Deictic Terms Research Articles

Person-Centred (Deictic) Expressions and Autism

We employed semi-structured tests to determine whether children with autism produce and comprehend deictic (person-centred) expressions such as 'this'/'that', 'here'/'there' and 'come'/'go', and whether they understand atypical non-verbal gestural deixis in the form of directed head-nods to indicate location. In Study 1, most participants spontaneously produced deictic terms, often in conjunction with pointing. Yet only among children with autism were there participants who referred to a location that was distal to themselves with the terms 'this' or 'here', or made atypical points with unusual precision, often lining-up with an eye. In Study 2, participants with autism were less accurate in responding to instructions involving contrastive deictic terms, and fewer responded accurately to indicative head nods.

Between Exclamatives and Interrogatives in Li Jing Ji

This paper explores the similarities and differences between exclamatives and interrogatives in terms of scalar modal. In this modal, they both denote a set of propositions which are organized into a scale according to at least one parameter. But in exclamatives the speaker profiles a proposition which is located towards an extreme end of the scale while in interrogatives the speaker asks the hearer to pick out a proposition from a presupposed set of propositions. The conceptual metaphor “Thinking Is Moving In The Ideascape” is used to provide a cognitive evidence for our approach. Finally, a preliminary study of two types of exclamatives which are marked with wh-words 乜 mih8 or deictic terms 拙 chua3, 障 chionn3, 向 hionn3 in Li Jing Ji is given.

‘You’ and ‘I’, ‘Here’ and ‘Now’: Spatial and Social Situatedness in Deixis

I examine the ordinary‐language use of deictic terms, notably the personal, spatial and temporal markers ‘I’ and ‘you’, ‘here’ and ‘now’, in order to make manifest that their meaning is inextricably embedded within a pragmatic, perceptual and interpersonal situation. This inextricable embeddedness of deixis within the shared natural and social world suggests, I contend, an I–you connectedness at the heart of meaning and experience. The thesis of I–you connectedness extends to the larger claim about the situatedness of embodied perceivers within a shared perspectivally configured milieu. This claim can be cast in terms of a polycentric orientation to the natural and social world, which provides a robust alternative to an egocentric conception of experience. I develop this claim via a renewed phenomenological reflection on speech, assisted by ordinary‐language philosophy, as well as relevant contributions from empirical sociolinguistic studies and developmental psychology. These reflective and empirical perspectives help make a case for the primacy of socially and spatially situated experience, which departs from the received notion of an asocial and uprooted mind.

Developing spatial localization abilities and children's interpretation ofwhere

Two-year-old children often start asking questions with where. In this study we test whether children understand where to mean route or absolute location and whether the size of the space or elevation made a difference. Previous research has documented developmental changes over the preschool years in children's non-verbal spatial reasoning. Forty-eight children between two and five years of age were interviewed. We asked them to point in response to where questions about an object, rooms on the same floor and on a different floor. All children pointed to the location of the hidden objects. The youngest children pointed to the route to rooms while the oldest children were more likely to point to the location of rooms. With age, the children gradually used more spatial location terms than deictic terms in response to where. These results suggest that children's meaning of where initially differs for different sized spaces and developmental changes reflect non-verbal cognition.

Indigenous Linguistics and Land Claims: The Semiotic Projection of Athabaskan Directionals in Elijah Smith's Radio Work

In recent decades, land claims and language revitalization have emerged as prominent forms of indigenous activism in many parts of the world. Activists' indigenous language performances merit special attention since they commonly foreground the semiotic resources of their languages and reference the social structures in which they are embedded. This article examines a co‐performance by Yukon native leader Elijah Smith and Southern Tutchone elder Solomon Charlie that epitomizes the use of indigenous linguistic resources to assert native rights and identity in innovative contexts. In particular, Charlie's account exemplifies the essential roles of deictic terms as bridges between micro‐level narrative processes and the macro‐level social fields of contemporary society in which indigenous identity is projected.

Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora (review)

Reviewed by: Discourse patterns in spoken and written corpora ed. by Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström Ute Römer Discourse patterns in spoken and written corpora. Ed. by Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. viii, 273. ISBN 1588115062. $126 (Hb). Up to now the text and discourse dimensions have been comparatively neglected in corpus linguistic research. The present collection of twelve papers can be seen as a response to this research desideratum. In their introduction, Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström review traditional approaches to, as well as recent trends in, the study of text and discourse and define the scope of the volume. They cover the interrelated fields of genre analysis, academic discourse, cohesion, deixis, metaphor, evaluation, and contrastive analysis. ‘Cohesion and coherence’, the first of the book’s four thematic sections, deals with expressions of cohesion and coherence in speech and writing. The papers by Annalisa Baicchi and Silvia Bruti relate to a project on text complexity and discuss forms and functions of cataphoric reference in spontaneous spoken conversation (Bruti) and in book titles and headlines (Baicchi). Using data from a parallel and a multilingual corpus of English, Norwegian, and German texts, Hilde Hasselgård, in ‘The role of multiple themes in cohesion’, explores themes that contain more than one textual, interpersonal, or experiential constituent. In the last paper in this section, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen investigates patterns of cohesion in face-to-face conversation (data from different BrE corpora) and in e-mail mailing-list messages, and identifies parallels between written and spoken dyadic dialogue. The five contributions in Part 2 of the volume are concerned with ‘Metadiscourse and discourse markers’ in different text types. Julia Bamford and Anna Mauranen both use corpora of academic spoken English (lectures and conversations) to shed light on textual microfeatures, in particular deictic terms (Bamford) and hedges (Mauranen). Marina Bondi analyzes the use of contrastive connectors, such as however or but, in academic writing. Bondi nicely shows that academic disciplines (here economics, history, and sociology) exhibit differences in their typical discursive procedures and in expressions of evaluative meaning. Guiliana Diani then takes a closer look at the discourse marker I don’t know in conversational exchanges, taking into account its semantics and the pragmatic functions enhanced by its typical co-selection patterns. This part of the collection concludes with Christina Samson’s discussion of how writers of economics lectures employ the person markers we and I to express their personal stance and to get the reader involved. The last two thematic sections, ‘Text and information structure’ and ‘Metaphor and text’, contain one paper each. Gunther Kaltenböck elucidates the functional properties of nonextrapositions in ICE-GB (a corpus of spoken and written BrE), focusing on the communicative properties of such constructions in contrast to it-extrapositions. The final contribution, by Kay Wikberg, takes a corpus approach to ‘English metaphors and their translation’ into Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish, and discusses the role of (multilingual) corpora in metaphor research. This volume certainly identifies corpora as powerful tools in text and discourse analysis, and also raises new questions on different types of text in context. It provides fresh insights into the patterning of discourse features in relation to register, genre, and discourse community. Ute Römer University of Hanover Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

How Does Narrative Cue Children's Perspective Taking?

Three experiments with a total of 120 children between 4 and 9 years of age revealed systematic errors in the recall of deictic terms from a narrative. In some cases, the terms were inconsistent with the perspective of a protagonist. The errors occurred in all age groups and were at the same level whether the protagonist was "good" or "bad" but were less common in a narrative that did not include a protagonist. The pattern of errors suggests that children adopted a perspective within the narrative. Moreover, it seems that whereas the form of the narrative is sufficient to provoke a shift in perspective, children might find it even easier to adopt a perspective when the narrative content is about a protagonist. It thus seems that the form and the content of the narrative (that it is about a person) can combine to give a strong cue to perspective.

"Hearing Jeremiah": Perception and Cognition in Jeremiah 1:1-2:2

This study engages with information structure concepts to explore the pragmatic function(s) of fronted deictic terms in Jeremiah 1:1-2:2. Accounting for deictic terms within the pre-verbal field of Biblical Hebrew sentences is important because like the spoken word, the written text is linear representation of thought that involves deliberate sequencing of constituents. Since the initial constituent in a sentence or paragraph exhibits the "privilege of primacy," an author or speaker may choose to exploit the initial position for various reasons. Deixis, or the "act of pointing out or indicating elements of a situation by gesture or linguistic expression," is a primary feature of human communication that occurs in both speech acts and in written text. In speech contexts, deictic expressions help to orient the speaker and the addressee in space and time, and provide a deictic center for the communication event. In written texts, an author may use deictic terms to direct the reader forward or backward through the text. Because both discourse level and text level deictic terms require contextual interpretation, such terms exhibit pragmatic function. This study is concerned with identifying specific pragmatic functions for fronted terms. In other words, which deictic terms does an author place in a privileged position, and why?

Zur ›Polyfunktionalität‹ der Deiktika. Von der Bedeutung zum Gebrauch am Beispiel des Italienischen

In the canonical case, deictical terms depend on the here-and-now of the speech situation. But as was already noted by Karl Buhler in 1934, many deviations from this basic scenario are possible, thus giving rise to a wide spectrum of varying functional usages. This article examines the possible usages of the Italian deictic terms io, tu, noi, voi, quello and questo. Based on an analytical framework proposed by Geoffrey Nunberg, it shows that in each case, the range of functions can be characterised by the variation of a few underlying parameters.

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Semantic Category and Surface Form

There is in philosophy of language a well known conflict concerning how to account for the meaning of expressions of the form 'the F'. On one side are those who adopt a 'unified' stance, believing all definite descriptions to be handled by a quantificational analysis;1 while on the other are those who think some definite descriptions must be handled as referential terms and who thus maintain that a single surface form may be correlated with two different semantic categories.2 Those who propose the latter approach, which I will call an 'ambiguity' account, might think to reinforce their claim by pointing to other types of noun phrase where a similar bifurcation between surface form and semantic category is called for. Prima facie, the most powerful evidence for ambiguity seems to come from the existence of 'anaphoric' terms: these are expressions which exist alongside potentially referential (or deictic) occurrences of pronouns and demonstratives, yet which seem to demand a semantic analysis akin to that given for the bound variables of quantification. So, the ambiguity theorist may argue, since we allow a 1:2 mapping between surface form and semantic category as far as deictic and anaphoric terms are concerned, we should be happy to allow the same for definite descriptions. My aim in this note, however, is to show that the premise here is mistaken: anaphoric expressions do not provide any evidence of disunity because they do not, in fact, share a single surface form with referential terms. To see this, let us begin by looking more closely at what anaphoric expressions are and why they might be thought to provide evidence for ambiguity, before looking at the kind of surface features such expressions display. An anaphoric context is one where the expression in question appears in a position which is bound by an earlier occurring quantifier phrase, such

Code-switching and register shift: Evidence from Finnish-English child bilingual conversation

In this paper, we attempt to place code-switching in the more comprehensive framework of register change, a feature in all human conversation. We want to argue that code-switching, while unique to bilinguals for obvious reasons, may also be approached as one of the many markers of register change, register change itself taking place in all populations. Fifty-three minutes of naturally occurring conversation by two Finnish-English bilingual children were taped and transcribed. Several patterns emerged: in spontaneous play, the subjects, adopting other characters, spoke their L2, English, while the negotiation of the play often, but not exclusively, took place in the L1, Finnish. While in our data English, the L2 of the subjects, is restricted to in-character talk, code-switching to Finnish is not the sole marker of change from play to negotiation. The onset of the negotiation segments is also marked prosodically by voice quality changes, and grammatically, by interrogatives, imperatives, deictic terms, and shifts in tense. On the basis of our data, we suggest that while code-switching indeed very often occurs when the speaker shifts from one conversational task to another, the shift is often marked by other means as well, providing evidence for code-switching as a register variation.

Who is We?: Constructing Communities in US-Mexico Border Discourse

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a speaker in a bilingual, binational communicative event uses deictic expressions to index and build social relationships. After a short review of related theoretical issues a description of the communicative event is provided as well as a description of the sociopolitical and geographical contexts for the discourse. An analysis is then presented of the meanings of the deictic term `we' in one key conference speech. The analysis traces how the speaker builds relationships of solidarity and opposition, how he mitigates oppositional relationships based on ideological criteria, and how he constructs power hierarchies. I argue that rhetorical goals, including affective goals, are addressed through a coherent development and ordering of shifting meanings of deictic terms in discourse.

Reconstructing Kinship, or, the Pragmatics of Kin Talk

This article argues that kinship terminologies are best studied in their full linguistic context; the data should be collected from naturally occurring conversation rather than elicited with frames, and recognition must be given to the fact that people choose which expressions to use. Other means are available for talking to or about kin: in any language there are many ways of referring to people. These include the use of kin terms, names, nicknames, titles and pronouns. These 'social deictic' terms are used in different social contexts. Analysis of the context shows the inadequacy of the address/reference distinction. However, the connexions between the choice of linguistic means and the social context are central to social anthropology, so new approaches must be sought. A Mambila transcript is examined, and some suggestions are made as to how a large body of conversational data could be approached in order to analyse the social deictic terms employed. The central problem for the student is to see his kinship terminology as a definite part of the dynamism of kinship relations, to determine how far the separation and combination of relatives under linguistic labels can be correlated with other sociological phenomena (Firth 1936: 226).

Deictic terms, lexical retrieval and utterance length in aphasia: an investigation of inter-relations.

This study quantified the number of deictic forms in the conversational speech of non-brain-damaged control, right hemisphere-damaged, and fluent and non-fluent aphasic subjects. The relationship between use of deictic terms and performance on single-word level lexical tests was examined, together with the number of deictics with increasing clause length. In the latter case, evidence of trade-off between lexical-semantic complexity and sentence length was sought. Fluent aphasics were found to use significantly more deictics than other groups, and non-fluent aphasics significantly fewer. No significant correlations were observed between deictic use and performance on the lexical tests. Analysis at the level of the group revealed no inverse relationship between deictic use and number of elements in the clause. However, this pattern could be observed in individual fluent aphasics.

¿Cómo se adquieren y usan los términos deícticos en lengua española? Un estudio longitudinal

Within the field of language acquisition, the study of deixis is presented as a subject or relevance; a basic language resource in the development of cornmunication. Through it, the speakers establish spacio-temporal relations between themselves and objects, adopting conversational roles. Thus, is is a rich source of data, for its learning implies acquiring a certain levet of communicative, cognitive and linguistic development. In the present research our aim was to study the development of the different types of deictic terms (person, space, time, mood, and verb) in Spanish children. A one year longitudinal study was carried out from a functional perspective. The subjects were two girls, from different sociocultural backgrounds, aged two years at the beginning of the study. The use both girls made of deictic terms, recorded in their natural context, was obtained from the analysis of the girls' spontaneous talk. In addition, their adequacy to the communicative context was taken into account, together with the differences related to the background of both subjects. Also, the implkations for the development and future knowledge of the detak terms used were considered.

The production of this and that by young children

Many studies have considered the child's developing comprehension of the deictic terms this and that, used to refer to spatial proximity and distance. This is in contrast with the paucity of research into the child's early use of these terms. In the present study, three-year-old children produced both of these deictic terms and each was accompanied by characteristic specific gestures. This was accompanied by a picking up and handling of the object being referred to, while the gestural support for that was either a point or a proffering of the object, depending on spatial contextual restrictions. From this evidence, it is argued that children can use a pragmatic system of deictic contrasts, integrating both verbal and gestural aspects.

Children's Comprehension of Deictic Categories in Oral and Written Language

THIS STUDY examined children's ability to understand the use of deictic terms in oral and written language. Three categories of words with deictic content were investigated: pronouns (e.g., I, you), locatives (e.g., this, here), and motion verbs (e.g., come, go). Three groups of second-grade students performed three types of tasks: oral-language tasks, written-language tasks, and picture-selection tasks. Planned comparisons indicated that written-language tasks were more difficult than comparable oral-language tasks, that motion verbs were more difficult for children to interpret, and that children found it more difficult to interpret deictic terms when they were observers than when they were participants in a conversation. Children had as much difficulty interpreting deictic terms in written texts addressed to the reader as in written texts representing quoted dialogue. Factors that contributed to the difficulty children had in interpreting words with deictic content are discussed.

Studies in the Acquisition of Deictic Terms

1. The Acquisition of Deictic Terms 2. Deictic and Nondeictic Spatial Relations 3. In Front of and In Back of: Are they learned in backwards order? 4. Personal Pronouns 5. Demonstratives and Deictic Locatives 6. Deictic Verbs of Motion: Easy Come? Easy Go? 7. Conclusions Appendices Bibliography Index.

Empirical and Theoretical Considerations of Deictic Terms

Empirical and Theoretical Considerations of Deictic Terms