J. Bohnemeyer Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

8. The genesis of deixis
It has been argued that pointing gestures are a proto-form of reference, and that
accordingly deixis should be the earliest form of verbal reference both in the
phylogenetic rise of language in human pre-history (Rolfe 1989) and
ontogenetically in child language acquisition (Clark 1978). Despite their
plausibility, both proposals are met with a major difficulty: the perspectivizing
effect of deixis requires highly non-trivial cognitive skills. Thus, there is no
conclusive evidence that free-ranging primates use pointing communicatively, and
it has been shown that chimpanzees in captivity produce what are commonly
considered pointing gestures irrespective of whether they are seen by the
addressee or not; in other words, they seem to lack awareness of the interlocutor
=
s
mental state of attention (Povinelli et al. 1997). Likewise, it is not the case that the
first referring expressions acquired by children are deictics. The first deictic forms
acquired by English-learning children are personal pronouns, and the adult-like use
of these does not occur before the third year of life. Perspectivizing expressions
such as 
in front of
are consistently used non-deictically at first, and deictic usage
does not come in until the fifth year (cf. Tanz 1980).
9. Conclusions
Deictic reference plays a particularly important role in language: it serves to 
A
hook
up
@
linguistic representations to the world. Deictic expressions directly point the
addressee
=
s attention to a referent given in the situation in which the utterance is
made, often in combination with gestures. By relativizing the utterance to the
particular context in which a particular speaker uses them, they relativize the
utterance to this speaker
=
s perspective. The cognitive demands imposed on

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language processing by this perspectivizing effect are in sharp contrast with the
apparent semiotic primitiveness of deictic reference and with its pervasiveness in
verbal communication.