Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture.
[4] Among other achievements, he was 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[5] in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study.
[7] Silverstein earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he studied with the Russian linguist, semiotician and literary critic Roman Jakobson,[8] a former member of the Prague School, where he also studied under the logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine.
[10] Based on work of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Charles Sanders Peirce, and incorporating insights from structuralism, philology, history and social theory, he saw 'language ideologies' as patterns that guide speakers' use of language and so, eventually, change that language.
[11] Silverstein's work caused a theoretical and conceptual shift in anthropology, linguistics and sociolinguistics.