J. Bohnemeyer Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

participant, and, in some languages, non-addressed participant); they may encode
the relative social distance between these (an example are honorific pronouns such
as French 
vous
or German 
Sie
; cf. Brown & Levinson 1987); they refer to objects
in space (demonstratives), to locations (place adverbs and motion verbs; cf. Rauh
1982), and to times (tenses and time adverbials). No language has been attested to
have a genuine event deictic, but many languages (including Yukatek) have
manner indexicals (translating 
>
like this/that
=
) that are used in reference to events.
7. The pragmatics of deixis
Indexical elements have, arguably, three functions in linguistic utterances. Firstly,
they represent the referent in the utterance, as a variable of sorts. Secondly, they
specify what may be called a 
search domain
for the referent in the context. And
thirdly, they direct the addressee
=
s 
attention
to the referent. The latter two
functions constitute the 
>
character
=
of the indexical sign.
The complexity of deictic search-domain distinctions varies considerably across
languages (see Anderson & Keenan 1985, Weissenborn & Klein (ed.) 1982). Where
the English demonstratives 
this
and 
that
make just a two-term distinction of

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distance relative to the speaker, the Bantu language ChiBemba is said to
distinguish proximity to the speaker, proximity to the addressee, proximity to both,
distance to both, and relative proximity to the speaker 
with respect 
to the
addressee (other languages have been claimed to make even more fine-grained
distinctions, but more recent research has failed to confirm such analyses). Whereas
English demonstratives distinguish essentially 
relative
distance, such that 
this 
and
that 
may be used 
contrastively 
within a space close to the speaker, the Yukatek
system mentioned earlier operates on an 
absolute
proximal-distal distinction.
Similarly, whereas English tenses merely distinguish past, present, and future with
respect to the utterance time, many other languages distinguish e.g. a past of the
same day from a 
>
yesterday
=
past, a 
>
tomorrow
=
future from a more distant future,
and so on. ChiBemba distinguishes four such 
>
degrees of remoteness
=
in the past
and four in the future (Givón 1972). For an example of a complex pronominal
system, see Foley (1997: 112-118) on Tagalog.
The conditions for felicitous deictic reference in space may depend on whether the
addressee
=
s attention is already on the referent or not. Some languages even have
a formal contrast that matches this distinction. Thus, in Yukatek, the regular
demonstrative forms translating 
>
this
=
and 
>
that
=
are expanded by deictic place
adverbs (
>
this here
=
, 
>
that there
=
) when the addressee
=
s attention is not on the
referent. It has been argued that what is traditionally considered the 
>
mid-distal
=
demonstrative of Turkish really has a purely attention-calling function and
contrasts with the proximal and distal forms only in this domain, not in terms of
distance from speaker (Özyürek & Kita 2000). @Pointing gestures may support

---

attention direction, and in addition serve to narrow down the search domain.
Moreover, in case more than one potential referent of the same kind occurs in the
search domain selected by the deictic form, pointing gestures may be used to
disambiguate the referent. There are, however, search domains which can be
referred to without any additional gesture, since they are uniquely identifiable to
the addressee. This is true of 
here
when used to refer to the speaker
=
s location, and
also of 
there
, when used to designate the addressee
=
s location e.g. during a phone
conversation (Fillmore 1997). The extent to which the use of spatial deictics
requires accompanying gestures seems to vary both with the context of use and
with the language-particular term. The attention-directing demonstrative of Turkish
cannot be used without a gesture at all. In addition to pointing gestures, iconic and
conventional gestures may occur with deictic terms, such as extending the hand,
open palm facing up, with presentatives (
Voila!
), or iconically indicating an
extension in combination with 
this big
or a manner of motion with 
like this
. The
relationship between such gestures and the linguistic reference act is different from
the function of pointing gestures.
Directing the addressee
=
s attention to an object in space is subject to the
perceptual accessibility of the object. Many languages exclude the use of certain
demonstratives in reference to objects that are not visible, or provide special forms
for this purpose. Yukatek has a presentative form for referents of which their is
perceptual (e.g. acoustic), but not visual, evidence (Hanks 1990). In the Wakashan
language Kwakwa
=
la of British Columbia, every noun phrase is marked for
whether its referent is visible to the speaker or not (Boas 1947).

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