Can the Native Know Language? Viewing Linguistic Anthropology through Signs of Difference

We now recognize that the “realities” of meaningful social practices emerge from people’s situated experience of indexical semiotic processes that constitute them.We ought, perhaps, to resign ourselves to enjoying the fact that it’s indexicality all the way down,that in any sociocultural phenomenon nothing is manifest beyond this indexicalityexcept semanticoreferential language and its further developmentsMichael Silverstein (1998: 128, emphases added). This piece offers a perspective on ling...