Editing Indexicality (section)

====Indexical order====
In much of the research currently conducted upon various phenomena of non-referential indexicality, there is an increased interest in not only what is called first-order indexicality, but subsequent second-order as well as "higher-order" levels of indexical meaning. First-order indexicality can be defined as the first level of pragmatic meaning that is drawn from an utterance. For example, instances of deference indexicality, such as the variation between informal ''tu'' and formal ''vous'' in French, indicate a speaker/addressee communicative relationship built upon the values of ''power'' and ''solidarity'' possessed by the interlocutors.<ref name=BrownGilman>Brown, R., Gilman, A. "The pronouns of power and solidarity, IN: Sebeok, T.A. (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960.</ref> When a speaker addresses somebody using the V form instead of the T form, they index (via first-order indexicality) their understanding of the need for deference to the addressee. In other words, they perceive or recognize an incongruence between their levels of power and/or solidarity and employ a more formal way of addressing that person to suit the contextual constraints of the speech event.

Second-Order Indexicality is concerned with the connection between [[linguistics|linguistic]] variables and the metapragmatic meanings that they encode. For example, a woman is walking down the street in [[Manhattan]] and she stops to ask somebody where a McDonald's is. He responds to her talking in a heavy "[[Brooklyn]]" [[Accent (sociolinguistics)|accent]]. She notices this accent and considers a set of possible personal characteristics that might be indexed by it (such as the man's intelligence, economic situation, and other non-linguistic aspects of his life). The power of language to encode these preconceived "stereotypes" based solely on accent is an example of second-order indexicality (representative of a more complex and subtle system of indexical form than that of first-order indexicality).