Bare demonstratives, joint attention and speakers' intentions
Year: 2002
Type: report
Abstract: Non-linguistic facts about the context of utterance relate demonstrative utterances to their context and can thereby fill the double role of providing the token meaning of the utterance and determining its reference. The reference of perceptual, bare demonstratives depends entirely on such facts. But contingent, causal, environmental factors are not reliable enough to take on this semantic role. An element that is within the control of the speakers themselves is required. It is argued that joint attention, based in the speakers' mutual co-ordination of their states of attention, is the default strategy. Intentionalists hold that the speaker's secondary or ultimate intentions help fixing the reference. But processing the speaker's underlying intentions is a costly strategy. A more economic one is to grasp the speaker's intentions implicitly by reading her manifest states of attention as displayed in interaction with the hearer, and make use of environmental cues. Unless the speaker explicitly indicates that the hearer should take the more resource-demanding strategy, there is no reason for her to do so. Moreover, if there is no general expectancy of hearers to give the underlying intentions priority, speakers will not in the normal case be using such intentions to get their messages across. 1. DEMONSTRATIVES There are no particular restrictions on the kind of entities to which demonstratives ('this', 'that', 'these', 'those') can refer. Meaning supposedly determines reference, but in the case of demonstratives, this does not seem to be the case. The meaning of demonstratives is not specific enough. This characteristic makes it difficult to understand how they work. Below I will explore the suggestion that attention and joint attention are involved in determining the reference of a cetain kind of demonstratives. I will first make some initial distinctions between different kinds of demonstratives, then focus on a particular subgroup, which I will call bare demonstratives. As regards demonstratives, and also indexicals ('I', 'here', 'now'), it is common to make a distinction between the type, or linguistic, meaning and the token, or contextual, meaning. This can be done in different ways that each will have different effects at a technical or formal level. I will not discuss the technical issues, but make
Author: Ingar Brinck
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2096803404