Deixis as a symbolic phenomenon

Donna E West

doi:10.13092/lo.50.321

Abstract

Children's early development of demonstrative use emanates directly from indexical gestures, namely, eye gaze, pointing, prehensile reaching, and giving exchanges. These indexical gestures become social in that they are joint attentional, and mark the inception of deictic use. Although children's deictic use draws upon index as a directional and social phenomenon, early uses of index alone do not deliver any semantic/lexical/symbolic determinants to the mix. The distinctive premise here is that deictics, especially demonstratives, are not merely social, but symbolic from a Peircian perspective, especially in light of developmental findings (West 1986, 1987, 2010; Tanz 2009) indicating an acquisitional pattern of non-contrastive to contrastive uses of "this" and "that" from 3;0–4;9. While initial non-contrastive uses of demonstratives are directional and/or social, contrastive use after 3;0 requires apprehension of symbolic role taking/role shifting. In addition to delivering the indexical and/or social, deictic indicators must implicitly refer to a class (Nunberg 1993, 1995), e.g., near/far objects from speaker's perspective in the case of demonstratives, and must ultimately have the potential to contrast objects/places with respect to distinctive points of orientation. These components together illustrate how mastery of deictic indicators is both a socio-pragmatic and semantic enterprise. In addition to indexing objects and securing joint attention with gesture, deixis requires semiotic and semantically based orientational competencies to shift perspectives and speech situation roles.

Highlights

Much attention has been accorded to the role of joint attention in the early use of demonstratives and how it is that pointing is a gestural precursor and bridge to the emergence of space deictics
The trend in the literature is that early gestures instrumental in securing joint attention are characterized as deictic before language and social reciprocity even develop, and emergent demonstrative pronoun uses are perceived to be deictic without question
The contention that deictic use consists in more than the indexical function is further supported with an analysis of the ontogeny of specific indexical gestures and demonstrative pronoun use; developmental

Summary

Introduction

Much attention has been accorded to the role of joint attention in the early use of demonstratives and how it is that pointing is a gestural precursor and bridge to the emergence of space deictics. At eleven months of age, giving exchanges are not merely unidirectional but become bidirectional when children show and are shown, and give to and receive from the extended hand and arm of another, which appears to facilitate the social element of joint attention schemes. It is not until eighteen months of age when eye gaze without additional accompanying gestures becomes unequivocally joint attentional between the child and the adult: "This new ability to isolate the referent of the mother's gaze, as plotted from the infant's position... Because the indexical use is necessary but not sufficient to deictic use, disentangling it from symbolic use in ontogeny can shed light on what constitutes deictic use and what merely serves as an indexical precursor to such use

Early use of demonstratives

Apprehension of symbol in deictic use

Conclusion