Undecontextualizable: Performativity and the Conditions of Possibility of Linguistic Symbolism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Austin’s explicit performatives (e.g., “promise,” “bequeath”) in terms of (i) the orders of regimentation between semantic-symbolic and pragmatic-indexical functions, (ii) the indexical anchoring of pragmatic effects within either denotationally mediated events-of-narration ( E n ) or interactionally mediated events-of-signaling ( E s ), and (iii) the articulation of indexical function with speech participant roles. The article concludes with a reflection on how the architecture of the phonology-semantics interface (or duality of patterning) safeguards symbolism by impeding the processes of runaway semiotic naturalization that produce rigid performativity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it