragmatic—pragmatic nexus lies at the intersection of specific theoretical concerns with one or another facet of the total linguistic fact. Let me point out some of these concerns.

First, there is the line of focus on the language—metalanguage relationship, coming out of the logico-linguistic tradition of analytic philosophy and formal syntax. Here, we assume that there is some language in the usual sense, i.e., some grammatically conforming system of expression-types, tokens of which refer-to some universe of referents and predicate-about some universe of states-of-affairs, and that the objects of reference-and-predication happen to be themselves grammatically conforming expressions of some language, called, by virtue of this, the OBJECT LANGUAGE of metalinguistic usage. (The expression-types that are used to refer-to/predicate-about the object language belong, of course, to the METALANGUAGE.)

Introduction

Speech can be reported in a variety of more or less explicit ways. The most obvious types of utterances reporting speech contain verbs of saying that refer explicitly to speech events and present this speech in direct and indirect quotations. Such metalinguistic utterances all mark explicitly some boundary between the reported message and the narrator's message, although they differ in other ways. Other types of utterances can also be used to present speech events in less obvious ways that do not explicitly represent speech qua speech. By virtue of their form and content in isolation, these utterances do not, strictly speaking, quote speech. When they are embedded in discourse, however, they constitute nonexplicit ways of reporting speech, the uses of which are systematic from a functional point of view.

The study presented below examines the different utterance types that were used by (English-speaking) adults and 4- to 10-year-old children when reporting dialogues in various situations. Several discourse modes are identified in the corpus and variations in their uses are illustrated in two types of narrative patterns: (1) prototypical cases, namely when dialogues were reported entirely in one mode, and (2) mode mixtures, namely cases which involved more than one mode.

Part IV, “Interpretation, reported speech, and metapragmatics in the Western tradition,” examines the significance of an understanding of reported speech and metapragmatics for a variety of other scholarly traditions developed in the West. Two themes that run through all of these chapters are the intimate linkage between the use of reflexive language and conceptions of human consciousness (or “inner” experience), and the importance of speakers' ideologies of language and language use in the creation and interpretation of texts.

The first two chapters deal explicitly with psychological theories. In Chapter 11, Crapanzano shows how an understanding of metalinguistic activity can illuminate Freud's psychoanalytic theory and practice. He begins by noting that Freud's metapsychology had difficulty characterizing the transference phenomenon in the psychoanalytic encounter. Crapanzano argues that the difficulty stems from Freud's attempt, deeply rooted in the Western tradition, to treat the transference as a text much in the same manner as he had treated dream texts. Through a detailed examination of Freud's well-known analysis of Dora, Crapanzano makes it clear that the transference phenomenon cannot be approached like the interpretation of a text since there is no autonomous text existing prior to or aside from the encounter. The transference is a pragmatic creation of the analytic encounter itself and is therefore difficult to accurately characterize with metalinguistic formulations since the latter systematically emphasize what is presupposed rather than what is created in an encounter.

Part II, “The relation of form and function in reflexive language,” explores how the two levels of functioning in a reflexive utterance are formally related. Usually, a given language provides a variety of formal techniques for reporting and describing speech which native speakers learn. One important dimension of contrast, at issue in these chapters, is the degree of formal explicitness with which a portion of the utterance is marked and then characterized as object language. The ease, range, or subtlety of metalinguistic activity will depend not only on the availability of formal devices of certain sorts but also on the metalinguistic norms current in the culture. In particular, language researchers bring to their encounters with informants highly developed and explicit reflexive concerns and understandings which interact with, and perhaps conflict with, native concerns and understandings (both tacit and ideological). Effective research requires that investigators understand native forms and their uses and that they be sensitive to the theoretical and practical significance of less formally regimented descriptive practices (e.g., use of narrative scenarios).

The first two chapters deal with naturally occurring techniques for reporting speech and separating metalinguistic usage from ordinary usage. In Chapter 3, Hickmann traces the emergence in English-speaking children of the capacity to separate reported speech from reporting speech in recounting a staged verbal interaction between puppets.

Introduction

In the course of his discussion of discourse in the novel, Bakhtin (1981) points out that the social-historical fact of the “internal stratification” of language into dialects, jargons, and speech genres is the prerequisite for the stylistic “heteroglossia” of the modern polyphonic novel, in which authorial speech, narrator's speech, and the speech of characters enter into complex “interanimation.” Many of Bakhtin's specific analyses of literary techniques found in novelistic heteroglossia can be transferred to the anthropological study of language in its social context. In particular, in the novel as in social life, speech constantly takes as an object of reference or representation previous speech, as in direct and indirect quotation of the actual utterances of others. As Bakhtin notes,

Language and communication

The development of a stylistic form which exists nowhere in the spoken language presents a problem for historical linguistics and literary history. If, as is often supposed, “un style écrit ne se renouvelle … que par un contact avec la parole,” then how does such an unspoken form arise? Is it a natural form or an artificial distortion? If natural, why does it appear at a given historical moment?

The assumption that natural linguistic change occurs only in speech — with writing preserving outmoded forms — is due to the modern assumption that the spoken language is the repository of all forms generated by the synchronic grammar.

Human activity is saturated by speech and much of what is distinctive about the human species depends on the use of language. Yet it is not easy to specify exactly what it is about language that is so special. One aspect of language that has drawn extensive attention in this regard is its reflexive capacity: in its full form this property may be unique to human language (Hockett 1963: 13; Lyons 1977: 5; Silverstein 1976: 16). This reflexive capacity underlies much of the power of language both in everyday life and in scholarly research. A theoretical account of this reflexive capacity will be necessary, therefore, for progress in many of the human disciplines.

A number of approaches to the study of reflexive language have already been developed, but the general significance of this work has not been widely appreciated. The present chapter briefly surveys some of the forms of reflexivity in language, outlines how these have been approached by some prominent research traditions, and then explores the place of research on reflexive language in the human disciplines with special attention to its methodological implications for the research process itself.

Part III, “Text, context, and the cultural functions of reflexive language,” explores the cultural significance of reflexive language and the pragmatic effects which can be obtained by creative manipulation of the parameters and boundaries of reported speech and current speech, text and context. In any situation where there are multiple ways of reporting speech in a community, the selection of or emphasis on one or another technique carries significance. For example, a focus of interest in the chapters presented here is the association between direct report (or literal re-enactment) and perceived authoritativeness. Direct quotation is apparently perceived as more authoritative because listeners recognize that such reports are relatively less subject to alteration in the speaker's interests and, inversely, authoritative speech tends to be directly quoted out of respect for its social value. Nonetheless, skillful speakers can succeed in projecting their own voice into the reported speech. Manipulations of this sort utilize the perceived authoritativeness of the narratives to achieve both personal and cultural ends. In this sense they can be persuasive in quite a different fashion than indirect reports, which more overtly adapt the report to current interests and circumstances.

The first two chapters focus on multiple performances of the “same” text in order to explore the interaction of text and performance context.

Introduction

In performing an act of demonstrative reference, as in “that's it” (said pointing), a speaker produces a special kind of relation between himself or herself, an addressee, and the object of the point. One of the main ways in which natural language deictics differ from one another is in the kinds of relations they establish between participants and referential objects, familiar examples being Proximal to Speaker, Visible to Speaker and Addressee, Distal to Speaker, and so forth. Languages clearly differ in the kinds of relational features they encode (Anderson and Keenan 1985, Fillmore 1982, Hanks 1987, 1989), and the determination of these features is a central part of the empirical study of deixis. Beyond the identification of referents however, demonstrative usage mobilizes a number of other relatively well-known functions too. These include ostensive presentations of a referent (Hanks 1984b), predication of identity or location (“There it is,” “That's it”), direction of an addressee's attention (“There! [look!]”), along with other extra-referential effects (Levinson 1983: 89ff; Silverstein 1976). In many, though not all, cases of demonstrative reference, a crucial role is also played by the execution of bodily gestures simultaneous with the utterance, such as pointing, directed gaze, handing the object over, cocking the head or pursing the lips (Sherzer 1973).

“The ‘me’ is a man's reply to his own talk”

Introduction

George Herbert Mead's social psychology is unique for, among other things, its emphasis on linguistic communication to explain the development of the self. For this reason alone it should be of interest to students of language and culture. I will argue that an understanding of his theory depends crucially upon a modern notion of metapragmatics (Silverstein 1976, 1981); hence the relevance of the concerns of this volume to Meadian scholarship.

However, the demonstration of this claim that the idea of metapragmatics is at the heart of Mead's theory of self cannot be easily achieved without a comprehensive overview of his work. There are several reasons for the necessity of such an overview.

To begin with, let us observe with Natanson that “the work of a truly major American philosopher is today largely unknown, frequently misunderstood where it is known, and, more often than not, simply ignored” (Natanson 1956: 1). A major part of the problem must be due to the circumstances under which his thought came to be known. He published relatively little in his own lifetime, the overwhelming part of his oeuvre having been edited by his students at the University of Chicago (particularly Charles Morris) from lecture notes and article drafts collected a few years after his death in 1931.

Introduction

Sociolinguists have long grappled with the difficult problem posed by units of analysis, those abstract theoretical compartments into which we fit the ongoing flow of speech and social interaction. At one level, this analytic reification captures those aspects of linguistic interaction that are specifiable in the abstract across contexts, the regularities that can be presupposed before any particular speech act takes place. Yet at another level, an analysis in these terms partially obscures the dynamic relation whereby language and context create and reflect social meaning in spontaneous and unpredictable ways. In addition to the perhaps unavoidable problem entailed by analytic abstraction, an added level of difficulty arises when the analyst's conception of language and its use differs from that of the speakers. This chapter examines the ongoing struggle to capture cross-contextual sociolinguistic regularities, focusing in particular upon the study of code-switching. It draws upon data from a Gaelic—English bilingual community in Canada to demonstrate the tension involved in applying abstract analytic categories to speech, a tension that is heightened when the speakers themselves hold a different, more contextual model of speaking. Although in one sense this tension is inevitable, an adequate linguistic analysis must take account of informants' own metapragmatic categories; to apply the standard sociolinguists' “grid” without generating this account is to risk a distorted view of linguistic processes.

Overview of the volume

This volume examines the nature and significance of the reflexive aspect of natural language. Through theoretical statements, empirical studies, and programmatic applications, the volume explores in detail the formal and functional operation of linguistic reflexivity. Both individually and collectively the studies seek to indicate the significance of such detailed work on language for an adequate understanding of the broader contours of human life. We hope to encourage broader and deeper attention to the reflexive aspect of natural language and its significance not only for studies of language structure and use but also for all research in the humanities and social sciences which deals extensively with language materials.

Language provides a powerful tool for representing and characterizing the world, and much of human activity consists of using linguistic utterances to effect certain actions. When, therefore, as scholars, we undertake to develop accounts of human life, one of our central tasks must be to characterize the use of language. This use depends in crucial ways on the reflexive capacity of language, that is, the capacity of language to represent its own structure and use, including the everyday metalinguistic activities of reporting, characterizing, and commenting on speech. The chapters in this volume explore the implementation, power, and limits of this reflexive capacity.