Attentional semantics of deictic locatives

Abstract

Since Bühler’s influential work on context-dependent, deictic expressions, much research has been devoted to the underlying concepts and cross-linguistic variation of linguistic deixis. Focussing on the semantics of deictic locatives like here and there, the present article starts with an overview of deictic theories and phenomena. It is shown that proposals which either utilize the semantic idea of abstract pointing from some reference point (origin, ground), or the pragmatic concept of joint attention, do not explain the data sufficiently. As an alternative, specific parts of Takubo’s theory of deixis are then combined with an attentional semantics according to which “selective attention” plays an essential role in cognition and for language. It is argued that deictics as description-lean terms rather express basic aspects of attentional reference to an entity of some (cognitive) domain than specific content related to pointing or anchoring. Finally, further aspects and possible extensions of the novel attentional semantics of deictics are discussed.