Abstract :
Roman Jakobson concluded his 1956 Presidential Address to the Linguistic Society of America by reminding his listeners that “the urgent task which faces the science of language … must begin by approaching metalanguage as an innermost linguistic problem” (1980 [1956]: 92). In the decades since, scholars inspired by Jakobson have focused on the phenomena of metapragmatics, in which language and other semiotic resources are used to formulate representations and construals of how utterances both reflect and shape the context(s) in which they occur. “Signs functioning metapragmatically,” Silverstein points out, “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” (1993: 33). Here I explore a range of examples in which interlocutors—whether conversing face-to-face or exchanging messages online—establish such ‘framing’ or ‘stipulative’ relationships in everyday forms of “talk about talk,” sometimes explicitly (e.g., by directly quoting and/or “captioning” an utterance or fragment of text), and sometimes implicitly (including through strategic non-response, or by letting a statement “speak for itself”). Such metalinguistic and metapragmatic practices, I argue, are centrally important objects of study, even as they comprise a rich (ethno-) methodology for participation in discursive activity, whether synchronous (face-to-face) or asynchronous.
