Editing Pragmatics (section)

===Silverstein's "Pure" Indexes===
[[Michael Silverstein]] has argued that "nonreferential" or "pure" indices do not contribute to an utterance's referential meaning but instead "signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables."{{sfn|Silverstein|1976}} Although nonreferential indexes are devoid of semantico-referential meaning, they do encode "pragmatic" meaning.

The sorts of contexts that such indexes can mark are varied. Examples include:
* '''Sex indexes''' are affixes or inflections that index the sex of the speaker, e.g. the verb forms of female [[Koasati language|Koasati]] speakers take the suffix "-s".
* '''Deference indexes''' are words that signal social differences (usually related to status or age) between the speaker and the addressee. The most common example of a deference index is the V form in a language with a [[T–V distinction]], the widespread phenomenon in which there are multiple second-person pronouns that correspond to the addressee's relative status or familiarity to the speaker. [[Honorific]]s are another common form of deference index and demonstrate the speaker's respect or esteem for the addressee via special forms of address and/or self-humbling first-person pronouns.
* An '''Affinal taboo index''' is an example of [[avoidance speech]] that produces and reinforces sociological distance, as seen in the Aboriginal [[Dyirbal language]] of Australia. In that language and some others, there is a social taboo against the use of the everyday lexicon in the presence of certain relatives (mother-in-law, child-in-law, paternal aunt's child, and maternal uncle's child). If any of those relatives are present, a Dyirbal speaker has to switch to a completely separate lexicon reserved for that purpose.

In all of these cases, the semantico-referential meaning of the utterances is unchanged from that of the other possible (but often impermissible) forms, but the pragmatic meaning is vastly different.