Deictic Systems Research Articles

Distance and Visibility: Two Systems in Hausa Deixis

The current standard account of Hausa deixis claims that Hausa has a linear person-based system with the following four locative adverbs and their interpretations: nân 'here', nan 'there near you', cân 'there away from you and me', and can 'over there away from you and me'. This paper shows that in fact one may need two separate deictic systems for Hausa to account for all relevant data. The first system is based on distance with a primary proximal vs. distal contrast. The distance system however also embeds a person subsystem, with one adverb in particular referring to the hearer (second person) position. The second deictic system in Hausa is based on visibility, with a primary contrast between an area comfortably visible and an area visible only with some difficulties. Indeed, in the visibility system, five adverbs range the entire visible area in front of the speaker, from the foreground up to the extreme visible area at the horizon.

Anti-intuitionism and paraconsistency

This paper aims to help to elucidate some questions on the duality between the intuitionistic and the paraconsistent paradigms of thought, proposing some new classes of anti-intuitionistic propositional logics and investigating their relationships with the original intuitionistic logics. It is shown here that anti-intuitionistic logics are paraconsistent, and in particular we develop a first anti-intuitionistic hierarchy starting with Johansson's dual calculus and ending up with Gödel's three-valued dual calculus, showing that no calculus of this hierarchy allows the introduction of an internal implication symbol. Comparing these anti-intuitionistic logics with well-known paraconsistent calculi, we prove that they do not coincide with any of these. On the other hand, by dualizing the hierarchy of the paracomplete (or maximal weakly intuitionistic) many-valued logics ( I n ) n ∈ ω we show that the anti-intuitionistic hierarchy ( I n ∗ ) n ∈ ω obtained from ( I n ) n ∈ ω does coincide with the hierarchy of the many-valued paraconsistent logics ( P n ) n ∈ ω . Fundamental properties of our method are investigated, and we also discuss some questions on the duality between the intuitionistic and the paraconsistent paradigms, including the problem of self-duality. We argue that questions of duality quite naturally require refutative systems (which we call elenctic systems) as well as the usual demonstrative systems (which we call deictic systems), and multiple-conclusion logics are used as an appropriate environment to deal with them.

Aspects of Spanish deictic expressions in Barcelona: A quantitative examination

ABSTRACTThis sociolinguistic investigation analyzes an innovative usage of Spanish motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives in Barcelona that involves crosslinguistic pragmatic transfer. Speakers in the two social networks examined (N= 58) use these Spanish deictics following pragmatic rules that generally correspond to the rules for their Catalan counterparts. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that this innovative usage of the Spanish deictics is not predictable from the lexical form of the deictic systems in both languages. Multiple regression analysis (SPSS) demonstrates that as relative exposure to Catalan increases so does the amount of innovative usage observed, although degree of integration into a Catalan social network and degree of Catalanist ideology do not affect such usage. Qualitatively, this innovative usage is a linguistic marker of a unique contact variety of Spanish spoken in Catalonia (i.e., Catalan Spanish). In this variety, such usage represents a potential resource for performing Catalan identity.

Deixis and deictic oppositions in discourse: Evidence from Romani

Studies of indexical devices differ in their analysis of ‘textual’ deixis, some advocating an overlap of deictic and anaphoric functions, while others argue in favor of a consistent form-function correlation. This ‘grey area’ of deixis is conventionalized in Romani, which has a complex four-term opposition system of demonstratives and place adverbs. Drawing on examples of natural discourse in the Kelderaš/Lovari dialect, I argue that deixis in Romani identifies the source of knowledge about the object of reference, distinguishing between extra-linguistic, perceptual reality of the speech situation, and intra-linguistic or conceptual reality established via the discourse context. A second opposition line is drawn between general and discrete objects of reference. The fact that situation and context-based mental representations are kept apart grammatically, strengthens the argument in favor of their analytical separation, as suggested in Functional Pragmatics, while the overall arrangement in Romani suggests that the distal/proximate opposition cannot always be considered as basic in a typological classification of deictic systems.

The Experimental Creation of a Pidgin Language

Over the past two years several research projects have been undertaken within the Applied Linguistics Program at UCLA to examine the early stages of pidginization. The idea was to create experimentally a pidgin language by having subjects memorize 250 words of a language they did not know and communicate with that lexicon for approximately 40 hours. A German Pidgin and a Farsi Pidgin were created. The experiments and subsequent analyses provided information on the origin and development of the lexicon, deictic systems, and syntax in early pidginization.