ABSTRACT
Approaching pragmatics as the study of the social and referential meanings indexed by utterances, this chapter takes the view that all uses of language are indexical. Drawing on Kaplan’s distinction between ‘character’ and ‘content’, the chapter begins conventionally by associating indexicality with person, time and place in talk and discourse, before arguing that signs are intrinsically plurifunctional and that indexicality is a property of all utterances. In discussing various real world examples of notices, announcements, helpline communication, radio reporting, reported speech, spam, teletext, advertisements and even legends on football supporters’ scarves collected in Britain, Germany and in Hong Kong, the chapter shows how several features of utterances have a social or cultural ‘content’ that their ‘character’ invites, and that they are thus indexical in ways that go far beyond narrow deictic indexicality and demonstrate the procedural nature of indexicals. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what ‘comes first’ in the evolution of pragmatic phenomena and in contemporary studies of linguistic pragmatics.
