Michael Silverstein

Michael Silverstein (born 1945) is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He is a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he has drawn together research on linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, language ideology, semiotic anthropology and grammatical theory into a comprehensive account of language in culture. Among other achievements, he has been 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 in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with developing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.