J. Bohnemeyer Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

6. The semantics of deixis
As illustrated with the example 
flower
above, the conventional type meaning of a
non-indexical term can be conceived of as a set of criteria that has to be fulfilled by
all possible referents of the term. This is called an 
>
intension
=
in the tradition of
Frege and Carnap. Indexical signs do not have such intensions. The perhaps most
striking feature of indexical 
meanings
is that they cannot be completely reduced
to non-indexical meanings (although the indexical components of an utterance
may of course be replaced by non-indexical expressions that happen to have the
same 
referents
). Philosophers (notably Reichenbach) have attempted to paraphrase
an utterance like 
I am writing this article
as 
>
The person who writes the sentence
that contains the reference to the person at the time of writing the sentence is
writing an article that contains the sentence
=
. This would in fact eliminate all
deictic reference, but it would also fail to identify any article or person in particular,
and would therefore make little sense.
D. Kaplan has suggested that the meaning of indexical expressions is not an
intension, but rather a rule that directly determines a referent in the context in
which the expression is used (e.g. Kaplan 1990). For example, the rule associated
with the pronoun 
I
may be stated as 
>
The referent is the person using the
pronoun
=
. It is not the rule that contributes to the propositional content of the

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utterance, but merely the referent. The rule belongs to a fundamentally different
type of meaning, which Kaplan calls 
character
.
It is presumably due to their lack of intensionality that no more than a few
distinctions of deictic reference are made in each of a limited number of highly
general semantic domains in every language. Deictic expressions single out persons
as participant roles with respect to the speech act (speaker, addressee, non-