Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: What do demonstratives, like this/that and here/there , encode about their referents? The traditional answer argues that the deictic content of demonstratives is mostly about distance from the speaker – that proximals like this encode that the referent is near the speaker, while distals like that mean it is far from them. This speaker‐centered, distance‐based view is intuitively appealing, but recent research in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology has challenged it in many ways. I review three of the most active debates in this new literature, where recent authors – in contrast to the traditional view – have argued that (i) the spatial deictic content of demonstratives is about location relative to socially or perceptually defined perimeters, not distance; (ii) deictic content often concerns perception or attention, not space; and (iii) deictic content can relate the referent to the addressee or the speaker‐addressee interactive dyad, as well as to the speaker. Under these new analyses, the deictic content of demonstratives is fundamentally social and interactive, not purely speaker‐centered or distance‐based.
Source: Language and Linguistics Compass
DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12519
Author: Amalia Skilton
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,760
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4398199843