Fieldwork on deixis

Abstract

This paper outlines an approach to fieldwork on the semantics and pragmatics of deixis. Deictic expressions, such as English ‘this, that, here, there,’ are typically used to individuate referential objects in relation to the indexical ground of utterance context. Drawing on long-term research on Yucatec Maya, the paper argues that the basis of deixis is not the spatial contiguity of the referent, but rather the access (perceptual, cognitive, social) that participants have to the referent. In order to properly determine the conventional meanings of deictics in any language, fieldwork should focus on the paradigmatic oppositions among deictic expressions, on metalinguistic glosses of deictics by native speakers, and on ordinary usage under a variety of socially structured circumstances. It is argued that, like other kinds of ethnographic research, elicitation should be conducted in the target language in order to gain access to the contextual schemas through which speakers apprehend context. Properly analyzed, referential deixis proves to be highly systematic, tractable to fieldwork, and central to pragmatics.