From the subject’s point of view: the role of deixis
«Por
trás daquela janela
Cuja
cortina não muda
Coloco
a visão daquela
Que a
alma em si mesma estuda
No
desejo que a revela.»
Fernando Pessoa
0. WHAT IS DEIXIS? *
The word deixis is
etymologically related to both showing (deiknymi)
and saying (dicere) and deictic
expressions are often put on a par with demonstratives, such as this or that. [1] Deictic words and their
accompanying gestures, it is said, are part of a language-system for making
references: “this book”, “that star”. Pointing is seen as a composite part of
those references. The demonstrative pronoun “this” is accompanied by a gesture
pointing to a book. On the main philosophical version of the view that pointing
is required for demonstrative reference, deictic expressions are determined by
a non-linguistic action (Kripke 1972, Künne 1982, 1992, Mulligan 1997) and
perceptual ‘baptism’ fixes reference. The demonstrative ‘this’ in the
expression “this is a star” is determined by perception and non-linguistic
behaviour. Underlying this view are the assumptions that a deictic expression
is verified by a non-linguistic referent and that this referent is identified
by a deictic expression only because there is an accompanying non-linguistic
action or gesture. I disagree with both parts of this assumption: a deictic
expression does not identify a referent by extra-linguistic means, rather it
identifies a referent by constructing that referent as a coordinate in a
deictic situation under a deictic description by predicating deictic existence
of it (by saying something about it). I also reject the claim that deictic
expressions are determined by a non-linguistic action by showing that deixis
grounds or coordinates the participants on a referent in a
communication-situation. Besides, the claim that gestures are non-linguistic
implicitly identifies language with speech, but speech is only one of
language’s means (Lyons: 1991:5). As a counter-example, consider sign language
used by the deaf.
A different problem with the demonstrative reference view is that deictic
expressions are not limited to demonstrative pronouns; rather there are
different deictic categories of person, place and time and different word kinds
can function deictically: pronouns, adverbs and tenses, especially if they are
uttered with an intonational stress. In addition, there are deictic expressions
such as ‘I’, ‘now’ or ‘yesterday’ which do not have a non-linguistic referent. How
are these deictic expressions determined? Below, I suggest that the tie between
a deictic utterance and its spatio-temporal circumstances is not necessarily a
non-linguistic action and I defend a constructivist view with an unfashionable
subjectivist posture: deixis constructs its objects by working out the
personal, spatial and temporal coordinates for an utterer (or narrator) and an
addressee. Words and pointing are different modes of expression but the
question is: how does someone (especially a very young child) know that something
is meant by these modes of expression? Seeing how someone points to something
and simultaneously hearing a series of sounds does not explain how another
person comes to understand what is meant by these expressions. On another
version of the referential view preferred in theoretical linguistics, a
pointing gesture by itself cannot make clear what exactly the addressee’s
attention is being directed to - an entity (or a part of an entity) or a
location? One reply is that a language-system is presupposed by linguistic and
non-linguistic expressions. “Identification by pointing […] is deixis at its
purest; and it is only when deixis operates within at least a rudimentary
language-system that ostensive definition, as such, becomes feasible.” (Lyons
1975: 65).
On a different view, popular in cognitive science, deictic words and
pointing are part of a system of communication for establishing joint attention
and shared intentions (Clark 2003, Tomasello et al. 2007). Deictic words, it is
said, require anchorage or grounding in a social context or contextualization
(Fillmore 1997:59). This context is a communication-situation posited by a
speaker, an addressee, a location and a time. If the deictic expression is
unanchored, it will not indicate the relation of what is designated to the
speech situation: If I see a message on my colleague’s office-door ‘back in 10
minutes’, the “10 minutes” is relative to the time at which it was written and
I won’t know what time is designated unless I know the coding time. Or, if
someone is telling you over the phone “I’m right here”, you won’t know where he
or she is unless you have additional clues orienting you to the location
indicated by the adverb “here”. So a common ground or joint attentional frame
is necessary for the communication to be successful – a deictic field is
required. The constructivist view I have worked out in this study combines
current linguistic and cognitive aspects from a historical perspective – a
philosophical and linguistic perspective anchored in Bühler’s Theory of Language (1934).
The notion of deictic field (Zeigfeld)
was introduced by Bühler (ST, 1934) as the lexical field of deictic signs which
do not name things but either show directions from the subject’s (or agent’s)
viewpoint or situate something relative to his or her viewpoint. That is why
the deictic field has a coordinate source. Bühler distinguishes the deictic
field and deictic signs from the symbolic field of symbolic signs or names
which have a symbolic function whereas deictic signs have a signalling
function. (ST:81). Unlike deictic words, names are coordinated with their
objects independently of a coordinate source. That said, Bühler argues that
deictic signs, in addition to their signalling function, also have a symbolic
function: they “name an area or geometrical location, […] an area around the
person now speaking within which what is pointed to can be found; […] [but]
they expect their meaning to be specified from case to case in the deictic
field of language and in what the deictic field is able to provide for the
senses.” (ST:90).
1. DEIXIS AS AN ANTHROPOCENTRIC
NOTION
Following Bühler, I argue that deixis is an anthropocentric notion
requiring a coordinate source of subjective orientation, as well as
coordination between a speaker, an addressee and the object or location the
expression is about. To put it differently, in a speech situation, the speaker
or subject (of an action), the agent ‘I’ - expresses an appeal to (or signals)
the addressee ‘you’ correlated to the object, ‘(s)he’ or ‘it’. Pointing is a
composite part of that appeal. As recent research on gestures by 14 month old
children has shown, pointing is a pre-linguistic activity with a lexical
status: pointing-gestures are object-referring terms used by very young children
as substitutes for words they have not yet acquired in their vocabulary.
(Goldin-Meadow 2007). Modes of pointing and presenting are part of natural
language, so non-linguistic behaviour is a channel for expressing linguistic
meaning and manifesting intentions but not a measure of verifying that meaning.
Quine’s famous example of ‘Gavagai!’ is a well-known example. The ontogenetic
point about pointing as a stepping-stone in language activity was already made by
Lyons (1975) who reformulates it over a decade later: “‘proto-reference’, which
rests crucially upon the psychological notion of attention, might equally be
called ‘proto-predication’. […] as far as the early utterances of children are
concerned, it is very often impossible to distinguish reference from
predication […].” (1991:168). [2]
Deictic words and gestures orient an addressee’s attention towards an
object or a location and thus have a pointing function: they show places, times
or participants in a communication-situation and they draw attention, either by
showing something to the addressee or by directing the addressee to something.
Deictic words are signposts (Wegweiser)
for subjective orientation (ST: 106). Thus the addressee starts an orientation
procedure when the speaker uses a deictic expression. Deictic words either
place something for the addressee to see or they displace the addressee by
directing him or her to a region in the deictic field. In order to carry out
that function, they have to be used for establishing a common ground or speech
situation, that is, the speaker and addressee have to be oriented towards the
same thing in a shared space. For you to understand what I am saying by: “if
you look over there, you’ll see what I mean by the brightest star”, you have to
be aligned to my point of view. So my first
claim is that deixis is a perspectival notion by means of which a speaker
and addressee can orient themselves in a deictic field either by situating,
placing or displacing a thing or by situating, displacing and directing someone’s
point of view. I use perspectival in
the sense of seeing through that is,
representing objects and their spatial relations of depth and distance, as they
could appear to the eye from a certain viewpoint. [3]
The deictic field projects a spatial continuum containing the things referred
to onto (or into) the speaker’s and addressee’s shared space. In the graphic
arts, an approximate representation of an image as seen by the human eye is
projected onto a two-dimensional surface.
Perspective works by creating a subjective optical impression: a
perpendicular line is drawn from the eye to the picture plane, so that all
perpendicular lines converge at the so-called vanishing point if all parallels
have a common vanishing point which lies on the horizon-line. Imagine a
rectangle through which light passes from a scene to the observer’s eye. Or
looking through a window using only one eye and painting what you see on the
windowpane, using the so-called visual pyramid where the apex of your eye is
connected with individual points in the picture plane and the objects appearing
on the intersecting surface of the visual pyramid and the picture plane are a
scaled-down version of the objects on the other side of the window. [4]
The deictic field acts like a window or transparent plane through which the
participants in the communicative act can view a perceptual or imaginary space,
as well as the objects pointed out in that space. The implications of my claim
that the deictic field is a perspective, through which speaker and addressee
are seeing, will become clear in what follows.
For now, I’d just like you to consider the following analogy between the
deictic field and Leon-Battista Alberti’s (1435) well-known example of linear perspective:
imagine that a painter
studies a scene through a window, using only one eye and not moving his head;
he cannot know whether he looks at an external scene or at a glass painted to
present to his eye. Then, imagine that a speaker and an addressee
study a scene through a window, using only one eye and not moving their heads;
they cannot know whether they are looking at an external scene or at a glass
painted to present to their eyes. I will discuss the implications for the
existential coefficient, arguing that deictic existence is different existential
mode from first-order existence which is tied to a location in a physical
space. I follow 
in a formula containing that
variable, as in ‘look at that star’. There exists at least one x such as star(x): ( x) star(x) means that there locates at least one such x
such as star(x) which an addressee is
asked to look at under the description ‘that star’. In addition, deictic
existence of an item emerges as speaker and addressee look at it through the
deictic coordinates that anchor deictic space. The existence of ‘that star,
over there’ emerges or takes shape as the angles of the perspective are worked
out by speaker and addressee. Needless to add, ‘emerging’ is a fundamental sense of the verb exsistere.
One upshot of my claim is that deictic references are descriptions but
not immediately so. Despite the influential literature to the contrary in the
Russellian tradition (Kripke 1972, Kaplan 1978, Recanati 1993), it would seem
that, because of the perspectival nature of deixis, deictic references are not direct, rather they
are definitions in relation to a viewpoint, so they are a case of mediate (or
indirect) reference. Deictic expressions and their gestural uses are oriented
to coordinates in the deictic field. Deictic words have variable referents and
a variable relation to their objects. As Bühler writes, deictic expressions “await their meaning specification
from case to case in the deictic field of language and in what the latter
offers to the senses” (ST :90). The variability of
deictic referents is symptomatic of a general grammatical function of deictic
expressions: “this” or “there” not only single out a thing or place but are
valid for any and all things or locations. It seems that deictic words have a
general function of categorizing things, location and time. In this sense
deictic words are indexes: they provide a means for classification – which is a
second reason why they are not directly referring expressions. For the
indicated thing is seen under a particular description – it is interpreted in a
certain way because the speaker gets the addressee to view it that way (Clark
2003). When I point out my favourite flower for you to see, saying “this”, I am
describing an object as my favourite flower and you are viewing that object as
indicated by me, that is, under the description ‘her favourite flower’. Your
vista or perspective on “this” is through my description “my favourite flower”.
1.1. The deictic field in perceptual
and imaginary space
My second claim is that the
deictic field is the joint attentional
frame or common ground and it can be perceptual (the space of present things
and our visual and auditory experience) or shifted from perceptual space to the
imaginary space (the space of absent things). This joint attentional frame (or
the deictic field) is the basis of human social activity and deictic signs are
a basic condition of human social activity, so deixis is a sufficient as well
as a necessary condition for human social activity. Deictic signs are used, as
Bühler puts it, “where a social situation requires an expansion of the horizon of joint
perception.” (ST:38). Not surprisingly, homesigning deaf
children use pointing gestures to refer to visible objects as well as to
objects that are not present (Goldin-Meadow 2007). Similarly 1-year old infants
use pointing to elicit an adult’s attention and get them to retrieve an object
for them, relying on a joint attentional frame (Tomasello et al. 2007). For the
deictic field is an orientational field of language and its objects: it orders
personal, spatial and temporal relations in regard to the coordinate source of
subjective orientation, “I”, “here”, and “now”. Thus a deictic reference is
correlated to the appropriate personal, spatial or temporal coordinate of the
coordinate source, that is, it is defined in relation to the origo. The deictic field can be posited
either in perceptual space, as in situational deixis or in imaginary space, or
in imagination-oriented deixis or represented speech. In situational deixis, reference is partly based on perception (e.g. when seeing the pointing finger). [5]
But coordination between speaker and addressee in the deictic field is
necessary for understanding the meaning of a pointing gesture. And in order to
understand that meaning, the addressee has to grasp the speaker’s intention
(what he wants to say) as well as the manifestation of that intention (what he
is expressing by means of signs). In imagination-oriented deixis, the referents
of deictic words belong to the domains of recollection, imagination and represented
speech.
I reconstruct Bühler’s theory of imagination-oriented deixis (Deixis am Phantasma) and his claim that
one person is able to present something absent to another in imagination and by
means of language only because there are deictic displacements (ST:139). Such
displacements or shifts are due to a shift of the coordinate source: real time
and location are replaced by time and location coordinates posited in
imagination. In addition, in represented speech the index of personal deixis
can shift from the first person ‘I’ to the second ‘you’ or third person ‘(s)he’
and spatio-temporal coordinates shift in relation to the narrative perspective.
The coordinate source (the origo or
anchorage) is posited by the subject or agent, using the deictic words: “I”,
“here” and “now” which are the subjective orientation-points. [6]
What is “here” or “there” changes with the role (the persona) of the speaker,
just as the “I” and “you” switch when the roles of sender and addressee are
exchanged by the participants in a communicative situation. In addition,
deictic expressions can be distinguished as either proximal or distal: “I”,
“here” and “now” are proximal, whereas “you”, “there” and “then” are distal.
(Fillmore 1971). The proximal-distal distinction can be extended to deictic
tenses: the imperfect is proximal, indicating proximity (or overlapping) of the
event-time to the utterance-time, whereas the preterite is distal, indicating
distance of the event-time to the utterance-time. I develop this issue in
section 3. An important difference between situational deixis and
imagination-oriented deixis is that whereas in the former, the coordinate
source is bound to a real situation, in the latter that source is arbitrarily
posited and shifted.
1.2. Deixis as modus de re
But there are different kinds of imagination-oriented deixis and
different possibilities for positing an imaginary deictic field. In addition,
there are differences and similarities between situational deixis and
imagination-oriented deixis. I begin by examining the similarities, because
they show an interesting feature of language acquisition. First, both
situational and imagination-oriented deixis offer the possibility of pointing
to something absent. That is why both of them can expand the ‘horizon of joint
perception’, to use Bühler’s words. Second, on condition that they are
object-oriented, that is, if and only if the relation between speaker,
addressee, location and time is a modus de
re (sachliches Zeigen),
regardless of whether that thing is present or absent, situational deixis and
imagination oriented deixis rest on the same psychological conditions and use
the same linguistic means. (ST:388). My hunch is that pointing de re, whether gestural or linguistic,
is a basic category of object-discrimination and that therefore pointing and
deictic expressions are an important step in language acquisition: namely,
pointing is a cognitive capacity for expressing grammatical relations by
spatial and lexical means. These grammatical relations are either locative or
possessive (Lyons 1975:63). For example, “this”, “that”, “here” and “there” are
locative, whereas “your” or “his” are possessive. Another similiarity between
situational and imagination-oriented deixis is that the first- and second-person
pronouns “I” and “you” refer to the utterer and addressee, respectively and the
object they are referring to belongs to their shared attentional frame or
deictic space. The object may be within or beyond their actually perceived
space, as long as the speaker and hearer are coordinated about what one is
telling the other. Such coordination implies that the speaker is aware of the
addressee’s viewpoint and that the addressee is aware of the speaker’s
intentions.
1.2.1. Pointing de re in situational deixis and imagination-oriented deixis: a case
study
1) Consider the following case of
deixis ad oculos et aures: a father and his little daughter are observing
the stars at night.
Deictic field
|
* ‘there’ // \\ Ivan
Kremena |
The
diagram is not quite correct because the deictic field is projected onto the
perceptual space of the participants in the communicative act. What is
happening in deixis de re is
analogous to projecting a geometrical space onto a psychophysical space – as
the Renaissance artists did in their construction of linear perspective. The
communicative act using situational deixis constructs a homogenous space with
homogenous positions and directions in a visual, auditory and tactile space
that is neither homogenous nor isotropic. Deictic signs are coordinates
expressing ideal spatio-temporal relations between the participants in the
communicative act and the object they are talking about. The deictic field
constructed by these coordinates is like a window through which the participants
see what they are pointing at and what they are oriented to. [7]
Ivan: (pointing towards the sky)
“look at the stars!”
Kremena: (gaze follows his direction)
Ivan: (still pointing) “there is
Venus, the brightest star!”
Kremena: (looking) “Where?”
Ivan: (pointing) “the one over there, to the left!”
Kremena: (looking & pointing) “Do you mean that big star, up there?”
Ivan: “Yes that one, it’s at the top of the Great Bear constellation.”
The deictic field or joint attentional frame is constructed by a
speaker, an addressee and the object they are referring to. It projects a
window or vista through which an
object and its spatial relations to the speaker and addressee, as well as to
other objects, are viewed and understood under the description “there”, “that
big star”, “the one over there”, “the brightest star at the top of the Great
Bear constellation”. The participants in the conversation are viewing a space
cut through by the deictic field, a space including them, as well as “the
brightest star” which is pointed out and its location at the time of the
utterance. The participants’ perspective (or deictic field) extends towards the
star and “there” indicates an object as ‘the brightest star’.
But the speaker’s location determines the orientation of the objects
around him and if the star is to his left, if the addressee is facing him, it
is to her right. So how can Ivan and Kremena be oriented towards the star in
the same way if her body is not aligned to his? Given that Ivan is aware of
Kremena’s viewpoint, that Kremena’s gaze is steered by Ivan’s pointing and the
linguistic signal “there” and that she grasps Ivan’s intention, how does she
orient herself in regard to a non-deictic expression such as “to the left”
which implies ‘the left as the speaker faces it’, if she is facing the speaker?
In other words, if the location of the object is represented independently of
the addressee’s perspective, how is she directed towards it? Bühler has an
interesting reply. First, the “coordinate source of visual directions wanders
in the field of kinaesthetic proprioception (Körpertastbild). Briefly, the perceptible here does not always lie in the same place in kinaesthetic
proprioception, not even when it is meant in a primarily optical sense.”
(ST:129).
Second, perceptual orientation requires a leap from egocentric
orientation or the ego’s axis of orientation as the reference direction to what
Bühler calls topomnestic spatial
orientation or a bearing independent of the ego’s location and motion also
called allocentric orientation expressed in terms of the cardinal directions
north-south, east-west or here-ahead-behind-right-left (ST:131). So the
respective kinaesthetic proprioceptions (Körpertastbild)
of speaker and addressee in the deictic field are coordinated on an allocentric
coding of the object’s location. Since the addressee’s location is not the
source point, her bearing to the reference direction cannot be egocentric but
requires a leap to an allocentric spatial frame, a bearing independent of her
vantage point or direction of movement. According to Bühler, the addressee can
make this leap because egocentric anchorage is shiftable. Likewise, in using
orientational expressions, the speaker must aware of the addressee’s viewpoint,
his egocentric anchorage shifts toward hers. For example, he will point to
“there”, saying “to your left”. “When a gymnastics teacher gives commands
standing nose to nose in front of a row of gymnasts, the commands left and right are conventionally given and understood in the orientation of
the gymnasts. That is a paradigmatic case one should note for explaining the
inordinately easy translatability of all field values of the spatial
orientation system and the linguistic deictic system from one orientation-chart
to another.” (ST:131).
The field values of the spatial orientation system, that is the four
cardinal directions and the six locating expressions to the right, to the left, above, below, behind, in front of, are
easily translatable because they depend on the orientation of the speaker and
how he or she imputes the spatial orientation of the objects around him or her
(Fillmore 1997:66). So those six locating notions have a deictic use. For
example, a cow may not have a top/bottom orientation but it does so under the
description of a child: “the cow has six sides: left, right, top and bottom. On
its back side it has a tail from which a brush is hanging. [...] The head is for
the horns to come out of and also because the mouth has to be somewhere. […] On
the bottom side is the milk.” [8]
Since the orientation of the speaker determines the orientation of the objects
around him and the coordinate-source (the speaker’s I, here and now) is
shiftable, it follows that the addressee can be directed to align her viewpoint
to the speaker’s by shifting her own coordinate-source. In addition, the origo of perceptual direction, the
perceptual ‘here’ can be detached from the present bodily position and
displaced into a fictive attitude: when in narration there is talk of the right
and left bank of the Seine, the reader mentally adjusts himself by displacing his
momentary kinaesthetic proprioception (ST:136). That is what happens in
imagination-oriented deixis de re.
2) Consider the following case: I am telling you a story about two
people observing the stars at night. You and I may not share a perceptual
space, but you might accept my invitation to a location in an imaginary space.
If you do, you will be looking through the deictic field I have projected onto
your perceptual space.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Kremena who loved
looking at the stars. So, one night her father, Ivan, opened the window,
pointed to the sky and said: “look at the stars”. Kremena’s gaze followed his
direction. Still pointing, Ivan said: “there is Venus, the brightest star”.
“Where?” asked Kremena. “Over there, to the left!” Ivan replied. “Do you mean
that big star, up there” the little girl asked, aligning her gaze to his. “Yes
that one, it’s at the top of the Great Bear constellation”, her father explained.
2. IMAGINATION-ORIENTED DEIXIS DE RE
Imagination-oriented deixis de re
is a pointing within imagination, either in an imaginary (or past or future) situation
or to a phantasy-object: “when the narrator leads the hearer into the realm of
what is absent and can be recollected or into the realm of constructive
imagination and treats him with the same deictic words as before” (ST: 124-5). In
displacing the coordinate source, a new deictic field is constructed: the scene
is now seen through a narrative perspective. The coordinate source and its
three orientational points “I”, “here” and “now” have been displaced, that is,
the imaginary coordinate source is different from the situational one and
identifying the speaker is no longer sufficient for identifying the time and
location of the utterance. The speaker (“I”) is now the narrator, the addressee
(“you”) is the audience and the time and location are represented by the
narrator who has to orient the hearer or reader, since visual and auditory cues
are no longer available. The origin of acoustic direction, the spatial source
quality is absent in imagination-oriented deixis. In situational deixis, the
speaker’s voice orients the addressee: the receiver of the acoustic signal
turns towards the source. This spatial source quality is absent in written
texts – the reader cannot use pre-linguistic deictic clues for locating the
place of speaker who says ‘here’, nor can he follow the “arrow formed by the
speaker’s arm” (ST 125), nor can he hear the voice of the speaker who says “I”.
Yet these deictic words are used in visual accounts of absent objects by absent
narrators: there is a pointing in the construction (Aufbau) of speech, using the same deictic words as in situational
deixis (ST:121). Such pointing also involves the de dicto mode of deixis (syntaktisches
Zeigen) which I discuss in detail in section 3. But deixis de re is sufficient for pointing out a
thing that has no visible location.
As we have seen, deictic words draw attention, either by guiding the
addressee to something or by showing something to the addressee. In
imagination-oriented deixis, the perspective is not projected onto the shared
perceptual space of speaker and addressee and deictic expressions do not refer
to things or locations in that shared space. The deictic field is posited in an
imaginary, recollected or otherwise represented space. As Bühler puts it,
“either Mohammed goes to the mountain or the mountain comes to Mohammed”
(ST:134). There is an intermediate case where Mohammed and the mountain remain
where they are and Mohammed sees the mountain from his perceptual position.
Bühler thus distinguishes between three cases of imagination-oriented deixis de re. In all three cases, an imaginary
situation is represented or simulated, as
if it were the real situation. Poets, narrators or screenwriters use the method of make-belief
or mimesis of action, where what is represented or ‘made visible’ is in a
different format from what is ‘given’ to our senses but none the less
accessible. It is accessible to the imagination because it in a belief-mode, as
a possible world. [9]
As Aristotle explains in the Poetics,
a narrator or writer is an image-maker who ‘produces a mimesis of one of three
things: reality past or present; things as they are said or seem to be; or
things as they ought to be”. [10]
Below, I argue that imagination-oriented deixis in the as if mode is explicitly de
re, but implicitly de dicto.
(1) An imaginary entity appears to
the speaker in his or her perceptual space
Either the speaker addresses himself to an imaginary addressee as if
(s)he were there. To the audience, it appears that the speaker is talking to
himself whereas he may believe (or want the audience to believe) he is talking
to a ghost. Or the speaker uses the deictic coordinates of situational deixis
and points to the direction in which the absent thing is mentally seen. The
imagined thing (Vorstellungsding) may
be located among the things the speaker perceives, as in “here, on that side
I’ll put the couch”, if the speaker is mentally furnishing his new apartment. Or
the speaker refers to an imaginary situation in his present surroundings, using
the ‘I’ ‘here’ ‘now’ origo. Consider a patient suffering from amnesia who is mentally
disoriented: she will be unable to indicate her present role, time or location
and might say to her doctor: “Presently, I have a position at the outpatient
clinic in
(2) Subjective imagination-oriented
deixis:
In subjective imagination-oriented deixis, Mohammed goes to the
mountain, that is, the subject is displaced in an imaginary scene because of “a
method cultivated by the epic poet” (ST:126). This method is that of
make-belief or mimesis of action, where what is represented or ‘made visible’
is in a different format from what is ‘given’ to our senses but none the less
accessible. [11] The strength of an epic narrative
(or a movie) lies in Mohammed’s displaceability to the mountain, that is, in a
scene, episode or situation which is not actually perceived the addressee is
topographically oriented by means of deictic words. In epic narratives, as well
as in references to the past, narrator and addressee do not have a common
perceptual space, the deictic field is a scene visualized by the speaker and
addressee: the deictic field is transposed from a perceptual to an imaginary
space where deictic words coordinate their attention as a situation is sketched
and their present perceptual space is turned into a stage. In describing a
battle scene, such as the one between Caesar and Pompey, the situation is
easily outlined by means of deictic words: ‘This is Caesar’s battle line, here
is the cavalry, here is Caesar himself. This is Pompey’s battle line’. The
narrated situation is treated as if
it were present and the narrator is displaced, together with the reader or
addressee in a fictional deictic field, with jumps of perspective in an
apparently continuous viewing. These perspectival jumps permit the
representation of a scene in a coherent deictic field - which is constructed so
as to appear continuous. Thus Homer displaces the reader, following Penelope on
her way to the treasure-vault to retrieve Odysseus’ bow:
“The prudent queen the lofty stair ascends,
At distance due a virgin-train attends;
A brazen key she held, the handle turn’d,
With steel and polished elephant adorn’d:
Swift to the inmost room she bent her way,
Where safe repos’d the royal treasures lay;
There shone high-heap’d the labour’d brass and ore,
And there the bow which great Odysseus bore;” (Odyssey, bk XXI, cited in
ST:393)
Similarly, when orienting someone in imagination, along the right and
left banks of a river, the subject is displaced in imaginary space as if it
were perceived: ‘here on the left was the battle-field, here was the bridge
crossing the river’.
“One is displaced to the geographical place of what is imagined, one
sees what is imagined in front of one’s mind’s eye. Your present kinaesthetic
proprioception (Körpertastbild) is
bound to an imagined visual scene. “When Mohammed feels displaced to the
mountain, his present tactile body-image is connected with an imagined optical
scene. For this reason he is able to use the local deictic words ‘here’ and
‘there’ and the directional words ‘forward’, back, right, left’ on the phantasy
product or imagined object just as well as in the primary situation of visual
perception. And the same holds for the hearer.” (ST:137)
The hearer understands the directions when he is similarly displaced
himself, that is, when his own present tactile body image is connected to a
corresponding imagined visual scene. “In
(3) Objective imagination-oriented
deixis:
Another type of displacement is objective imagination-oriented deixis,
where an object appears in the subject’s imaginary space and the utterer can
point to it by means of deictic words which draw the attention of the hearer.
In objective imagination-oriented deixis, the mountain comes to Mohammed.
Bühler calls this the dramatic procedure, as opposed to the epic procedure of
subjective imagination-oriented deixis, where utterer and addressee are shifted
and oriented in an imaginary scene. In a dramatic procedure, an absent object
is pointed out and taken up by utterer and addressee in their actual perceptual
situation. When demonstrating on a phantasm, what is absent is cited into the present
space (ST:140). A classic case of pointing to an object in the subject’s
represented space is Macbeth’s: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the
handle towards my hand?” (II.1) Hallucinations are a similar case.
To recapitulate: in imagination-oriented deixis de re, either the speaker mentally sees something or someone from
his perceptual location, or he directs the addressee to something or he places
an object for her to see. In a narrative, either the narrator displaces the
hearer or reader by pointing out the directions for the latter to follow, or he
(dis)places an object for the hearer to notice. In imagination deixis de re the addressee’s attention is drawn
through a deictic field or perspective by orienting him in an imaginary
situation or by orienting her attention to something in an imaginary space. But
imagination-oriented deixis also has a de
dicto mode Bühler calls syntactic pointing (syntaktisches Zeigen). “The
psychological basis of syntactic deixis differs from that of deixis de re (sachliches Zeigen) and although the horizons of what can be pointed
out there and then impinge on each other, they are by no means identical” (ST:
388). Since the deictic field is perspectival, it allows for positing and
projecting different viewpoints. The horizons of deixis de re and de dicto cut
through the speaker’s and addressee’s shared represented space as different
angles through which something is seen and shown. Thus in deixis de dicto, the deictic field is not the
narrator’s but constructed from the perspective of a figure in a narrative: the
narrative perspective shifts from first to third-person and the coordinate
source is shifted because the origo
of the deictic field is no longer ‘I, here, now’ but ‘s(h)e, (t)here,
now/then’.
Even more important is a claim Bühler implicitly makes (probably because
he took it for granted that this distinction would be understood), namely that
deixis de re posits what Lyons
(1991:171) calls first- or second-order entities such as discrete physical
objects and persons on one hand, or events and states-of-affairs on the other, whereas
deixis de dicto posits third-order
entities such as intensional objects. When Ivan points out a star to Kremena,
the deictic expression ‘there’ predicates deictic existence of the star or that
an individual satisfying a certain description is in a certain location – and
since it is in a certain location, it must exist (Lyons 1975:80-81). The
underlying structure of this deictic expression is: ‘there is such an x as star(x)’ or ‘there is at least one x
such as star(x), formalized in the
atomic formula ( x) star(x), for the deictic
adverb ‘there’ functions as a locative predicate. In deixis de re an
expression such as ‘the star is there’ draws the addressee’s attention to a
first- or second-order entity in a physical space by means of coordinates
established by the origo or coordinate source in regard to the zero
point ‘here’. The deictic field or perspective projects a continuous and
homogenous space onto a physical space shared by speaker and addressee. This
projective quality is common to deixis de re and deixis de dicto.
Unlike deixis de re, however, deixis de
dicto only has an existential coefficient insofar as ( x) is projected through a deictic field onto the domain of speech. The
inconvenience does not lie in existential quantification, since ( x) (x = a) is predicated of a third-order entity, but in the
verification of existential quantification, especially if you’re an externalist
realist, though if you are, you probably won’t accept my distinction in the
first place. For a cognitive irrealist such as myself, however, there is no
inconvenience in constructing objects the existence of which (s)he cannot
verify by means of a reference to an external world. I take cognitive irrealism
in the sense that linguistic statements are truth-committed (involving
grounds & reasons for beliefs & actions) but do not have truth-makers.
Following Bühler, I claim that deixis de dicto is syntactic pointing
where the deictic field is shifted from a physical space to the context of
speech. As I have shown above, imagination-oriented deixis de re is
sufficient for orienting an addressee to an absent object or absent location,
but in imagination-oriented deixis de re the existence of a first-order
entity such as a discrete physical object or a location is posited, hence the ‘de
re’. Thus Macbeth assumes that there is such an x as a dagger when
he exclaims “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” But syntactic
pointing shifts the deictic coordinates to the context of utterance, that is,
the context of utterance takes on the level of a deictic field. [12]
The shift from deixis de re to
deixis de dicto is a shift from
spatial to temporal dimensions. The level of the perspective is no longer a
shared physical or perceptual space but a shared linguistic dimension of
narration. Hence
3. IMAGINATION-ORIENTED DEIXIS AS MODUS DE DICTO
Imagination-oriented deixis de
dicto is tied to represented speech. Represented speech is another way of
displacing deictic coordinates in narration and thought, famously coined by
Charles Bally (1912) as ‘le style indirect libre’; Jespersen (1924) uses ‘represented
speech’ and so does Banfield (1978), whereas Fillmore uses ‘discourse deixis’
(1997). [13]
I choose ‘deixis de dicto’ because it
is less awkward than the technically correct ‘represented speech’ and less
loaded than ‘discourse deixis’.
Besides, the de dicto mode is not
necessarily a discursus, either in
the sense of ‘running to and fro’ or in the sense of ‘argument’. Rather, this
mode is non-situational deixis in which the contextual field (das kontextliche Zeigfeld) coordinates
utterer and addressee because in deixis de
dicto the developing context of an utterance becomes itself a deictic
field. For example in ‘as I have shown above’ I point to a place in my text.
Owing to the representative method of language “the two fields, the deictic
field (of things) and the symbolic field of language are thus bound together
[...] by the contextual deictic field.” (ST 124). For example, if I say: “there
you are wrong”, “there” points to a particular case. Or if we point
anaphorically, that is, if ‘this’ or ‘there’ are used to refer back to
something just mentioned, as in: “
In addition, in the de dicto
mode, the coordinate sources of subjective orientation are posited arbitrarily:
the deictic field is not the narrator’s but constructed from the perspective of
a figure in a narrative: the narrative perspective shifts from first to
third-person and the index of the context is shifted because the origo
of the deictic field is no longer ‘I, here, now’ but ‘s(h)e, (t)here,
now/then’. Besides, in a narrative more than one coordinate source can be
posited: perspective is not only shifted from first to third person, but in the
de dicto mode of narrative both
perspectives can be posited simultaneously. Consider the following passage from
a short story by Miranda July (2007):
“Over time she knew more and more people who had never seen her with the
birthmark. These people didn’t feel any haunting absence, why should they? Her
husband was one of those people. You could tell by looking at him.” (“The birthmark”)
Another example of deixis de dicto
is chronodeixis or shifting the temporal coordinate source in represented
speech, when an imaginary situation is expressed by means of a shift in verbal
tenses. For tenses have a deictic function and chronodeixis shows how a speaker
can posit temporal distance between an event and an utterance about that event
by using the preterit or simple past. In what follows I examine two kinds of
deixis de dicto for pointing to the
past: anaphor and chronodeixis, with a special emphasis on the deictic function
of the epic preterit as in the deictic expression ‘once upon a time there was…’
I follow Rauh (1982, 1983) whose research paved the way into this past
perspective. I have but an angle to add. [14]
I think that deixis de dicto
provides an answer to the question of how we point towards the past or future –
a deceptively easy question to which most scientists would reply that temporal
dimensions are basically spatial dimensions, as in “yesterday’s party is behind
us” (Gärdenfors, 2000:181). It seems that the past is located in space as
something that lies behind us. But in which direction do we look when we refer
to the past? Or rather: how do we look into the past? My first case of deixis de dicto is anaphoric pointing and it
could be argued that an anaphor refers backwards or upwards in a text – if the
text is a Greek scroll, we would be looking upwards to find what is pointed to
(ST:122). Perhaps we should not be too hasty in assuming that temporal
dimensions are spatial locations
because, although the two can be correlated, there does not seem to be a
one-to-one correspondence between them. I think that pointing to the past or
the future involves a shift in our belief-mode which underlies spatial and
temporal distinctions: we represent something absent as if it were present and point to it by means of verbal tenses,
that is, by showing and directing to it from our subjective point of view or
drawing an arrow-line to it from our own perspective as proximal, medial or distal.
Verbal tenses or inflexions indicate the time of a narrated event relative to
the time at which the narrator is speaking (the coding time) and thus tenses
function as referential operators, since the temporal distance of a retrospective account is linguistically
expressed by tenses: the before-past (ante-preterit), simple past (preterit)
and after-past (post-preterit) are the main tenses expressing distant and
nearer past times with regard to a zero-point ‘now’. [15]
In addition, the imperfect and perfect tenses modulate our focus on the
past much like objective and subjective imagination-oriented deixis modulate
our focus on what is absent. There seems to be a one-to-one correspondence
between the imperfect tense and objective imagination-oriented deixis on one
hand, and between the aorist tense and subjective imagination-oriented deixis,
on the other. As
Otto Jespersen
(1924) puts it, “the
imperfect is used by him to whom one day is as a thousand years and the aorist
by him to whom a thousand years are as one day”. [16] Using
the aorist, we focus on the past from a bird’s eye perspective which gives a
panoramic or small-scale view of a situation where we would need subjective
imagination-oriented deixis for displacing ourselves. Using the imperfect, on
the other hand, we use a close-up view or close range and our sequence shows
something on a large scale, so in this case objective imagination-oriented
deixis would be used for pointing to that which appears in our imaginary space.
3.1. Anaphoric pointing (anamnestic
deixis)
A past situation is treated as if
it were presently given when the egocentric deictic field is transposed by
imagination and the narrator guides the reader with orientation in imagination.
Hence, as Bühler says, “what is absent is cited in the present space as in drama” (1934: 140). Either I
displace a past scene into the present by focussing on it (objective
imagination-oriented deixis) or I am transposed by means of an imaginary change
of location and the scene is described as an action in which I participate
through the narrator’s eyes (subjective imagination-oriented deixis). In the
first case, I have a bird’s eye view (in the aorist tense and from a
third-person perspective) of a historical site which I visit in an imaginary
journey and in the second case (in the imperfect tense and from a second-person
perspective) I am displacing myself in
situ. In both case, I follow the narrator’s deictic clues: ‘here was the
battle-scene’, ‘over there was the castle’. Here the deictic field is a scene
visualized by the utterer/narrator and the addressee. Hence the deictic field
is transposed from a perceptual to an imaginary space, a transposition allowing
for the past situation to be treated as
if it were present. To put it differently, recollection is incited by the
transposition of the sense of a lived experience which can be ‘seen again’ by
focussing on that event, except that, instead of using perception, we use
imagination. [17]
Bühler calls anaphoric pointing anamnestic deixis, that is, pointing in the
recollective mode. In recollection, the deictic coordinates and their index are
shifted from the egocentric mode to the anaphoric mode of presentation: the
coordinate source is shifted from the perceptual ‘here and now’ mode to the
memory ‘there and then’ mode. The perceptual mode is egocentric (the coordinate
source of subjective orientation is ‘I, hic
et nunc’) but modes of representation or presentification, such as memory
and imagination are not egocentric. Rather, a remote situation which has been evoked
is treated as if it were egocentrically given. In recollection, as in a
dramatic narrative, the coordinate source is shifted from the mode of here and now to the mode of as if. I recollect an object or event as
having perceived that object or event at an earlier time: I recall the train as
having seen it (I was there) rushing
into the station last week (then). The
referents of the recollective mode (which simulates the perceptual mode) are
past actions and events. An addressee can take up again a past situation
because anaphoric pointing provides a back-link to the antecedents of the
referents.
An anaphor is a deictic word such as ‘this’ or ‘there’ used to refer
back to something just mentioned: “(In the past) there was a dog in the
neighbour’s yard. This dog was a problem because it was large and unpleasant.”
‘This’ points back to the dog, for anaphoric pointing ensures a taking up of a
past state of affairs by referring to an antecedent. The back-link need not be
to an individual item. Consider: “The restaurant’s special dish was salmon.
This fish has tender pink meat”, where ‘this fish’ refers to a species of fish.
The deictic function of anaphors is the back-link which points to something
from which the consequence is drawn and in order to find this something, I have
to turn back towards the preceding sentences. [18]
For anaphoric deixis is: “a pointing to something that is not to be looked for
and found at places in perceptual space but rather at places in the whole of
speech.” (ST: 121). This back-link is based on the semantic dependence relation
between an antecedent and a consequent where the antecedent grounds the
consequent, for the antecedent provides the because
of the consequent and justifies or motivates it, by giving the reasons why the
consequent is the case. [19]
3.2. Chronodeixis: shifting
belief-modes
Temporal dimensions are not basically spatial (or even temporal); rather
they have a modal character because they are, basically, belief-modes, hence
the de dicto mode of deixis operates
a shift in belief-modes. I take ‘mode’ in the semantic sense of ‘viewpoint (or
perspective) under which an object is presented’. A speaker modifies or
modulates the content of an utterance in order to communicate certain
intentions to an addressee or to achieve certain effects. For example, the
statement “I wish you had seen this seascape before they built those horrible
hotels” evokes a past view from a ‘now’ coordinate source, by positing a
temporal distance by means of the deictic adverb ‘before’ in relation to ‘now’
and the addressee’s attention is drawn to the speaker’s mental state of regret
expressed also through his or her intonation. In addition, the verbal mood of
subjunctive accompanying the past tense in the subordinate clause signals a
hypothesis based on an unfulfilled condition (a counterfactual). In the
semantic sense the ‘realm’ of modality is narration - in speech and text and in
this section I examine narration as a shared dimension of speaker and addressee
coordinated by a deictic field or perspective in the de dicto mode. I do not study modal verbs and the related pragmatic
problems but focus on verbal moods and verbal tenses in so far as they have a
deictic use, in order to show that deixis de
dicto is a principle governing verbal moods as well as verbal tenses.
The de dicto mode operates in
verbal moods such as indicative, subjunctive or imperative, as well as in
verbal tenses such as present, imperfect or perfect which show when the action
of the verb occurs and verbal aspects (imperfect or aorist) which show what
type of action it is it – whether it continues into the present or whether it happened
in the past. Tenses occur in verbal moods but the distinction between moods and
tenses is not clear-cut: for example, the infinitive (which is basically a case
form) is sometimes classed as a mood: consider the imperative ‘don’t be foolish!’
I argue that the imperfect and perfect (preterit) tenses have a modal deictic
use, namely that they express belief-modes, just as the indicative, imperative
or subjunctive do and that consequently, the verbal distinctions of mood and
tense are related. As for the indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative
moods, they are verb forms expressing the mode in which a speaker conceives of
an assertion concerning the subject. So a mood is a perspective through which a
speaker posits something – through indicating, commanding, wishing or imagining.
Similarly, a tense is a perspective through which a speaker posits something –
(s)he posits a time in regard to a coordinate source. A temporal perspective is
constructed by means of present, past or future tenses - but that ‘time’ is a
possibility (or impossibility), a mode used for saying that something could be
or could have been, as in ‘once upon a time there was…’. It seems that, in this
case, ‘time’ has an adverbial use, in the multiplicative sense of ‘how many
times’ with an infinite possibility of instantiation: every speaker and
addressee will project the perspective of the ‘once upon a time there was…’ infinitely
many times, perhaps because this expression is determined by the numeral adverb
‘once’.
In addition, the appropriately named verbal aspects are viewpoints or perspectives posited by the speaker or
narrator for viewing actions in the past, either in the present form and
imperfect forms, as continuing, or in the aorist form, as something that
happened in the past. The upshot is that both verbal moods and verbal tenses
have a modal deictic use, precisely in chronodeixis which the coordinate source
is arbitrarily posited. My claim is that pointing to the past or the future
involves a shift or change of pace in our belief-mode. My analysis of
chronodeixis focuses on how moods and tenses provide perspectives on the past
in order to show that the past is a de
dicto construct and not a de re
mode. I discuss (1) how chronodeixis operates in recollection by combining
verbal moods, (2) how chronodeixis operates shifts in perspective by switching
verbal tenses. I examine the imperfetto
fabulativo, the epic preterit as used in ‘once upon a time there was’ and
how two coordinate sources can be posed by switching verbal tenses.
3.3 Chronodeixis in recollection:
combining indicative and subjunctive verbal moods
Recollecting a past event combines the indicative and the subjunctive
moods: deixis de re and de dicto. Let us consider recollecting a
past event: ‘I was… then and there’ or ‘I recollect having seen x then and there’. The indicative, as
used in recollection combines deixis de
re and de dicto: I indicate a present or absent object as
an entity that once existed. This
indication, however, also has an implicit subjunctive mode, an as if mode. Let us say I recollect the
brightly illuminated theatre I was at last night. My recollection of my attending the
theatre combines a first- and a third-person perspective
and, consequently, two deictic perspectives, de re and de dicto (or
indicative and subjunctive moods) I ‘see again’ the theatre (which is not now present) and I
also reproduce my earlier act of perception, for I grasp the
time and location, the ‘when’
and ‘where’, of the remembered event as well as the event itself. ‘I was’ is
oriented on the ‘I am’ coordinate source of personal deixis, just as ‘there’ is
oriented on a ‘here’ coordinate source of location. ‘There’ is not to be found
in the deictic field of the speaker and addressee’s perceptual situation;
‘there’ points to a location in the deictic field of their shared imaginary space.
In my recollection, I point to the theatre as if it were now present. ‘Then’ is posited as past in regard to
‘now’ (or what counts as present). ‘Then’ is oriented on a ‘now’ source of
coordination. ‘The theatre I see again’ at tu (time of utterance) is
a different object from the theatre I attended at ta (time of
action) and it is presented in a different mode from the theatre at ta.
The theatre at ta has a location in a physical space, hence it is
referred to as existing at ta and not at tu: the theatre
I see again at tu is posited as an existing object at ta.
The brightly illuminated theatre does not exist hic et nunc, but it is pointed to de re and de dicto as
having existed at another time (or once upon a time). It has no location in
physical or perceptual space, but is posited as existing in the temporal
dimension of my recollection (or de dicto).
What I ‘see again’ is a construct of my imagination and not an object of
perception but deictic existence is predicated of the theatre (in this case,
past existence) because I believe that it once existed: I see the theatre
through my belief in its past existence and this imaginary object can be
linguistically located by means of deictic coordinates. Why is the recollected
theatre posited by my belief? In the indicative mood, I am looking back from my
present position (the ‘now’ coordinate source). I see the theatre from my
‘now’-perspective. But the indicative mood is combined with the subjunctive
mood, since the theatre appears ‘as if’ I perceived it, so my past perception
appears ‘now’ in the mode of belief. I have what Husserl calls a double focus: from the
reproductive position of the ‘as it were’ as well as looking back from my present
position in the ‘now’. [20]
To clarify the ‘double focus’ consider Husserl’s example of a perceptual illusion: in a
museum he sees a young woman holding a catalogue and after a while he
recognizes it as a figure made of wood and wax, designed to trick the perceiver. Once he had recognized his error, he can still ‘see’ the figure now as
the human being, now as the wax figure, but its sense has a ‘different mode of being’
– that of an illusion and hence of a different belief. [21]
He can see it as a young woman ‘as it were’, in the subjunctive mood, without
believing that it is one. The indicative mood is framed by the subjunctive
mood. In his past belief-mode he points to the human figure de re which is cut through by his
present belief-mode that ‘this’ is a wax figure which is pointed to as if it
were a human being. The past belief-mode de
re is re-framed as the present belief-mode de dicto. In addition, his recognition of the figure as a mechanical mannequin marks a
temporal discontinuity: his present perspective ‘now’ is different from
his past perspective
‘then’.
Obviously, this temporal discontinuity is marked by the switch between present
and past tenses, although the temporal perspective is shared by the ‘I’ who is
also an eyewitness of an earlier time – as is the case in episodic recollection
or autobiographical memory. That is why the narrator ‘sees again’. ‘Seeing
again’ is essential to recollection: it is the necessary condition of being
able to re-identify something as the same thing you have once seen – in order
to make this re-identification, you have to be an eyewitness.
There is a slight twist in the view that to be an eyewitness is a
necessary condition for recollection: the object of a recollection is a past
action or event which is presented by means of simulation or mimesis, the
eyewitness-condition is underwritten by the shift from deixis de re, where the deictic coordinates are
oriented on a location in a physical space, to deixis de dicto, where the deictic coordinates are oriented on a location
projected onto the narrator’s and addressee’s shared imaginary space. The
referent is located in what
In addition, the subjunctive mood provides a temporal perspective and
thus is a case of chronodeixis. It goes without saying that the subjunctive
mood posits a possibility. If that possibility is posited as a perspective for
viewing actions in the past tense, it is seen as something that could have
been. Reminiscences
containing expressions such as: “I could” or “I should have been” are
hypothetical assumptions or implications of the form: ‘suppose that if p, then
q’. For example, if I ‘see again’ a scene from my past,
that scene is ‘in front’ of me, as it
were, posited in the subjunctive mood. Consider the following passage from
Nabokov’s “act of vividly recalling a patch of the past”.
“I see again my old
schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wall-paper, the open window. […] A
sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That
robust reality makes a ghost of the present. […] Everything is as it should be,
nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” [23]
“Everything is as it should be”, precisely because the
“robust reality” of memory “makes a ghost of the present”, that is, memory does
not preserve the past, it conditions its recovery. The subjunctive mood
expresses a possibility (or, in some cases, an impossibility), regardless of
whether our conjecture is of the future or the past : the de dicto perspective ‘suppose that I had gone to Harvard,
what a great lawyer I should have become’ is
projected onto the de re perspective
in the indicative mood ‘I
did not go to Harvard, nor did I become a great lawyer’.
3.4. Chronodeixis and shifting
perspectives: switching verbal tenses
So far I have examined chronodeixis in verbal moods. But there are other
kinds of chronodeixis which posit their object in a past mode and signal
temporal as well as modal distance, using verbal tenses.
(i) the imperfetto fabulativo
In Italian there is a modal (non-temporal) use of the imperfect tense as
chronodeixis for signalling modal distance: it does not describe past events in
the present world but constitutes roles in a game by coordinating the ‘I’ with
‘now’ in an imperfect mode representing a possible world. [24]
Thus Gianni Rodari (1973:169) notes a dialogue between two playing children in
the Grammatica della fantasia. He
calls this use of the imperfect ‘imperfetto fabulativo’.
“Roberta: Noi accendevamo il fuoco
Giorgio: Andavamo a dormire
Si ritirano nella sua ‘capanna. Ci restano accucciati per
pochi secondi.
Roberta: Adesso era matina,
io cercavo i polli per riserva” [25]
The children are not referring to past events in the present world,
rather they are coordinating their imaginary actions with an imaginary ‘now’,
that is, in a belief-mode, an ‘as-if’ mode they use to ascribe their imaginary
actions. The use of the imperfect refers to a possible world and not to the
time of the action in relation to the time of the utterance.
(ii) The epic preterit: ‘Once upon a
time there was…’
Other tenses which signal temporal as well as modal distance are the
historical present and the preterit: ‘once upon a time there was a brightly
illuminated theatre’ or ‘once upon a time there was a little girl named Kremena
who loved looking at the stars’, belong to this category of chronodeixis. My
claim that tenses function deictically is semantic, not formal. Tenses have a
deictic function in showing a temporal perspective or coordinate source in
regard to an action or event because the choice of tense characterizes the
speaker’s or narrator’s perspective, that is, his or her relation to the time
of action at the time of utterance. The past tenses signal a temporal distance
to the situation, but while the imperfect overlaps with the present and the
perfect signals a distal situation which is still hot news in the present, so
that the past in the perfect tense has an effect on the present, the epic
preterit is delimited from the present. I follow Gisa Rauh (1982, 1983) in
claiming that the difference between perfect and epic preterit can only be
explained deictically: both tenses express the relation ‘before’ which is
posited as past in regard to the time of utterance. ‘Before’ governs the
subordinate clause with a verb in the perfect or preterit tense but, while the
perfect is in the realm of the time of utterance, the epic preterit posits a time
of action beyond the time of utterance or a possible world, as in ‘once upon a
time there was’.
Bühler appropriately points out the important role of the subordinate
clause in relating the deictic and symbolic fields and their respective
dramatic and epic procedures. “Whoever wants to determine and describe the
entire realm of displacements presupposed by perceptually narrative speech […]
should also think of ‘subordinate clauses’ if he wishes to describe to what
extent the deictic field and with it the ‘dramatic’ procedure and the ‘epic’
procedure intervene in the domain of the symbolic field of language.” (ST:140).
Thus the epic preterit has a deictic function because it enacts a dramatic
procedure by showing an action or event to the addressee in an imaginary time
and location. In addition, these temporal modes express deictic perspectives
because they show how the speaker or narrator coordinates the time of action
with the time of utterance: ‘he said that he (has/had) finished that paper’.
The preterit is also used in viewing the time of action through a subjunctive
lens: ‘I wish I had finished that paper yesterday’
My own claim is that this modal difference is cemented by the fact that
the preterit, as in ‘once upon a time there was’ posits a time of action to
which the narrator is not an eyewitness and I argue that the perfect and epic
preterit tenses can be distinguished by the eyewitness-criterion which also
functions deictically: the epic preterit signals a time of action which the
narrator did not witness. The difference between perfect and epic preterit can
only be explained deictically because the differentiating criterion is whether
or not the personal coordinate source is an eyewitness of the time of action by
formatting his perspective as cutting through or cutting off the time of action
at the time of utterance. The perfect cuts through the time of action at the
time of utterance: ‘I have seen him at the station three days ago’ or the time
of action comprises the time of utterance, unlike the preterit ‘I saw him at
the station three days ago’, where the time of action is cut off from the time
of utterance.
In addition, the epic preterit delimits the time of action from the time
of utterance because this perspective cuts off the temporal realm from both
narrator and addressee: the temporal realm denoted by ‘once upon a time’ is
beyond the narrator’s and addressees’ shared imaginary space. That is, the
difference between the perfect and the preterit is explained in terms of the
narrator’s observational access to the time of action. The perfect, on the
other hand can be used to refer to an action which is still relevant to the
time of utterance, as in ‘I know that you lied’ (Rauh, 1982). Here the speaker
or narrator has access to the time of action at the time of utterance (as does
the addressee, in this case). Unlike the perfect (especially the present
perfect) the epic preterit does not have this close relation to the present
because it is posited in a modal rather than a temporal realm. ‘Once upon a
time there was…’ points to an action or event that could have occurred at any
time. The epic preterit does not have a shared temporal perspective with the
present as time of utterance because it does not project a present perspective
on the time of action. The historical present, on the other hand, presents an
action as going on at the time of utterance, that is, it projects a present
perspective on a the time of action: ‘Themistocles fled (flees) to Corcyra and
was (is) transported to the mainland’ (Θεμοστοκλη΅ φεύγει ε̉ς Κέρκˉυραν ...
διακομίζεται ε̉ς τήν ̉ήπειρον). The historical present shows what
counts as present, whereas the preterit shows a time that does not count as
present.
If I had to formally substantiate the semantic claim that tenses function
deictically, I should give an example in Bulgarian, because English past tenses
or –ed forms do not have an active
perfect option. Bulgarian and Russian on the other hand, have an –l form, a complex active perfect tense
in addition to the passive perfect tense in the –en form. This –l form
signals a distal situation of which the speaker is not an eyewitness. Thus he
can say something about his own past without claiming to have seen it himself
which is inexpressible by a passive perfect form. For example, ‘I was born’
implies an eyewitness perspective and, as a result, questions arise as to
whether I can
know facts about my life
such as my birthday without recalling them as past personal experiences
which are usually resolved by distinguishing between semantic memory for facts
and episodic memory of one’s own personal experiences. In Bulgarian
or Russian, the question of whether I really remember
my birthday, viz the day I was born, or whether I ‘just know’ it, is
resolved grammatically, by the perfect tense in the reflexive voice in the –l form, ‘родил съм се’ (in Russian: я родилас), which is
inappropriately translated into English using the active imperfect ‘I was born’
for lack of another option. For the English translation of the Bulgarian –l form in the active imperfect
corresponds to the Bulgarian passive perfect ‘роден съм’. The reflexive –l form, on the other hand, is deictic de dicto: it signals a distance between
the speaker and the past time he is referring to, a past time which signals the
relation of an ante-preterit – a time beyond the narrator’s conscious horizon.
(iii) Switching perspectives in
chronodeixis: ‘one day…’
Chronodeixis allows for positing two coordinate sources in a single
sentence by shifting verbal tenses. Consider this extract from a song by Amy
Macdonald (2007): “and they’ll meet one day, far away and say ‘I wish I knew
you before’; but I’ve seen that all before, in TV, books and film and more.”
The expression ‘and they’ll meet one day, far away’ is in the oracular or prophetic
present, a tense in which a future event is posited as present. The expression
‘one day’ is as evocative as ‘once upon a time’ but unlike the latter, ‘one
day’ posits an event as present in a prophetic mode. The oracular present has a
deictic function: seen through a prophetic perspective ‘one day’ counts as
present. The perspective or coordinate source of the oracular present is
countered by a coordinate source in the present perfect ‘but I’ve seen that all
before’. The rosy perspective opened by the oracular present is cut through by
a wry perspective from experience: ‘I’ve seen that all before’. The stanza is
complemented by a third coordinate source in the empiric present ‘and there’s a
happy ending every single day’ which posits a general truth based on
experience, thus grounding the present perfect ‘and there’s a happy ending
every single day’. Cut through by the combined empiric present and present
perfect, the oracular present perspective on a romantic human encounter appears
through the filter of irony. The switch in deictic coordinate sources from
oracular present to present perfect to empiric present and back to oracular
present achieves an ironic effect because they reciprocally cancel each other:
the prophecy is not only seen as projecting a horizon onto a movie screen, but
as repeatedly having done so. The evocative formula ‘and they’ll meet one day’
has long since been proved by experience. But the formula has the last word
because the cadenced movement or rhythm of the refrain cuts through the
empirical data. Here is the complete stanza:
« And they’ll
meet one day, far away and say ‘I wish I was something more’/
And they’ll meet
one day, far away and say ‘I wish I knew you before’ »
[…]
« Mrs Black
and White she’s never seen a shade of grey/ Always something on her mind, every
single day/ But now she’s lost her way/ And where does she go from here/ Mr
Multicultural sees all that one could see/ He’s living proof of someone very
different to me/ But now he wants to be free, free so he can see/ He’ll say ‘I
wish I knew you, I wish I met you when time was still on my side/ She’ll say ‘I
wish I knew you, I wish I loved you before I was his bride’ »
« And so they
must depart/ Two many more broken hearts/ But I’ve seen that all before in TV,
books and film and more/ And there’s a happy ending every single day »
Amy Macdonald Mr
Rock & Roll (2007)
(1)
“And they’ll meet one day, far away and say ‘I wish I knew you before’” shows a
future event ‘one day’ at an imaginary location ‘far away’, regarded as present
by narrator and addressee. This perspective shows an unattainable event
expressed by the wistful expression from a different coordinate source than the
narrator’s: ‘I wish I knew you before’ is an unavailable option for the couple
indicated by the personal pronoun ‘they’. Their wish is a wish for the past,
expressed in the perfect (aorist) indicative. The temporal deictic adverb
‘before’ points to an imaginary time of action: a distal time imagined by
‘them’ which is cut off from their time of utterance.
(2)
“Mrs Black she’s never seen a shade of
grey, but now she’s lost her way” posits a present with an enduring result
‘she’s never seen’ cut through by a ‘now’ which is simultaneous to the singing
narrator’s coordinate source of deictic orientation. Similarly ‘Mr
Multicultural sees all that one could see’ posits a present perfect cut through
by ‘but now he wants to be free’, signalling a temporal interval which occurs
in the present, simultaneously with the coordinate source of the narrator’s ‘I,
here, now’ who comments that ‘he’s living proof of someone very different to
me’.
(3)
“He’ll say ‘I wish I knew you … when time was still on my side’” posits an
oracular present showing a wish for a past time which was never an option. The
overall effect is a contradiction: the future (and hence possible) event
signalled by the oracular present shows a wish for an unavailable past
situation, so the effect is that of looking through a trompe-l’oeil perspective from the reverse side.
(4)
Not to worry. ‘I’ve seen that all before in TV, books and film and more’ sings
the narrator about fiction that produces happy endings ‘every single day’ The
wish for a past time is regularly granted in texts and on the screen, for
couples in fictional contexts. This reassurance on behalf of the narrator
cancels any de re perspective the
addressees might have had.
References
Alberti, L.B. Della pittura
(1436). English trans.,
Aristotle,
Poetics (1987). S. Halliwell
(trans.).
Bühler, Karl (1934). Sprachtheorie,
Stuttgart, Fischer, 1965. (ST)
Clark, Herbert (2003). “Pointing and placing”. In Pointing,
S.Kita ed.,
Conte, M.-E.(1984). “Deixis am Phantasma. Una forma di riferimento nei testi”. In Linguistica
testuale. Atti del XV congresso internazionale di studi della SLI, Roma,
Bulzoni: 187-205.
Fillmore,
Charles (1997). Lectures on Deixis,
CSLI Publications, Stanford.
Goldin-Meadow,
Susan (2007). “Pointing sets the stage
for learning language – and creating language”. In Child Development, May-June 2007, vol.78, no.3: 741-745.
July,
Miranda (2007). No one belongs here more
than you,
Kasabova,
Anita (2007). За автобиографичната памет,
New Bulgarian University Press, Sofia. In English: On autobiographical memory,
Kasabova,
Anita (2008) “Memory, Memorials and
Commemoration” in History and Theory,
Wiley-Blackwell, October 2008: 331-350.
Lyons,
John (1975). “Deixis as the source of
reference”. In Formal semantics of
natural language, E.L. Keenan, ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press:
61-83.
Lyons,
John (1991). Natural language and
universal grammar, vol.1,
Macdonald,
Amy (2007) Mr Rock & Roll.
In album This is the life. Melodramatic records Ltd.
Panofsky,
Erwin (1991). Perspective as symbolic
form. Zone Books, N.Y., 1997.
Rauh, Gisa
(1982-3). “Ueber die deiktische Funktion
des epischen Präteritum: die Reintegration einer scheinbaren Sonderform in
ihren theoretischen Kontext”, Indogermanische
Forschungen, de Gruyter, Berlin, Bd 87,1982: 22-55; Bd 88,1983: 33-53.
Rodari,
Gianni (1973).
Grammatica della fantasia,
Tomasello,
M. Carpenter, M., Liszkowski, U. (2007). “A
new look at infant pointing”. In Child
Development, May-June 2007, vol.78, no.3: 705-722.
*
This paper was first presented
at the
[1] Appolonios Dyskolos (2nd C.) used the word deictic in relation to demonstrative pronouns and so did Karl Brugmann (1904) who investigated demonstrative pronouns in Indo-European languages.
[2] If predication and reference are
ontogenetically indistinct in very young children, perhaps what they
ontogenetically develop from is an attributive act which coordinates meaning
and object: it seems that very young children name and/or point to something
using a deictic expression such as ‘this’
by correlating a word and a discrete physical object to express what
Goldin-Meadow (2007:741) calls “sentence-like meanings” – that is, attributive
meanings. For example in ‘eat’+ point at cookie’, the cookie is understood as
having the property ‘edible’ from the child’s subjective point of view: ‘this x cookie(x) is an edible-for-me(x)’
or (x)(x=edible-for-me).
In other word, the (proto-)predicative act and the (proto-)referring act
presuppose an (proto-)attributive act.
[3] The adjective perspectival
is a Latin derivative of the verb perspicere
which means seeing clearly as well as
seeing through and the noun perspectivus, or sight. Perspectiva was
the science of sight or optics. In
Italian perspectiva underwent a phonetic transformation to prospettiva or looking
forward, anticipating or projecting a point of view. (That is the word used by
Piero della Francesca, for the cross-section method or intersecting a three-dimensional
body with a plane). See Erwin Panofsky (1991), Perspective as symbolic form
(Zone Books, N.Y., 1997). So perspective does not only denote a representing of
objects as if they were seen from a distance, as in foreshortening, but also a
representing of the space these things occupy and how they are related to the
eye from a single viewpoint.
[4] On this see Erwin Panofsky (1927,
translated 1997:28-9).
[5] ”Phänomenologisch aber
gilt der Satz, da. der Zeigefinger, das natürliche Werkzeug der demonstratio ad
oculos zwar ersetzt wird durch andere Zeighilfen; [...] Doch kann die
Hilfe, die er und seine Äquivalente leisten, niemals schlechterdings wegfallen und
entbehrt werden; auch nicht in der Anaphora, dem merkwürdigsten und spezifisch sprachlichen Modus des Zeigens. Diese Einsicht
ist der Angelpunkt unserer Lehre vom Zeigfeld der Sprache.”
[6] Stephen Levinson (1983 : 54-94) also
holds that deixis has a coordinational (or deictic) centre and develops a
pragmatic view of deixis as context-dependent.
[7] This is exactly what L.B. Alberti
and L. da Vinci did in establishing the principles of linear perspective. Alberti
writes: “scrivo uno quadrangulo […] qualo reputo essere una fenestra aperta per
donde io miri quello que quivi sara dipinto” (Della pittura 1436:79; English translation, New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1966: 56)
[8] This text written by a child is
exhibited in the Musée Pédagogique in
[9] Aristotle, Poetics, ch.2.1448a. Aristotle considers epic poetry (at least
Homer’s) as a kind of drama or mimesis of action.
[10] Aristotle, Poetics, ch.25.1460b 8-11.
[11] Aristotle, Poetics, ch.2.1448a. Aristotle considers epic poetry (at least
Homer’s) as a kind of drama or mimesis of action.
[12] „der werdende Kontext einer Rede selbst zum Zeigfeld
erhoben wird“ (ST:124).
[13] Fillmore (1997:103) sums up the
issue as follows : “Discourse deixis
has to do with the choice of lexical or grammatical elements which indicate or
otherwise refer to some portion or aspect of the ongoing discourse – something
like, for example, “the former”. Most commonly, the terms of discourse deixis
are taken from systems of deictic and non-deictic time-semantics, for the very good reason that any point in a
discourse can be thought of as a point in time – the time at which that portion
of the discourse is encoded or decoded – […].” I follow Fillmore, except on his
choice of the term discourse because today that word has philosophical
connotations which obscure the present purpose.
[14] Gisa Rauh (1982, 1982) made a
valuable two-part study which seems to have been consigned to the preterit form
it describes. Rauh’s starting point is Bühler’s theory of deixis which also
seems to have been largely forgotten. My own view is that Bühler and Rauh’s
theories have stood the test of time, pace
the currently popular developments in cognitive linguistics which date back to
Rauh’s, if not Bühler’s, era (Langacker 1982, 1985, 1987, 1993). Rauh’s study is entitled: “Ueber die deiktische Funktion des epischen
Präteritum: die Reintegration einer scheinbaren Sonderform in ihren theoretischen
Kontext”, Indogermanische Forschungen,
de Gruyter, Berlin, Bd 87, (1982: 22-55); Bd 88 (1983: 33-53). For what it’s worth, I agree with
the cognitive linguists’ denials of Chomsky’s generative grammar (the
‘generativist’ part) on one hand and truth-conditional semantics on the other,
though it remains to be seen how successful their denials turn out to be. But I
just can’t see the benefits of discarding historical grammar – call it
‘personal perspective’.
[15] I have developed this view in
Kasabova (2007) За
автобиографичната памет (On autobiographical memory), New
Bulgarian University Press, Sofia. The English version is forthcoming
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
[16] Otto Jespersen (1924) The philosophy of grammar,
[17] I examine this issue in Kasabova
(2008) “Memory, Memorials and
Commemoration” (History and Theory,
October 2008).
[18] “Rückverweis
” (ST:389).
[19] I argue for this in Kasabova (2008),
as well as in Kasabova (2007).
[20] Husserl, Collected Works, vol. XI, text no.19, p.672.
[21] Husserliana XI, pp.351-354.
[22] I argue for the claim that whereas
retention is personal, recollection can also be collective in Kasabova (2008).
[23] V.
Nabokov (1947 :75-77). Cf. on this Eakin (2000):
292-293. Note that Nabokov entitles his work an autobiography revisited, as if to comment on the
autobiographical genre. I
discuss the subjunctive and indicative modes of representing in Kasabova (2007).
[24] Peter Gärdenfors tells me that this
non-temporal use of the imperfect tense also exists in Swedish.
[25] G. Rodari « Giochi in pineta ». In the English and French translations, this
imperfetto is rendered as a fabulative conditional, in Russian and German as
aorist. The chronodeictic use of the imperfect in Italian is discussed in M.-E. Conte (1984) « Deixis am Phantasma. Una forma di riferimento nei testi » in: Linguistica testuale.
Atti del XV congresso internazionale di studi della SLI, Roma, Bulzoni:
187-205.