Evolutionary steps for linguistic signs: The place of indexicality

Peircean semiotics is notoriously based on triads, whose most debated triplet of index, icon and symbol has been taken to express the very essence of linguistic signs. Indexes refer to signified entities by means of physical contiguity, icons by means of structural complexity, while symbols reach the full-blown Saus- surean arbitrariness interpreted in constructional terms as a conventionalized pair of form and meaning. In the paper, the place of indexicality will be discussed with reference to an emergentist perspective discussing one example in which it results from the refunctionalization of disruptive phonological change, as well as to an evolutionary perspective reconstructing the development of an indexical particle which displays peculiar “primitive” properties persisting for an impressively long timespan.