Indexes, power, and netdoms: A multidimensional model of language in social action

Across a wide range of scholarship on language, tensions emerge about the relationship between grammar and practice. I explore these tensions and argue that they can be expressed along three analytical dimensions: semiotic, power, and relational. The semiotic dimension shows that language communicates not only symbolic-referential content but primarily the nature of the speech event as a socio-cultural phenomenon in its own right. Thus meaning—and cultural semiosis in general—is mostly about reflexive indexicality. The power dimension points to language as an ambiguous game embedded in conflict and seldom about building consensus. The relational dimension captures whether language stems from the face-to-face or from social network traces of broader interactional times and spaces. I conclude with a multidimensional model of communicative action, and assert that these tensions—symbolic versus indexical, consensus versus conflict, face-to-face versus network—arise from uncritically conflating the empirical with the analytical. My goal is to contribute to broader metatheoretical debates on the linkages between structure and agency in social action.