J. Bohnemeyer Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

4. Transposed deixis and text deixis
Textual deixis occurs when (part of) an utterance or discourse is itself the referent
of a deictic expression, as in 
The preceding sentence contains 27 words.
It has
been suggested that some form of textual deixis is present in every anaphoric
reference, to the extent that anaphors direct the addressee
=
s attention to an earlier
mention of the referent. As long as it is clearly discernible as deixis, textual deixis
will always have a 
metalinguistic 
reference. But as soon as any part of the
meaning
of an utterance becomes the target, textual deixis becomes increasingly
indistinguishable from anaphoric reference. An intermediary case is constituted by
reference to propositions, facts, or events (cf. Lyons 1977).

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Transposed deixis is constituted by an 
imagined
situation replacing the actual
speech context as the 
>
indexical ground
=
of a deictic form. When the imagined
situation is itself described in discourse, this may have a quasi-anaphoric effect.
Consider 
He arrived in Paris in early May. Now he finally had the time to explore
this great city. 
The deictic forms in the second sentence refer to the time and place
introduced in the first sentence. However, they are relativized to the character
perspective and therefore function as true deictics. This perspectivizing effect was
actually one of the primary concerns of Bühler (1934), who laid the foundations of
modern research on deixis.
5. The semiotics of deixis
Many philosophers of language have pondered the nature of deictic expressions.
Perhaps the most widely known account is within the semiotics of C.S. Peirce.
Signs are classified in this framework based on the relationship between their form
and the object they represent into 
icons
(constituted by similarity; e.g. pictures,
blueprints, maps), 
indexes
(constituted by an 
>
existential
=
relationship; e.g. a
pointing arrow, or smoke as a sign of fire), and 
symbols
(constituted by convention;
e.g. hammer and sickle as the symbol of communism). Like all linguistic signs,
deictics are fundamentally symbolic on this account; that is, their form does not
stand in any 
natural
relationship with the object they designate. However, deictic
expressions are then often considered 
>
indexical symbols
=
(e.g. Tanz 1980) which
somehow combine symbolic meaning and indexical reference. Notice, though, that
it cannot be the expression itself, as a 
type
, that bears the 
>
existential
=
relation in
Peirce
=
s sense (which in the case of deictics is always a relation of spatio-temporal
contiguity), but only its 
use
in a particular context, as a 
token
(Silverstein 1976), as

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an acoustic or graphic gesture, as it were (often accompanied by a manual gesture,
see below). This 
>
token-indexicality
=
evidently underlies 
all
deictic reference,
irrespective of whether the form used deictically is itself a deictic or a non-deictic
expression. What, then, is the symbolic meaning of deictic signs?