Metalinguistic density as an indicator of sharedness: Economic and financial terms in online interaction

Abstract

Metalanguage, language about language, is one of language's most creative and intriguing properties. Yet it has rarely been crystallised as an analytical focus, nor has its occurrence been systematically described or scrutinised. This paper employs a focus on (explicit) metalanguage as a means to detect the extent to which a term and its denotational norms/indexical links are shared across a subset of language users. It argues that the relative amount of metalanguage focusing on a term, the term's ‘metalinguistic density’, offers insights about the term's status in a particular community. Specifically, it proposes the categories of Contentious, Common, and Unstable Terms to describe the contextually influenced behaviour of terms.