Revisiting the Strategically Deployable Shifter: Manipulating Indeterminacy for Semiotic Power and Profit

Abstract The specificity of acts of reference emerges from their indexical nature, not from any fixed denotation inherent in referring expressions. Referential indeterminacy is generally not an issue or is easily corrected. But it can be taken advantage of when hierarchic relations are in play: people can deploy the semiotic potential of indeterminacy in ways that covertly index advantageous alignments based on shared values, while seeming to make the same acts of reference as participants in (apparently) the same discourse who are not angling for such alignments. The indexicality of such alignments provides ethnographic insight into the importance of these fields of discourse for those involved, how social actors exercise control or authority, for whose benefit, toward what desired outcome. To this end, I have coined strategically deployable shifter (SDS) as an analytic term for such discursive action, examining its use in higher education as linked to the financial and corporate spheres. I further explore how SDSs can figure into the processes of indexicality and rhematization (as proposed by Gal and Irvine) that are central to the modeling of those status-driven worlds.