J. Bohnemeyer Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

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Deixis
J. Bohnemeyer
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
P.O. Box 310
6500 AH Nijmegen
The Netherlands
Deixis is a type of reference constituted by the meaning of a linguistic sign being
relativized to the extra-linguistic context in which the sign is used. The semiotic
nature of this kind of reference, its exact communicative prerequisites and
functions, its acquisition by children, and its processing have long puzzled linguists,
philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. This article presents an
introduction to some of the research that has focused on deictic signs and
meanings and their phenomenology.
1. Introduction
It is one of the fundamental design features of human language that the
interpretation of linguistic utterances may strongly depend both on the linguistic
and the non-linguistic context. This context dependence of linguistic reference is
known as 
indexicality 
(cf. Silverstein 1976). It has been argued by philosophers
that in fact without some such underlying indexicality in all 
referring 
expressions,
no successful reference to the world would be possible (Putnam 1975). Take, for
example, the utterance 
She brought this flower for me yesterday
. The noun 
flower
has a meaning that can be defined independently of context (e.g. 
>
t h e
reproductive organs of a plant and their colored (non-green) envelope
=
), and it can
be used to refer to real or imaginary flowers that fulfill this definition. Yet, in order
to successfully refer to a plant as a 
flower
, more than mere knowledge of the
meaning of 
flower 
is required: speaker and addressee have to agree on the plant

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being identifiable by that term (botanists for example use the term differently - they
do not require the envelope to be colored).
However, there are expressions that point to the context in their very meaning,
such that they cannot be used to refer to anything before the relevant information
from the context is retrieved. In the above example, the pronoun 
she
takes up a
referent of feminine gender that must have been introduced in the preceding
stretch of discourse (if the speaker announced in the preceding utterance that he
is planning to marry his girlfriend Helen, then it will be inferred that it was Helen
who brought him the flowers). This illustrates 
anaphoric 
reference. 
Deictic
reference occurs whenever a linguistic sign receives part of its meaning from the
extra-
linguistic context. For example, the pronoun 
me
refers to the speaker - it has
a different meaning depending on who utters it. The demonstrative 
this
selects a
referent in the speaker
=
s proximity - 
this flower
, as opposed to 
that
one over 
there
(at least in its most simple spatial use). The verb 
bring
designates transport to a
deictically defined location (
here
); this could be the location at which the
conversation takes place, or the speaker
=
s home (there are in fact many
possibilities). The past tense of 
brought
indicates that the flower arrived at this
location prior to the time of utterance, and the adverb 
yesterday
restricts this time
interval to the day before the day of utterance. So in order to know what exactly
is meant by 
She brought this flower for me yesterday
, and whether this statement
is true, one first needs to know who uttered it, on what day, and where.
It can be argued that reference to most objects (including people), places, and times
in the real world (to be precise, to all those that neither have a proper name nor a

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unique status, such as celestial bodies) ultimately requires some form of deictic
anchoring. To understand this claim, one may select an object at random from the
environment and try to make a statement about it that avoids any form of deixis.
If the claim is correct, it follows that language could not be used to talk about the
real world (other than in generic statements) without deictic reference.