Index as Scaffold to the Subjunctivity of Children’s Performatives

Abstract

This article provides a new characterization of gestural performatives, providing a semiotic analysis of their dialogic meaning—that performatives function as action signs, specifically indexes. Consonant with Peirce’s Ten-Fold Division of Signs, it proposes that the meanings which underlie performative actions supersede the interpretants of the Dicisign and therefore become the subjects of propositions. The dialogic nature of action signs is only beginning to be explored systematically; as such, this fresh inquiry argues that this process develops in ontogeny between two semiotic actors, particularly in view of imperative and subjunctive meanings or effects housed within the Energetic Interpretants of signs whose representamen depict movement.