ABSTRACT
The indexical character of language reaches far beyond pronouns. Communication rests upon a kind of conceptual language-context orchestration that members of communities are capable of imagining, wherein language forms provide just enough meaning to invoke past, present, and irrealis contexts of cultural and/or personal relevance. [Toni] Morrison captured this capacity in her Nobel Lecture: “Language arcs towards the place where meaning may lie” (1994, p. 20). This is a beautiful image of indexicality as not so much an explicit pointing to a context that is outside of language, but rather a gesturing of language towards a potential realm of meanings that are brought into consciousness through the linguistic gesture. Indexicality exquisitely displays how incompleteness systematically and creatively brings together language and context. (Ochs, 2012: 149)
