ABSTRACT
As discussed in Chapter 5, variability in directive use is an important resource for understanding cultural diversity in styles of pragmatic socialization. Cultural notions of interactional style and pragmatic socialization can be further educed by what people say they do with words, namely, by their metapragmatic discourse. Metapragmatic comments made in regard to linguistic and conversational behavior reveal the pragmatic norms underlying such behavior. In Silverstein’s (1976) terms, metapragmatic comments are nonreferential indexes. Just as language use can index nonreferentially social dimensions such as degrees of deference, so comments made in regard to the perceived violation of a conversational norm may index for the members of the particular speech community the network of interactional norms governing its particular language use. Such comments relate to the smooth flow of discourse and include calling attention to breaches of turn-taking rules and to perceived violations of conversational maxims, as laid out by Grice (1975). Thus, metapragmatic comments are one of the explicit ways in which members discuss criteria for verbal appropriateness.
