Inference and indexicality, or how to solve Bakhtin's problem with heteroglossia

Abstract

Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia was ambiguous on a central point: whether the styles or socio-ideological languages that constituted it were creations of novelistic discourse itself or were already established in everyday speech and incorporated into the novel. The sociolinguistic and anthropological literature on indexicality has greatly enriched our understanding of heteroglossia, but, it, too, leaves this question up in the air. After a brief review of writing on indexicality, we show that the idea of ‘n + 1’, higher-order, indexicality, first mooted by Silverstein, intersects with debates in analytic philosophy of language about the relative roles of inference and semiosis in linguistic understanding. Higher-order indexicality, crucially, depends upon inferential processes, ranging from simple analogy to complex argument, and this has consequences for where indexical values are established.