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The structural focus of linguistics has led to a static and modular treatment of meaning. Viewing language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal with meaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This article presents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasing performativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performative extreme. The meaning potential of sociolinguistic variables in turn is based in their form and their social source, constituting a cline of ‘interiority’ from variables that index public social facts about the speaker to more internal, personal affective states.

Although brand authenticity is gaining increasing interest in consumer behavior research and managerial practice, literature on its measurement and contribution to branding theory is still limited. This article develops an integrative framework of the concept of brand authenticity and reports the development and validation of a scale measuring consumers' perceived brand authenticity (PBA). A multi-phase scale development process resulted in a 15-item PBA scale measuring four dimensions: credibility, integrity, symbolism, and continuity. This scale is reliable across different brands and cultural contexts. We find that brand authenticity perceptions are influenced by indexical, existential, and iconic cues, whereby some of the latters' influence is moderated by consumers' level of marketing skepticism. Results also suggest that PBA increases emotional brand attachment and word-of-mouth, and that it drives brand choice likelihood through self-congruence for consumers high in self-authenticity.

This study adopts a raciolinguistic perspective to examine the portrayal and reception of Ruan Yuejiao, a Vietnamese female spouse character created by a Taiwanese male content creator. As a representative of the Taiwanese majority, this content creator utilizes linguistic features to perform a racialized Vietnamese accent and embody a Vietnamese spouse persona, which they believe counters racial stereotypes. This article introduces the concept of indexical hijack to describe how the racial majority imposes new indexical meanings on these mediatized linguistic features, disregarding the perspectives of the Vietnamese community. By highlighting a raciolinguistic listening mode embedded within Taiwan's multicultural discourse, this study reveals how anti-racist actions initiated by the Vietnamese community are reinterpreted by the Taiwanese majority as racist, reflecting the complexities of post-racial multiculturalism in East Asia. (Raciolinguistics, Taiwan, Vietnamese migrants, digital enregisterment, indexicality)*

The treatment of social meaning in sociolinguistic variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macrosociological categories of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In both waves, variation was seen as marking social categories. This article sets out a theoretical foundation for the third wave, arguing that ( a ) variation constitutes a robust social semiotic system, potentially expressing the full range of social concerns in a given community; ( b ) the meanings of variables are underspecified, gaining more specific meanings in the context of styles, and ( c ) variation does not simply reflect, but also constructs, social meaning and hence is a force in social change.

Laura Millard's 2006 Lac des Arcs depicts the traces left by skaters on an ice rink. The digital photograph's surface is covered in handmade marks which serve as an index of the skaters and their motion over the ice. Millard's work combines contemporary and nineteenth-century techniques: her handwork recalls the practice of overpainting in the late nineteenth-century French sports press, where editors and photographers used drawing and painting to articulate the aesthetic and narrative importance of their photographs. Since its inception, overpainting's practice and analysis have lived at the margins of art and media history. Once a shameful technique to which critics and printers of photographs in the late nineteenth century turned a blind eye, and still a phenomenon that remains difficult to locate in archives, overpainting has re-emerged in Millard's work. This article argues that the artist breaks down barriers between media forms and revisits questions about what kinds of image technology can most holistically provide a window into reality. Millard's work makes clear that handwork can seemingly emphasize a photograph's indexicality - those factors that enable connections between representation and the world - of the subjects and movement that the camera captured, despite drawing over the top of indices of human movement.

This paper presents and advocates an approach to the semantics of opinion statements, including matters of personal taste and moral claims. In this framework, 'outlook-based semantics', the circumstances of evaluation are not composed of a possible world and a judge (as in 'world-judge relativism'); rather, outlooks replace possible worlds in the role of circumstance of evaluation. Outlooks are refinements of worlds that settle not only matters of fact but also matters of opinion. Several virtues of the framework and advantages over existing implementations of worldjudge relativism are demonstrated in this paper. First, world-judge relativism does not actually explain the 'disagreement' of 'faultless disagreement', while a straightforward explanation suggests itself in outlook-based semantics. Second, outlook-based semantics provides an account of subjective attitude verbs that can capture lack of opinionatedness. Third, outlook-based semantics unproblematically explains the connection-building role of aesthetic discourse and the group-relevance of discretionary assertions, while capturing the same effects in world-judge relativism obviates the purpose of the judge parameter. Finally, because the proposed circumstances of evaluation (outlooks) are entirely analogous to possible worlds, the framework is easy to use and extend.

Although consumer demand for authentic market offerings has often been mentioned in consumer research, the meaning of the term “authentic” has not been sufficiently specified. Thus, some important differences among authentic market offerings have not been recognized or examined. This article uses Peirce’s semiotic framework to distinguish between two kinds of authenticity—indexical and iconic. We identify the cues that lead to the assessment of each kind, and, based on data collected at two tourist attractions, we show that these cues can have a different influence on the benefits of consuming authenticity. Our results also contribute to an understanding of the negotiation of reality and fantasy as a part of consumption.

It is well documented that the same sociolinguistic feature can be used as a sociolinguistic resource with different indexical potentials in different linguistic as well as social contexts. Often, however, indexical meanings of a specific feature are related to or derived from one another. In this article we present the results of a perceptual study of indexical meanings of alveolar versus fronted (s)—[s] versus [s+]—in different registers. The data consist of responses to male speakers' use of [s] and [s+] respectively, in two different registers that may be labelled “modern Copenhagen speech” and “street language.” Results show that the [s+] indexes femininity and gayness when it occurs in “modern Copenhagen,” whereas the (s)-variation has a different and less significant effect when occurring in “street language.” We discuss the implications for theories of indexical fields and the relation between features and clusters of features in speakers' perceptions. (Indexical meaning, phonetic variation, fronted /s/, perception of sexual orientation and ethnicity, matched guise technique).