Expanding and Mapping the Indexical Field

Abstract

While rising terminal pitch on declarative syntax (“uptalk”) has received a fair amount of attention in scholarly and popular media, relatively little work has focused specifically on perceptions of uptalk. And among perceptual work, no study has systematically asked listeners to provide their own meanings for uptalk. Study 1 was designed to fill this gap, where listeners were presented with two cases of stereotypical uptalk and asked to answer questions about its meaning. Two follow-up studies analyzed variability in the perception of meanings supplied in Study 1. Study 2 used a matched guise design to compare perceptions of nonstereotypical uptalk and synthetically manipulated falling versions of the same tokens, finding that rises were perceived as less finished, happier, and clearer. Study 3 elicited perceptions of the stereotypical uptalk samples from Study 1, showing perceptions of ‘youth’ and ‘California’ and low agreement with meanings like ‘finished’ and ‘intelligent.’ In both studies, correlation analyses reveal relationships among the meanings for uptalk, for example, the relative independence of perceptions of ‘finished.’ These results are theorized in the context of Eckert’s indexical field and Silverstein’s indexical orders, and I argue that indexical fields need to incorporate semantic and pragmatic meanings to more fully capture the meaning of a linguistic feature. Moreover, correlation analyses can help map the indexical field, identifying which meanings cluster together and which ones are more independent.