There’s now a Page on this blog about AZBlog postings that comment explicitly on the potential multivalence of all sorts of symbols: these symbols are “just stuff”, being able to be deployed for a number of different purposes.
For example, this entry:
6/30/15: That goes without:
[https://arnoldzwicky.org/2015/06/30/that-goes-without/]The fact is that different people are doing different things with uptalk, and that different people are doing different things with vocal fry. These phonetic features are “just stuff”, just material that’s available for becoming associated (within particular social groups) with semantics, social meanings, pragmatic functions, discourse functions, and so on. Similarly for lexical items: for example, different people use discourse markers like well for different purposes. And for syntactic constructions: for example, there is plenty of variation in how Subject-Auxiliary Inversion is used. And so for syntactic truncation.
Also on other bits of behavior: particular facial expressions, particular poses / stances / postures
And also on objects: penises, particular colors, particular flowers
(I hope to add more entries for postings in which the IJS principle is employed but not named.)
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