indexicality and sincerity

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
A friend of mine who is a rhetorician would like to know what linguistic
anthropologists have said about how people index sincerity.  He explains
what he is after below:

As for sincerity, I’m thinking of the demand to give signs that we
“mean it” when we promise, apologize, confess, etc. These signs are
typically affective—a catch in the throat, a tear, and so on—and thus
supposed to indicate a certain incapacity to control
self-representation. So I’m interested in the paradox where the
disabling of intention (strategy, rhetoric) is supposed to deliver a
pure intention (or something like that).Presumably affective signs are
supposed to do this work through indexical reference, so I’m
interested in analyses of that process.


I am hoping you can suggest some things he could read.

Thank you,

Ilana