Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Mon May 18 07:30:53 UTC 2009


>>> <Salinas17 at aol.com> 05/18/09 4:21 AM >>>
Part of the difficulty for all these approaches I think is caused by
the
fact that reference/deixis is not limited to external things.  
Expressions
can also refer to other representations, i.e., the referent can be a
symbol as
well as an object or state of affairs.   This drops us into a spiral
of
references where there's often no start point or end.

'External' is probably a red herring. At the risk of sounding like
Durkheim one might say that discourse facts are also things. One can
talk about James Bond just as much as one can talk about Winston
Churchill. What makes both of them concrete (rather than external) is
their presence in episodic memory. Someone who doesn't have either of
these in memory cannot refer to them.
Tahir



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