The analysis of the first person singular pronoun ("I"), as outlined by Benveniste in his now classic articles "The Nature of Pronouns" (1971a [1956]) and "Subjectivity in Language" (1971b [1958]), has supplied a framework for conceptualizing the relationship between self, language, and ultimately culture. This analysis has been taken up in theorizing about the self that is of a semiotic-philosophical character, especially in the work of Ricouer (1974) and Singer (1984), but also in the semiotic-linguistic framework developed by Silverstein (1976). I wish to argue in this paper that the analysis proposed by Benveniste is only partially adequate, and that, in fact, an empirical investigation of the use of the personal pronoun "I" in actual discourse reveals a much richer picture of the semiotic functioning of that pronoun. Ultimately, this enriched picture leads to a modified conceptualization of the relationship between self and culture.

Specifically, I propose that in narrative discourse "I" occurs predominantly within quotation marks, and that there it acts as an anaphoric device, analogous to the third person anaphoric pronouns (in English, he, she, it, and they. This "I" conforms only apparently to the Benveniste analysis, its character as a "referential index," to use the semiotic terminology, arising only metaphorically through the semantically described situation, and being considerably removed from true token-level indexicality. There is also, in some instances at least, a kind of "de-quotative 'I,'" where the metaphorical "I" of quotation, though a kind of theatrical substitution, becomes again a referential index, but this time pointing to the speaker not with respect to the speaker's everyday identity or self, but rather with respect to an identity the speaker assumes through the text. I will argue that this substitution of de-quotative "I" for referential indexical "I" is at the heart of the cultural construction of self.

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