Michael Silverstein
Michael Silverstein (12 September 1945 – 17 July 2020) was an American linguist who served as the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of
anthropology,
linguistics, and
psychology at the
University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of
semiotics and
linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of
communication, the
sociology of interaction,
Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic
pragmatics,
sociolinguistics, early
anthropological linguistics and structuralist
grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to
culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture". Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of
Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of
indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms
metapragmatics and
metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing
language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
Provided by Wikipedia
