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Michael Silverstein is a 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.
Silverstein earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard under the Russian linguist, semiotician and literary critic Roman Jakobson, a former member of the Prague School, where he also studied under the logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. In 1982 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the second year of the prize's existence, and was the youngest person, at the time, to be awarded the grant. He was also a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, in Anthropology.
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