ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 provides a model of social meaning which incorporates language ideologies, indexicalities and identities. Each is surveyed briefly in its own section, synthesising the literature and then focussing on the most relevant understandings. In each of these, a subsection links the discussion back to social meaning and describes the idea’s part in the conceptualisation at hand and the diagram representing this. Ultimately, the model incorporates indirect indexicality and indexical orders and asserts that these link linguistic forms to identities at three ‘levels’ via language ideologies. The understanding of identity developed here draws particularly on work by Bucholtz and Hall but posits that stance/participant role, social category identity and local type identity have different indexical relationships to the linguistic form (variant, style or language). The relationships between these ideas and their application in analysis are rarely explicated but, by the end of the chapter, the use of social meaning is fully theorised.
