Person-Indexing Registers, Idiolect, Subjectivity

Abstract

This article explores person-indexing registers : registers where the non-referential indexical value of the register’s metasemiotic model of semiosis is an individuated entity, prototypically a person. Differentiating such cases from persona-indexing registers (e.g., speech registers like legalese, dialects, slangs, etc.)—which invoke metapragmatic stereotypes of various sorts, prototypically figures of personhood—and so-called idiolects, I turn to an extended analysis of person- and persona-indexing enregisterment in Stanton Wortham’s ethnography of a U.S. classroom. I conclude by reflecting on the non-discreteness of persona- and person-indexing registers, the way they dialectically transform into each other through citational processes, and how an understanding of this relationship affords insight into the semiotics of subjectivity.