Michael Silverstein

For the American business consultant and author, see Michael J. Silverstein. For the Rhode Island judge, see Michael A. Silverstein.

Michael Silverstein
Born(1945-09-12)12 September 1945
New York, New York, U.S.
Died17 July 2020(2020-07-17) (aged 74)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Known forMetapragmatics, language ideology
TitleCharles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor
Academic background
EducationHarvard University (BA, Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisorKarl Teeter[1]
Academic work
InstitutionsUniversity of Chicago
Semiotics
 
General concepts
Fields
Methods
Semioticians
Related topics

Michael Silverstein (12 September 1945 – 17 July 2020)[2] was an American linguist who served as the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago.[3] 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".[4] 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[5] 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.[6] His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.[7]

  1. ^ Stephen O. Murray. 1998. American Sociolinguistics: Theorists and Theory Groups. John Benjamins, pp. 236–37.
  2. ^ "Michael Silverstein, groundbreaking anthropologist and linguist, 1945-2020". uchicago news. Retrieved 21 July 2020.
  3. ^ "Michael Silverstein". University of Chicago Department of Linguistics. Archived from the original on 8 July 2015. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
  4. ^ "Michael Silverstein, groundbreaking anthropologist and linguist, 1945-2020". uchicago news. Retrieved 21 July 2020.
  5. ^ Jonathan Yovel and Elizabeth E. Mertz. "Metalinguistic Awareness". Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights. Ed. an-Ola Östman, Jef Verschueren, Jan Blommaert, Chris Bulcaen,. 2010. p. 252-3
  6. ^ Blount, Ben G. 1995. Language, Culture, and Society: A book of Readings. Waveland Press. Inc. pp. 106-7
  7. ^ ""Linguistic Relativity, Whorf, Linguistic Anthropology"". Society for Linguistic Anthropology. 1 September 2010. Retrieved 10 August 2020. "Over an extensive set of publications not designed for the casual reader, Michael Silverstein ... has brought Whorf to bear in formulating one of the key research paradigms of contemporary linguistic anthropology, the investigation of the linguistic and social concomitants of linguistic ideologies."