Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity

[Brian MacWhinney]

Tom,

     Yes, this is all quite right.  In his book Infant Speech from  
about 1935, Lewis noted that, even in babbling sounds i the 6-9 month  
range, there is a tendency for dentals to be associated with attention  
to objects.  Roman Jakobson brought a great deal of attention to the  
issue of "why mama and papa?" but it seems to me that the issue of  
"why da?" is more fundamental.  Whether it is da, there, di, do, or  
itt, these early dental syllables have a clear pointing function.  And  
Liz Bates picked this up in her 1976 analysis of the association of  
pointing with vocalization and looking at the interlocutor.  As Tom  
says, you can find plenty of these early deictics in the earliest  
CHILDES transcripts.  Moreover, they form one of the most solid bases  
for syntactic learning in item-based frames such as "this X" or "that  
X" (MacWhinney, 1975).
    However, for me, the most fascinating treatment of this issue  
comes from Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their organismic-developmental  
account of symbol formation and the growth of language and thought.   
Taking a page from Pierce, Buhler, and Vygotsky, they talk about the  
mother-child-object triangle.  Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is  
the one in which they show how a therapist can reestablish a  
schizophrenics contact with reality by resurrecting this triangle.   
Very 60s.   Dan is right that Mike Tomasello has taken this analysis  
one step further and shown parallels across primates, while  
emphasizing the extent to which these activities are even sharper in  
humans.  I haven't yet read the Sarah Hrdy work, but it sounds quite  
compatible.
     Do children stay at this level of concrete use of deixis?  Of  
course not, but certainly it is fully situational, social, and  
concrete from the beginning.

--Brian MacWhinney

On May 18, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Tom Givon wrote:

>
> I think that before we accept as gospel the idea that "from the  
> infant's point of view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of  
> mirrors", we ought perhaps look a bit more carefully at how infants  
> actually acquire communicative expression of reference, starting  
> from deixis and going on to other kinds of reference. The CHILDES  
> transcript of communication in the first year of life shows that the  
> prerequisite to reference is the care-giver's intense exercise in  
> establishing JOINT ATTENTION. The reason why this will become first  
> deictic reference is obvious--in early childhood, all communication  
> is about here-and-now, you-and-I, this-and-that accessible to both  
> of us in the shared speech situation. There is nothing confusing to  
> the infant in these learning sessions. On the contrary, the process  
> capitalizes on the shared perceptual field and the child's innate  
> propensity to attend to salient objects--colorful, compactly-shaped,  
> fast-moving, or pointed to by the care-giver. But the child is also  
> acquiring another important prerequisite to reference--and  
> communication in general--during the first year of life: Considering  
> OTHER MINDS as having a perspective distinct from one's own (inter- 
> subjectivity; theory of mind). So the acquisition of referential  
> communication is deeply embedded in these early capacities. Joint- 
> attention sessions are indeed early theory-of-mind instructional  
> sessions.
>
> Attracting the child attention to a referent within the shared  
> situation in early childhood is done by various pointing means-- 
> touching, approaching, holding-bringing-and-showing, changing the  
> child's position, pointing, and eventually verbal deictic  
> expressions. Verbs of perception such as "see", "look", "ear" or  
> "touch" are prominently used in the care-giver's verbal "obligato"  
> that accompanies these joint-attention (or joint-reference)  
> sessions. Early nominal vocabulary is also prominently introduced at  
> these sessions. And early uses of determiners ('this', 'the',  
> 'your', 'my') that are not motivated by discourse but still by the  
> deictic situation.
>
> With the gradual change during the second year to communication  
> about non-present objects and future and past events, the move from  
> deictic to other types of reference is phased in, together with more  
> sophisticated grammatical devices that point at remembered or  
> imagined referents. Thus, while the domain of reference expands, the  
> basic principle established in early infancy--JOINT-ATTENTION-- 
> remains as the leitmotif of all referential gestures, verbal &  
> otherwise: Make sure that you & I are attending to the same thing.  
> This is, of course, deeply embedded in the human capacity to  
> consider other minds ("inter-subjectivity, Theory of Mind, empathy).  
> There is a beautiful recent book by Sarah Hrdy on the evolution of  
> this capacity ("Mother & Others") that I think is perhaps worth  
> reviewing here, maybe later. (And Ch. 8 "How children acquire  
> complex reference" of my recent "The Genesis of Syntactic  
> Complexity" deals in some detail with the child reference data  
> during years 2-3-4).
>
> Cheers, TG
>
> ==============
>
>
> In more sophisticated referential learning during the 2nd and 3rd  
> year,
>
> Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 5/18/09 3:17:34 AM, twood at uwc.ac.za writes:
>> --I agree with the broad notion of deixis; I have never thought of  
>> it as a  early stages ("see the kitty?").
>> small class of linguistic expressions. But I don't agree that it  
>> has much to do with ambiguity. It seems to me that deixis is more  
>> like the pole of concrete as opposed to abstract in language, or  
>> specific as opposed to universal. So a linguistic expression will  
>> tend to have a deictic content as well as an ideational content--
>>
>> Tahir - Thanks for the comment.   Let me suggest that ambiguity  
>> arises in two ways with deixis.   One is the simple problem created  
>> by external context.   Levinson describes these on all levels, but  
>> the most apparent are the most basic -- "from the infant’s point of  
>> view, deixis is as confusing as a hall of mirrors: my “I” is your  
>> “you”, my “this” is your “that”, my “here”
>> , your “there”, and so forth."
>>
>> Ambiguity is also involved with deixis when we use it to be  
>> definite, i.e., to minimize ambiguity -- I don't want any car but  
>> this car.   The irony here is that what decreases ambiguity also  
>> increases ambiguity, since we are not in Kansas anymore when we  
>> accept deictic reference into our study of expression.
>>
>> The problem I cited with deixis applying to abstracts is that we  
>> really have no way of stopping the ball at just concretes.   For  
>> example:
>> John knew that.
>> That was exactly what I was thinking.
>> Do you believe this?
>> Here is where we part thinking.
>> That is diectic and this is not.
>> Here, on the other hand, a squared times b squared equals d.
>>
>> So-called secondary deixis apparently can apply to extreme  
>> abstracts -- which is why perhaps Buhler limited deixis to the  
>> point before the "pointing" became representation or symbolic.    
>> Perhaps because the process changes after that, if we are pointing  
>> to an abstract.
>>
>> regards and thanks,
>> steve long
>>
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>> **************
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