Semantics (In: Konstanze Jungbluth & Federica Da Milano (eds) (2015): Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 359-380.

Andreas Dufter

14 Semantics

Abstract: Deixis figures among the great challenges for semantic theory. This chaptersurveys the development of philosophical inquiry into deixis from Frege to Perry,Kaplan and Nunberg, and its implications for truth-conditional linguistic semantics.The chapter then outlines a second, more empirically grounded line of research in thetradition of Bühler and Benveniste, focusing on some of the contributions of cogni-tive, historical and comparative linguistics to our understanding of the lexical seman-tics of indexical expressions and the mechanisms of deictic reference.

Keywords: Romance languages, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language,reference, person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, indexicality

0 Introduction

Ever since its inception, semantic theory has struggled considerably to account fordeictic uses of linguistic expressions such as I, you, here, there, now or this evening.Deixis straddles the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, relying on aspectsof the utterance context in complex, yet intriguingly systematic ways. Much work onthe semantics of deixis in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been inspiredby philosophy of language, while research within cognitive science and anthropologyhas tended to capitalize on the irreducibly pragmatic dimension of deictic acts.Indeed, the study of deixis in language has even lead to approaches of “pragmaticmaximalism”, according to which linguistics “must be ‘liberated’ from the reference-or semantics-centric perspective” and needs to be re-founded “from the deictic centerof sociocultural interaction” (Koyama 2009, 79). In particular, pragmatic maximalistsare inclined to be skeptical about the value of formal semantic analysis in the study ofdeixis.

In their view, such a de-contextualized approach will almost certainly fail toaccount for many aspects of deictic utterance meaning, including the more or lesssubtle expressive overtones which are often associated with the use of deictic terms indifferent languages.

However, while probably few semanticists would deny the value of studyingdeixis in actual discourse, and some of them might even assign an essential role tospeakers’ intentions in their performance of deictic acts of reference, there seems to bea large consensus among semanticists that the use of linguistic expressions such as I,here or this evening is regulated – or at least constrained – by conventions which arerooted in the lexicon, and possibly the grammar of English. In this context, philoso-phers of language and semanticists alike tend to draw a distinction between deixis, onthe one hand, and indexicality on the other.

While the details, and possibly the formal implementation of this distinction mayvary between authors, indexicality generally appears to be the wider notion, designat-ing a special form of context-dependent usage potential of certain linguistic expres-sions, such as the English pronouns I and you, and place and time adverbs oradverbial phrases such as here, this evening, or tomorrow. Deixis, by contrast, does notdesignate an inherent property of linguistic expressions, but rather a special subclassof context-dependent construal of reference,1 which systematically relies on theidentity of the speaker/writer and addressee(s) (person deixis), on the spatial andtemporal coordinates of the utterance (place and time deixis), and possibly othertypes of context-dependence.2

We will return to the dimensions of deixis over the course of the chapter. At leastin the case of person and place deixis, acts of deictic reference can be accompanied,or even supplemented by non-linguistic behavior, in particular pointing gestures andeye gaze. In the remainder of this chapter, we will reserve the term deixis for such aspecific subtype of context-dependent reference (↗29 Gesture), and use terms such as“deictic word” or “deictic expression” only on the token level as a shorthand formula-tion for ‘deictic use of an indexical word or expression’. In the next section, we willsurvey the treatment of deixis in formal semantic theory since its foundation byFrege. Section 3 will then widen the notoriously English-based perspective of con-temporary formal semantics and philosophy to comparative and typological linguis-tic semantic investigations on deixis, and point out at least some aspects in which thestudy of Romance languages and dialects can arguably make interesting contribu-tions to a semantic theory of indexicality and deictic reference. Finally, Section 4 willconclude.

1 An alternative way of distinguishing between indexical expressions and deictic uses of expressionsis the distinction between “deictic expressions” and “deictic reference” advocated by Blühdorn (1995).Notice however that “deictic expressions” have also been understood on the level of utterance tokensas those indexical expressions whose reference is intended to be construed, on a given occasion ofutterance, as deictic (cf. West 2014).2 Due to limitations of space, we will not be able to offer a survey of social deixis, which in Romancelanguages is mostly restricted to oppositions between address pronouns (see Helmbrecht 2003 for across-linguistic overview;↗10.1 Latin-American Spanish 1;↗10.2 Latin-American Spanish 2), and maybe more adequately described within linguistic pragmatics. We have also had to ignore other, perhapsless salient dimensions of deixis, such as discourse deixis (see Levinson 2004; ↗30 Discourse Deixis)or deictic aspects of evidentiality (see Haßler 2010 for a proposal based on data from Romancelanguages).

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1 From philosophy of language to truth-conditionalsemantics

The German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege is generally held to be thefounding father of modern truth-conditional semantics. In particular, it was he whointroduced the idea of quantified variables and who distinguished between Sinn(‘sense’) and Bedeutung (‘denotation’, or ‘reference’) in order to account for theinformativity of identity statements and the peculiar semantics found in belief reportsand other intensional contexts. While indexicality and deixis do not seem to play amajor role in his seminal text Über Sinn und Bedeutung ‘On sense and reference’(1892), indexical expressions are explicitly recognized as a special semantic class inone of his last works, Der Gedanke ‘The Thought’ (11918/1919). The challenge thatwords such as today, yesterday, here or there pose for interpretation, Frege argues, liesin the fact that the full propositional content (Gedanke) conventionally associatedwith an utterance containing such words can only be grasped by taking into account“certain conditions accompanying the utterance”:

“If a time-indication is conveyed by the present tense one must know when the sentence wasuttered in order to grasp the thought correctly. Therefore the time of utterance is part of theexpression of the thought. If someone wants to say today what he expressed yesterday using theword ‘today’, he will replace this word with ‘yesterday’. Although the thought is the same itsverbal expression must be different in order that the change of sense which would otherwise beeffected by the differing times of utterance may be cancelled out. The case is the same with wordslike ‘here’ and ‘there’. In all such cases the mere wording, as it can be preserved in writing, is notthe complete expression of the thought; the knowledge of certain conditions accompanying theutterance, which are used as means of expressing the thought, is needed for us to grasp thethought correctly. Pointing the finger, hand gestures, glances may belong here too. The sameutterance containing the word ‘I’ in the mouths of different men will express different thoughts ofwhich some may be true, others false” (Frege 1984, 358; 11918/1919, 64).

A related observation found in this passage is that words such as the first personpronouns systematically vary in reference according to the person producing theutterance token. This is why indexical expressions have also been designated asshifters (Jakobson 1957, cf. also the French term embrayeur, coined by Ruwet in histranslation of Jakobson, cf. Jakobson 1963).

In the formal compositional semantics worked out by Richard Montague, thisreliance on aspects of the context such as speaker (and addressee) identity wasaccounted for by an additional index (Montague 1974). This index helps to representjust those aspects of context for which a given language has indexical expressions.While the shifting interpretation of pronouns which cannot be accounted for by anylexical specification may appear to be successfully incorporated by such contextualindices, indexicality nonetheless presents numerous other challenges for semantictheory. We will not be able to address many of them in this brief survey article, but

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will concentrate on cases in which knowledge of the identity of discourse participantsand contexts is incomplete, or in which there are differences in the knowledge back-grounds between the participants in a discourse.

Consider Frege’s famous example of Dr. Lauben, who utters (1), and somebodyelse, in Frege’s text a man called Leo Peters, a few days later (2):

(1) I was wounded.(2) Dr. Gustav Lauben was wounded.

Reflecting upon the pair of utterances in (1) and (2), Frege embarks on a briefdiscussion of whether the utterances in (1) and (2) express the same thought (Ge-danke). He concludes by suggesting that they do not, since somebody who heard Dr.Lauben utter (1) without knowing the speaker and later Leo Peters utter (2) will fail tounderstand that (1) and (2) are about the same state of affairs.

This line of reasoning was subjected to critical scrutiny decades later by Perry(1977). According to Perry, Fregean semantics, distinguishing sharply between senseand reference and taking thoughts to be senses of sentences, is forced to concludethat there may be thoughts which, although intuitively sound, do not seem to becommunicable to others. Perry’s example is David Hume, in 1775, “thinking tohimself” the thought in (3):

(3) I wrote the Treatise.

Since the thought in (3) is not, according to Frege, the same as “David Hume wrote thetreatise”, it cannot be apprehended by any other person, not even by a schizophrenicwho believes himself to be David Hume. This leads Perry to reject Frege’s identifica-tion of senses of sentences and thoughts, and to postulate that Hume and the schizo-phrenic can entertain the same senses associated with (3) without having the samethoughts. Simplifying, we could perhaps say that Perry’s point is that there is ameaningful level of semantic interpretation of sentences such as (3) containingindexical expressions prior to the determination of reference. The fact that we do notalways know the identity of speakers uttering sentences such as (1) or (3) containingdeictic uses of first person pronouns does not imply that these sentences appearmeaningless or in any way semantically deficient to us.

More recently, Perry’s (1977) critique of Frege has itself been criticized by May(2006). According to May, Frege does subscribe to the view that there can be noincommunicable senses, since he explicitly states that the raison d’être of first personsingular pronouns in languages is precisely to be able to communicate with others,and not to entertain private thoughts about oneself. In general, May argues, index-icals have senses which constrain reference rather than present a reference on theirown, even if the first person singular pronoun might indeed be considered a goodcandidate for such a direct mode of unequivocal reference. In the philosophicalliterature, Perry (1979) offers a much-quoted argument, his tale of the spilled sugar, in

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order to illustrate the “special” status of indexical expressions which do not appear tobe substitutable by coreferential expressions salva veritate. Perry’s thought experi-ment is this:

“I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on oneside of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tellhim he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But Iseemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch”(Perry 1979, 3).

What is the new thought entertained by John Perry, the protagonist of this little story?There may be a variety of ways of expressing his insight, but crucially, all of theseneed to make reference to a first person singular indexical. Non-indexical alternativesto I such as the proper name John Perry, or any definite description unambiguouslyreferring to John Perry, will not do since they need to be supplemented by a cogni-tively manifest background assumption that the speaker is John Perry, which in thespeaker’s own mind inevitably will come out as something like “I am John Perry” (cf.Wechsler 2010, 342). At least some indexical expressions thus appear to be “essen-tial”, in Perry’s terms, bearing some “special” identificational capacity which stran-gely resists all attempts at paraphrase.

Another example illustrating this point was provided by Geoffrey Nunberg: Whilean occurrence of singular you in an utterance might be reasonably glossed as “theaddressee of this utterance”, on most occasions of utterance, the following twosentences will definitely not appear to be freely interchangeable:3

(4) Oh, it’s you.

(5) ?Oh, it’s the addressee of this utterance(Nunberg 1993, 1)

Perry and other philosophers of language have intended to narrowly circumscribe theclass of indexical expressions which are essential in this sense. Onmany accounts, notonly first and second person pronouns, but also place and time indexicals such as hereand now, are deemed essential, i.e., indispensable for expressing propositions whichindividuals may hold in their set of assumptions, beliefs and the like. In spatialreference, the limits of what counts as essential indexicality vary somewhat betweenauthors:Haase (2001) basically restricts the class of “primarily deictic”place indexicalsto expressions such as here and there, which necessarily rely on the speaker’s location,at least in their most elementary readings. In contrast to this, a recent proposal adds

3 This irreducibly indexical construal of reference in (1), (3) and (4) finds a natural counterpart insentence semantics, since in most cases at least, sentences containing deictic expressions do not entailsentences without such expressions and vice-versa (see Russell 2011 for a precise formulation andproof of an “indexical barrier theorem” and a “reverse indexical barrier theorem”).

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indexicals of direction such as up, down, or left, to the list of essential indexicals, byvirtue of their semantic privileges in accessing relevant aspects of utterance contexts(Passos Severo 2012). For temporal indexicals, Corazza (2002, 442) argues that not onlybasic adverbs such as now, today, or yesterday are “intrinsically perspectival”, but alsocomplex expressions such as this Monday, last week, or next year. What this amounts tois that as in the case of spatial deixis, the class of temporal essential indexicalsmaydefya restrictive characterization, and even be unlimited in principle, given compositional-ity. In the case of personal pronouns, the domain of essential indexicality is not water-tight either: Corazza (2004) argues that the irreducibly indexical character of I carriesover to a special semantic status of third person pronouns in indirect discourse, beliefreports and the like. While we cannot go into the details of Corazza’s analysis of suchanaphoric pronouns as “quasi-indicators”, the more general lesson to be learned fromit is that the boundary line separating essential indexicals from other context-depen-dent linguistic expressions may not always be easy to determine.

Indeed, the validity of assuming a separate subclass of essential indexicals onsemantic grounds was radically put into question by Millikan (1990). Millikan arguesthat what distinguishes so-called essential indexicals from other referential expres-sions is their “psychological role”, and the resulting impact on behavior, rather thanany special type of semantics. In a similar vein, Kim (2010) criticizes Perry for hisfailure to maintain a principled distinction between the semantics of indexical refer-ence in language on the one hand, and the status of indexicals in certain types ofbeliefs on the other, where propositions are entertained but not necessarily commu-nicated by individuals.

A framework which may help to avoid many philosophical pitfalls of indexicalityin language and thought, while emphasizing the cognitive foundations of linguisticsemantics, is Theory of Mind. With respect to first and second person deixis, Wechsler(2010) offers several arguments in favor of a Theory of Mind approach, includingfindings from research on language acquisition and autism. Theory of Mind spells outwhat it means to be able to ascribe mental states to others, and how a restrictedcognitive ability to differentiate between mental states of oneself and of others mayaffect successful communication. The Theory of Mind view of person deixis is perhapsbest illustrated by utterances directed to groups of individuals. In Wechsler’s example(6), a teacher instructs her students at the beginning of a written exam:

(6) Write your name at the top of the page.(Wechsler 2010, 353)

Most likely, the intended interpretation of this utterance is that each student writesdown her or his own name, and not just chooses at random some name of a classmate.On standard semantic accounts, however, plural you refers to a plurality of addresseessuch that it would not be a trivial task to model the natural intended reading. In aTheory of Mind approach, you “indicates self-ascription BY every […] addressee”(Wechsler 2010, 353, emphasis in the original). The use of second person indexicals

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therefore presupposes a certain “mindreading” capacity insofar as the speaker has toconstrue correctly relevant aspects of mental states of one or more addressees. As wehave already seen in (4) and (6), person indexicals are more than just convenientshorthand forms for designating discourse participants. Although not couched in aversion of Theory of Mind, Kleiber (2012) offers another example, this time fromFrench, which can serve as a nice illustration of the mindreading required whenindexical person reference is at stake. Imagine Sophie, at home watching televisionand waiting for her boyfriend Paul. The door opens, but it is not Paul who is cominghome, but Paul’s father. Sophie notices that someone has entered the apartment, andasks, without turning around:

(7) C’est toi?‘It’s you?’

Now, Paul’s father is well aware that Sophie is not expecting him, but his son.Given this, a reply such as (8) would inevitably appear inappropriate, even

though it might be taken as analytically true under at least a simplistic referentialsemantic approach.

(8) Oui, c’est moi.‘Yes, it’s me.’

Somewhat unfortunately for Paul’s father, a negated version of (8) such as (9) will notdo either, even though it might appear to express the refutation of Sophie’s expecta-tion, which Paul’s father correctly imputes to Sophie. What makes the sentence in (9)semantically incoherent is the fact that the self-ascription of identity imposed bypredicativemoi does not seem to be cancelable:

(9) Non, ce n’est pas moi.‘No, it’s not me.’

Semantic challenges of this kind are not restricted to person deixis. In (10), we find anexample combining person, place and time deixis:

(10) I am here now.

As in (8), the sentence in (10) looks just like a tautology, an assertion true in anyconceivable situation (see Kaplan 1989, 508s.). Notice, however, that as soon as wesubstitute the deictic expressions in (10) by referential expressions such as Thomas,on the Rialto bridge, on New Year’s Eve, it comes to express a proposition which can betrue or false according to the circumstances of utterance. Strangely enough, then,analyticity does not seem to be preserved when substituting deictic expressions byreferentially equivalent non-deictic terms.

In one of the key contributions to the semantic treatment of deixis, David Kaplan’sarticle “Demonstratives” (1989, 11977), a possible way out is developed. Kaplan takes

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up Montague’s idea of an index function to represent relevant aspects of context, butargues convincingly in the opinion of many scholars that what is needed is “doubleindexing” (Kaplan 1989, 509, emphasis in the original). Kaplan distinguishes betweencontexts of use of an utterance and the circumstances of its evaluation. He goes on todefine the content of a sentence as the proposition expressed by it. In sentences withindexical expressions (or other types of context-dependent elements), the content of asentence may vary from occasion of use to occasion of use. The content of a sentencesuch as (10) thus represents those aspects of meaning which change from situation tosituation.

At the same time, expressions such as I, here, or now pick out their referents insystematic ways, essentially determined by the linguistic conventions of English. Thisinvariant aspect of indexicals is captured by Kaplan’s second notion of character. Thecharacter of an expression determines its content in a given context of utterance.Technically, character constitutes a function from a n-tuple of contextual parametersto contents, and content a function from possible worlds or circumstances of evalua-tion to extensions.4 While in one version or other, such a two-stage model of meaningand reference has gained widespread acceptance, a second theoretical point made byKaplan remains more controversial: Kaplan proposes to categorize all indexicalexpressions of a language into two classes, which he calls “pure indexicals” and“demonstratives”. The reference of pure indexicals, Kaplan maintains, is exclusivelydetermined by relevant aspects of the context, whereas establishing the intendedreference of a demonstrative expression “depends on the associated demonstrations”(Kaplan 1989, 492). In the clearest cases, demonstratives therefore require some kindof visually perceptible accompaniment, such as pointing or nodding. In a singleutterance, multiple gestures may accompany identical indexical expressions, estab-lishing different references with each linguistic token, such as in (11). Crucially, thesentence becomes awkward when we substitute all instances of demonstrative that byidentical non-demonstrative determiners, as can be seen in (12):

(11) I like that house and that house, but not that house.

(12) *I like the house and the house, but not the house.(Abbott 2010, 192)

Just as it happened with Perry’s concept of essential indexicals, Kaplan’s concept of aclass of pure indexicals has not found universal acceptance among scholars.

Mount (2008) argues that even for some central representatives of the alleged pureindexical class, many uses can be found in actual discourse in which their contribu-tion to sentence meaning does not obey to any “automatic” functional determination

4 It deserves to be pointed out that according to Kaplan, the context parameter must remain constantduring the evaluation of a sentence (though see Schlenker 2011 for critical discussion).

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of reference along the lines of a Kaplan-style character function. In (13), a zookeeperdescribes her daily routine at work:

(13) First I feed the giraffes. Then I make sure the elephant enclosure is free ofdebris. Now it’s time to check on the gorillas…(Mount 2008, 196)

In (13), now is not used as a deictic expression. Instead, it functions as a quantifierranging over those moments in time when the zookeeper has checked the elephantenclosure. For cases such as (13), Mount argues that such non-deictic uses of so-calledpure indexicals cannot be dismissed as secondary, occasional extensions of theirbasic indexical meaning. Another telling example is (14):

(14) I am parked out back.(Nunberg 1993, 39; Mount 2008, 200)

The intended reference of the subject pronoun will most likely be a car rather than thespeaker himself. Worse still for Kaplan’s theory, the speaker may well accompany astatement such as (14) by a pointing gesture, even though the sentence only containsan allegedly pure indexical and no demonstrative expression. More generally, Nun-berg (1993) levels a fundamental critique against Kaplan-style character functionswhich assume a direct, functional relationship between the character semantics of anindexical expression and its reference. He makes a strong case for taking into accountspeaker intentions in all kinds of deictic reference, arguing that cases such as (14) aremore than just occasional metonymical figures of speech. Neither Montagovian in-dices nor Kaplanian characters can properly account for such shifts in intendedreference, which have been discussed in the literature under labels such as “deferredreference”, “deferred ostension” and the like.

There is a second reason why Nunberg objects to a neat, Kaplan-style classifica-tion of linguistic expressions into pure indexicals, demonstratives and non-indexi-cals: In situated discourse, linguistic items such as third person pronouns, whichtypically do not rely on extra-linguistic context in the same way as pure indexicals,may well be used without any linguistic anchoring in preceding discourse. Considerthe examples in (15) and (16):

(15) Context: We are walking through the Taj Mahal:Gee, he certainly spared no expense.

(16) To my wife, who has just returned from a trip to the zoo with our daughter:You look exhausted; what did she do?(Nunberg 1993, 33)

Since both (15) and (16) occur discourse-initially, there is no linguistic antecedent withwhich to establish a coreference relation for he in (15) and she in (16). At the sametime, there is no way of signaling the intended referents by means of a demonstration

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associated with these pronouns. In these examples, we are forced to conclude that heand she can neither be said to be pure indexicals nor demonstratives, yet it is only byrelying on salient aspects of the situational context that discourse participants canuse and comprehend these pronominal subjects the way they do. Nunberg comments:“These uses are clearly indexical – there is no linguistic source for the reference of thepronoun – but they are not demonstrative or deictic. Let me say that they are simply‘contextual’” (1993, 33). Once more, the semanticists’ hopes towards establishingclear boundaries between indexical and non-indexical ways of referring suffer aserious drawback.

A third argument developed by Nunberg against Kaplan-style semantic accountsof indexicality concerns lexical semantics: In many, if not all languages, indexicalexpressions provide at least some abstract information about their referents. InEnglish, we is specified for an animate plurality of referents including the speaker.In Spanish, nosotros is the first person plural subject pronoun which can be used ifat least one member of the designated referents is male, while nosotras refers to aplurality of exclusively female referents. Again, we are led to conclude that semanti-cally, indexical expressions are more than just convenient shortcuts to referents intheir context of utterance. In order to account for this, Nunberg (1993, 8) advocatesa two-step process of interpretation for indexical expressions: in his own words, “wego from an occurrence of the word to an index, and from the index to the interpreta-tion”.5 The index, in Nunberg’s view, must therefore not be identified with theintended referent, but serves as a pointer, i.e. as an index in Peirce’s originaldefinition of the notion (ibid., 19). In this respect, Nunberg’s view of indexicality isreminiscent of May (2006), who, as we have seen, argues that an indexical expres-sion has a sense (Sinn, in Frege’s terminology) which constrains rather than presentsreference.

More recently, Nunberg’s theory has been cast in formal semantic terms byElbourne (2008). In this enriched semantic model, four components of indexicalexpressions are distinguished: (i) a deictic component, which specifies a discoursereferent that is contextually salient in the situation of utterance, and which is calledan index; (ii) a relational component, which imposes constraints on the relationbetween index and interpretation; (iii) a classificatory component, contributing prop-erties associated with grammatical number, gender and the like; and (iv), the in-tended interpretation (Nunberg 1993; Elbourne 2008, 419s.). Clearly, the formalsemantic apparatus needed in order to do justice to the variety of referential uses towhich indexicals can be put is quite impressive.

5 Similar arguments for a two-stage model of deictic reference had already been developed by Kleiber(1986). According to this author, the reference of a deictic expression on a given occasion of use isdetermined by contextual parameters, but cannot be equated with any of them: “[…] le sens d’uneexpression déictique (d’un token-réflexif) est tel que l’identification du référent passe nécessairementpar la prise en considération de l’occurrence (ou token) du déictique” (Kleiber 1986, 16).

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Not only Kaplan’s assumption of a class of “pure indexicals”, but also his formalsemantic treatment of demonstratives – both pronominal ones such as this andadnominal ones such as in this man – has given rise to a number of different elabora-tions and criticisms. In particular, doubts have been formulated regarding the validityof Kaplan’s assumption that a paralinguistic demonstration is required on any occa-sion of use of demonstratives. A second complication arises from the fact that speak-ers may well point to a location on a map, uttering (17).

(17) This is where we spent our holidays.

Of course, the actual demonstratum serves to determine the intended referred locationin (17), but it is not equal to it. Recent solutions to some of the intricacies presented bysuch cases of demonstrative reference include Predelli’s (2012) constraints on the useof demonstrative expressions and Hunter’s (2013) presuppositional account. Predelliexplores multiple uses of identical demonstrative expressions such as in (11), whichcan only be felicitously uttered when different demonstrations are involved, andargues that the determination of reference by means of paralinguistic demonstrationsshould not be taken into account by truth-conditional semantics. In particular,demonstrations can fail to establish a reference (in Kaplan’s terms, they can be used“vacuously”), and demonstrative expressions can fail to refer because an accompany-ing demonstration would be needed but is not provided (an “incomplete” use, in theterminology of Kaplan). The lesson to be learned from such unsuccessful acts ofreference, according to Predelli, is that while it may be true that demonstrativesrequire a paralinguistic demonstration, this requirement in itself is not “part of theirtruth-conditional profile” (Predelli 2012, 554). Just like Predelli, Hunter (2013) alsoinsists on the possibility of referential failures when using demonstratives, andproposes an alternative to a Kaplan-style two-stage semantics which can account forsuch cases. In her formal treatment of indexicals, couched in the framework ofDiscourse Representation Theory, reference is determined by a kind of presuppositionresolution. Whereas the resolution of anaphoric references is organized within thelinguistic context, the resolution of indexical reference can only rely on informationabout utterance events, including acts of demonstration. Hunter suggests that thedetermination of indexical reference can be modeled as binding, the same mechanismwhich is also at work in the computation of anaphorically established references.Once more, then, the boundaries between indexical expressions and other linguisticitems appear to be permeable. From a linguist’s point of view, however, one mightconsider this picture rather attractive, since many pronouns and demonstrative ex-pressions appear to be Janus-faced anyway, allowing for both indexical and anapho-ric uses.

We will conclude this section with some remarks on another classic problem ofthe semantics of indexicals. The problem, already noted by Kaplan (1989) in afootnote, has come to be known as the answering machine paradox. Sentences such

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as (18) can be heard on answering machines, mailboxes and the like all over theworld:

(18) I am not here now.(Kaplan 1989, 491, footnote 12)

Kaplan’s theory predicts that, just as (10) cannot be uttered falsely, (18) cannot be usedto make a true statement. Intuitively, however, we would like to be able to accept (18)as true in the specific context of a recorded greeting message. Kaplan himself brieflysuggests that the paradox can be resolved by positing a systematic ambiguity for now:Now can either refer to a segment of time which comprises the moment of speaking(and recording) or to a time span including the moment when the hearer listens to theutterance containing now, i.e., the time of playback of the recorded message.

Despite its initial attractions, Kaplan’s view has been criticized for a number ofreasons. In particular, as pointed out by Cohen (2013), the natural consequence wouldbe to posit corresponding types of ambiguity for all indexicals. In the case of (18), wewould thus need to assume an eight-way ambiguity, which seems to be an undesiredresult to say the least. In order to rescue the more intuitive view according to which(18) is an unambiguous utterance in the context of an answering machine, albeit witha “shifted” interpretation of at least one indexical, other authors emphasize theparticular “utterance-deferral technologies” involved in such machines (Cohen 2013,14 and references cited there). But then, no sophisticated technology is needed, sincevery similar problems may arise with handwritten notes. Imagine your next-doordepartmental colleague writing I am not in my office today on a Thursday evening andposting the message on his office door in order to inform everybody about his day outof office on Friday.

The semantic problem at issue is clearly not restricted to new communicationtechnologies, and must definitely be taken seriously in a fuller account of indexicalreference construal.

In several publications, Predelli has developed and refined a solution to preservea Kaplan-style two-stage semantics while avoiding the undesired consequences ofautomatic reference (see Predelli 2011 for a recent summary of his argumentation). Tothis end, Predelli advocates an intentionalist semantics in which utterance tokens of(18) and the like can be produced with the intent of being interpreted literally, i.e.,with a standard semantics for I, here, and now, but with an intended context ofinterpretation which can be different from the context of the production of theutterance token. In fact, the intended interpretation of now in (18) will differ betweeneach caller listening to the answering machine message. An additional advantage ofhis analysis, Predelli argues, is that it can also accommodate cases in which amessage has gone astray. Your colleague’s note I am not in my office today could beread by another colleague who returns to her office late in the evening on Thursday,or by a colleague who is hard pressed to finish a long overdue paper and comes to thedepartment on Saturday, when the note is still there. It seems clear that there needs to

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be a place for speaker intentions in a comprehensive account of indexical reference.At the same time, not just any intended deferred interpretation is likely to be success-fully communicated by utterances containing indexical expressions, and one mightwell prefer a theory of linguistic meaning which relegates speaker intentions to therealm of pragmatics.6 In the next section, we move on to some more cognitivelyoriented semantic approaches to deixis, and provide a few illustrations from Romancelanguages.

2 From psychology to cognitive semantics andsemantic typology

One of the classic references for the study of deixis is Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie. Firstpublished in 1934, it dedicates an entire section to “The Deictic Field of Language andDeictic Words”. Drawing upon a rich array of findings from several Indo-Europeanand typologically markedly different languages such as Japanese, Bühler carefullyweighs the cross-linguistic evidence in order to differentiate between universal andcontingent aspects of deixis in language. With respect to person and place indexicalsand demonstrative expressions, he argues that these do not need to be considered“pro-forms” in the sense that they would necessarily be substitutable by non-deicticreferential expressions. Rather, Bühler tends toward the position that has been called“irreducibility” in formal philosophy of language, by suggesting that demonstrativessuch as this are in all likelihood indispensable for any full-fledged linguistic system(2011, 11934, 121). Bühler (ibid., 128) also makes a strong case for the primordial role of“sensual guides of deixis”, including not only pointing and ocular indications, butalso voice quality in utterances such as It’s me. While he admits that there may belinguistic substitutes for these paralinguistic indices, he does insist on their situated-ness within the deictic field of reference (Zeigfeld), a frame which is fundamentallydistinct from the symbolic field within which symbolic expressions are structured.

Another topic which receives a nuanced treatment in Bühler is imagination-oriented deixis (Deixis am Phantasma). As we all know from our everyday linguisticexperience, indexical expressions can be used effortlessly and successfully with“deferred references”, for instance in child play, on stage or in any kind of fictionaldiscourse. In order to pave the way for a psychologically plausible account, Bühlerspells out various mechanisms of displacing the interpersonal, spatial and temporalcoordinates in oral and written utterances. In this context, he emphasizes the invar-

6 See Barrios (2013) for arguments in favor of preserving standard semantic assumptions for first-person singular pronouns and restricting the role of speaker intentions in sentences such as I amparked out back (14).

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iant aspects of spatial orientation, with or without direct visual perception of refer-ents:

“It is not at all the case that imagination-oriented deixis completely lacks the natural deictic cluesupon which ocular demonstration is based. Rather, the speaker and hearer of a visual descriptionof something absent possess the same talent and resources that permit the actor on the stage tomake something that is absent present and which permit the audience to interpret what ispresented on the stage as a mimesis of something absent” (Bühler 2011, 11934, 142, emphasis inthe original).

In a way, Bühler’s conception might be seen as foreshadowing modern theories ofDiscourse Representation and embodied cognition. Bühler’s Sprachtheorie has alsobeen invoked as an early precursor of modern typologies of spatial reference frames(Levinson 2003), and has even been related to grammatical typological concepts suchas degrees of topic prominence (Abraham 2012, 243).

An inspiration from Indo-European and comparative linguistics is also clearlydiscernible in Émile Benveniste’s publications on deixis. Much along the same linesas Bühler’s notion of a deictic origo, Benveniste elaborates on the consequences of thebuilt-in subjectivité in linguistic systems. He surmises that all languages exhibit agrammatical category of person, and that the fundamental opposition between I andyou serves as an anchor for other dimensions of deixis and the linguistic perspectivi-zation of events. Rather than admitting transitional zones between indexical and non-indexical modes of person reference, Benveniste (1966, 256) insists on the fundamen-tal divide between, on the one hand, first and second person, and third person, on theother hand, which he qualifies as non-personne. For French, Benveniste describes anumber of “correlations” whereby the systematic distinction between the deictic firstperson anchor and the non-deictic third person (or, rather, non-person) is alsoreflected in a systematic distinction in the expression of place and time. According tohim, je ‘I’ correlates with ici ‘here’ and maintenant ‘now’ in the same way as il ‘he’correlates with là ‘there’ and alors ‘then’. This division between deictically anchoredand non-deictic relational indications of time, Benveniste adds, extends to a largenumber of spatial and temporal expressions. Time adverbs such as aujourd’hui ‘to-day’, hier ‘yesterday’ and demain ‘tomorrow’, to cite but three basic items, areinvariably deictic, whereas le jour même ‘on the same day’, la veille ‘the day before’and le lendemain ‘on the following day’ constitute their non-deictic counterparts.

The impact of Benveniste is perhaps most evident, and explicitly acknowledged,in current semantic theories of subjectification (cf. Traugott/Dasher 2002). Withrespect to Benveniste’s dichotomy between indexical expressions and others, scho-larly opinion is less unanimous. We have already seen in the last section that theexact limits of what counts as an essential or pure indexical have given rise to muchphilosophical debate. Likewise, linguists have pointed out that even “dedicated”indexical terms (Nunberg 1993, 2) can, on occasions, be used non-indexically, as in abrighter tomorrow or in the French and Spanish examples in (19) and (20):

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(19) La monstruosité est toujours là…mais il y a toujours un demain…‘Monstrousness is always there… but there is always a tomorrow…’(Thérame, Bastienne, FRANTEXT).

(20) […] porque compartimos una visión de un mejor mañana.‘[…] because we share a vision of a better tomorrow.’(Diario de las Américas, 14.10.1997, CREA).

More generally, then, the “tightness of fit” between indexical expressions and deicticacts of reference may well be less perfect than Benveniste and his followers wouldtend to assume. In such a perspective, indexical expressions are so-called becausethey can be – but need not be – “referentially related to information derivable fromthe current situational frame of reference, which is cognitively accessible to a basi-cally constant set of speaker(s) and addressee(s)” (Janssen 2002, 176). Alongside thesedeictic uses of indexical elements, Janssen maintains, there can always be anaphoricuses where the informational grounding is in the textual rather than situational frameof reference.

An intermediate position between Benveniste and Janssen would be to acknowl-edge that different indexical elements may exhibit differential propensities to be putto anaphoric uses. Each indexical element would then have to be analyzed individu-ally for its anaphoric capacities, and it might well be the case that figurative uses turnout to be metonymically shifted deictic uses rather than anaphoric ones. For Frenchmaintenant ‘now’7, De Mulder/Vetters (2008) argue that all types of non-literal uses,including non-temporal argumentative ones, can be derived from its basic denotationof a timespan which includes the moment of speaking or writing. They do admit,however, that there may be specific degrees of conventionalization of non-literal,metonymical or metaphoric uses for each indexical element. The question then iswhich of these more or less established usage conventions of an indexical should beconsidered part of its lexical semantics, and figure as a separate reading in itsdictionary entry. What is clear is that usage is not entirely predictable on universalpragmatic grounds, and that the lexical semantic conventions are subject to variationand change. In-depth analyses of the dynamics of indexical sense extensions do notabound. One case study on indexical temporal adverbs in Spanish is presented byAzofra Sierra (2009). In her historical corpus under study, she finds that metonymicgeneralizations of ayer ‘yesterday’ andmañana ‘tomorrow’ to refer to the past and thefuture, respectively, are very rare before the seventeenth century.

However, there is a second time adverb, cras, for ‘tomorrow’, which is frequentlyused non-literally in this way since Old Spanish, as illustrated in the proverbialstatement in (21):

7 ↗6 French.

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(21) Lo que oy puedes fazer non lo pospongas para cras.‘What you can do today you should not postpone until tomorrow.’(about 1285, Libro de los cien capítulos, Azofra Sierra 2009, 27).

Observations such as these should motivate linguists to carefully describe eachindexical item on its own, and to be skeptical about alleged synonymic equations ofthe type tomorrow =mañana = cras.

There is a second basic tenet of Benveniste which deserves a brief comment, viz.the correlations between person, place and time deixis. Consider the two Frenchsentences in (22) and (23), discussed by Smith (1995):

(22) Je suis ici.‘I am here.’

(23) Je suis là.‘I am there.’

According to the French speakers consulted by Smith, (22) sounds somewhat tautolo-gical, and would be appropriate only under special conditions, e.g. when the speechsound serves to locate the speaker in a dark room after a short circuit (Smith 1995, 46).By contrast, (23) clearly constitutes an idiomatic answer to aWhere are you? question.Similar contrasts also arise under negation. While (24) is a natural way of announcinga day off, (25) was only accepted by Smith’s informants with a shifted reading such as‘I am confused’:

(24) Je ne suis pas là demain.‘I am not there tomorrow.’

(25) Je ne suis pas ici.‘I am not here.’

Contrary to what Benveniste might lead us to expect, then, je combines more readilywith the non-first person place indexical là than with ici, the designated term forreferring to the speaker’s location.

Etymologically, the two basic place indexicals of French, ici and là, also occuras morphemes in the complex deictic demonstratives voici ‘here is’ and voilà ‘thereis’. Both items enter into a broad range of constructions and uses, explored inconsiderable detail by Bergen/Plauché (2005). While in many sentences, voici andvoilà appear to be freely interchangeable, there are also some clear distributionalasymmetries. Most notably, voilà can be used felicitously in a wider array ofdiscourse contexts than voici, and is perhaps the unmarked choice in many contextsin which in principle both voici and voilà are possible. Among these cases, Bergenand Plauché identify a usage type which they call “the now deictic”, illustrated by(26) and (27):

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(26) Et nous voilà au labo.‘And now here we are in the lab.’

(27) Nous y voilà.‘Now here we are.’(Bergen/Plauché 2005, 16; translations theirs).

Again, it is not the origo term ici in voici, but the non-origo term là in voilà, whichaccording to Bergen and Plauché most naturally occurs in this “now deictic construc-tion”. Whatever the best explanation for these observations may be, the correspon-dence relations between person, place and time deixis deserve to be investigated indetail for each language under study.

Following the lead of scholars such as Bühler and Benveniste, a great deal ofwork has been conducted within linguistics in order to gain a deeper understandingof the ways indexical expressions function in discourse. As should already havebecome clear, indexicals pose special challenges for theories of the interfaces betweensemantics, pragmatics, and cognition.8 For several decades, Charles J. Fillmore hasbeen exploring the pervasiveness of indexical aspects of meaning well beyond thestandard inventories of person, place and time indexicals, and emphasized the valueof analyzing indexical elements in actual conversations, during which “a continuingprocess of matching contexts” (Fillmore 1998, 41) takes place. This line of researchhas been taken up by a number of different linguists who focus on the interactionalnegotiations of the utterance meaning of deictically used linguistic expressions (cf.Hanks 2011, 321–323; ↗27 Social Interaction). In particular, linguistic fieldwork ondeixis needs to be conducted in a methodologically sophisticated way, taking accountof cultural frames of reference within a speech community well beyond “objective”interpersonal and spatiotemporal coordinates (cf. Hanks 2009).

The ubiquity of deixis in linguistic communication has also been highlighted inthe works of John Lyons, who suggests that non-deictic forms of reference are “at leastontogenetically secondary” (1975, 82). Research on child language indeed corrobo-rates this hypothesis. We know that demonstratives typically are among the first tenwords produced by children (Clark 22009, 94) and that already at the earliest stages oflanguage use, they are used in context-dependent ways which can only be qualifiedas deictic (West 2014, 4). In other respects, however, Lyons’ insistence on the primacyof deixis in language leads him to an unusually wide conception of the class ofindexicals which many linguists today would probably not subscribe to.9 One of hisfar-reaching proposals is that “the third-person pronouns and the definite article are

8 ↗19 Cognitive Linguistics.9 That said, we should add that there is also at least one current within contemporary philosophy oflanguage, commonly known as indexicalism, which considerably extends the class of indexicals toinclude relational nouns, adjectives and other lexical items. According to the proponents of indexical-ism, these words contain “hidden” indexical variables, since their context-dependent contribution to

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to be regarded as being basically demonstratives” (Lyons 1975, 71). One argument putforth by Lyons in favor of this idea comes from diachrony. Third-person pronouns anddefinite articles are often historically derived from erstwhile demonstratives. This isindeed the case for Romance languages, where Latin ille ‘that (one)’ has resulted in arich array of pronominal and definite article forms. It needs to be borne in mind,however, that third-person pronouns and definite articles in the Romance languageshave lost much, if not all, of the demonstrative usage potential with which Latin illewas endowed. Noun phrases headed by a definite article such as French le livre,Italian il libro or Spanish el libro ‘the book’ are poor candidates for reference actsaccompanied by pointing. In cross-linguistic investigations, it has been found thatdemonstratives can evolve into non-demonstrative grammatical items, possibly alonga limited set of grammaticalization paths. Surprisingly enough, there are no knowncases of lexical items developing into demonstrative items in the history of languages.What this amounts to is that demonstratives may figure among the oldest functionalitems, so that their suggested primacy might hold not only in language acquisition,but also in the evolution of language (Diessel 2012, 2418s.).

Not only in historical linguistics, but also in linguistic typology and experimentalpsycholinguistics, demonstratives have received a considerable amount of attentionover the last decades. As far as is known, every language possesses a class ofdemonstrative items (Dixon 2003, 61; Diessel 2012, 2418).

These items not only include words, but also clitics and affixes (Dixon 2003).Apart from adnominal, pronominal and adverbial demonstratives, some lan-

guages outside Europe also have demonstrative verbs (ibid., 72–74). In his typologicalsample, Diessel (1999; 2012) found that a significant majority of languages contrasttwo or more indexical expressions. Semantic oppositions between demonstratives canbe based on proximity versus distance to speaker, hearer, or both. Several languagesin the world distinguish in their demonstrative systems between referents that arevisible and others which are out-of-sight, or make reference to other aspects of itsspatial location such as a position uphill or downhill and the like (ibid.). Even morefine-grained typologies of demonstrative systems can be worked out when psycholin-guistic elicitation methods are used. In these settings, not only the relative distancesbetween speaker, hearer, and referent are taken into account, but also the position andvisual orientation of speaker and hearer, i.e., whether they are communicating face-to-face, or sitting side-by-side sharing more or less the same visual field etc. In such anuanced approach, Jungbluth (2005) and Da Milano (2007) present in-depth compara-tive case studies of Ibero-Romance varieties and of European languages, respectively.

These insights from linguistic typology and experimental approaches to seman-tics and pragmatics may, in turn, inspire historical linguistics (see, in particular,

propositional meaning would bear a great resemblance to the established indexicals in language. SeeClapp (2012);↗17 Indexicalism, for critical discussions.

364 Andreas Dufter

research conducted on the semantics of demonstratives in Medieval French texts, cf.Marchello-Nizia 2005; Guillot 2013; Massé-Arkan 2013, and references cited therein).In any event, demonstratives and place indexicals have turned out to be fertile groundfor interdisciplinary investigation, with mutual benefits for the different branches oflinguistics, but also for anthropology and cognitive psychology.

3 Conclusion

Deixis figures among the great challenges for semantic theory. For the very samereason, it has loomed large in the modern history of linguistic semantics, at least sincethe times of Frege and Bühler. According to a famous guess, “more than 90 per cent ofthe declarative sentence-tokens we produce during our life-time are indexical sen-tences” (Bar-Hillel 1954, 366; cf. also Kryk 1990, 49). This chapter has focused onperson, place, and time deixis, the three elementary dimensions of deictic reference.We have surveyed the unfolding of philosophical analysis from Frege to Perry,Kaplan, and Nunberg, and attempted to point out at least some areas of research inwhich more empirical neighboring disciplines such as psychology, historical linguis-tics and linguistic typology have left their mark on the semantic study of deixis. Atseveral points, we have seen that an exact definition of just which items in languageshould be included into the class of indexical expressions is highly controversial. Inpart, the debates about the range, and limits of indexicality and deixis reflect moregeneral controversies surrounding the distinction between semantics and pragmatics(Mount 2012). In order to gain a deeper understanding of deictic reference in dis-course, one might want to abandon the idea according to which semantics would beexclusively concerned with context-insensitive aspects of linguistic meaning, leavingthe entire rest to the realm of pragmatics. Instead, it has been proposed, semanticsshould be construed as a discipline studying all aspects of utterance meaning whichare rooted in the grammar and the lexicon (Gillon 2008; Carston 2008).

Under such a conception, semantics would need to describe as precisely aspossible the range of conventionalized acceptations of indexical words, includingnon-literal and, possibly, non-deictic ones.

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