Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity

[Daniel Everett]

On establishing joint attention in the development of deixis, other  
species do seem to show primitive signs of this. Some dogs, for  
example (mine is one instance), regularly get their owners to focus on  
a third object. So my dog paws me to get me to look at someone sitting  
on the sofa in my dog's spot. I will be sitting talking to the person  
and the dog approaches. The dog paws me and then, when I make eye  
contact with the dog, he looks at the person sitting on the sofa. He  
keeps looking to me and then towards the offending person until I ask  
the person to move. Then he gets into his place on the sofa.

This seems to me like a joint-attention-getting event. It is possible  
that this comes from the dog's close contact with humans and  
represents a learning strategy available to canines but perhaps not  
always used. I don't know of studies of this in any form, certainly  
not studies comparing domestic canines with wild canines. I know,  
however, that Tomasello's group in Leipzig is studying canine  
communication/cognition. I am sure there must be other groups.

Surely Tomasello, Givon, Hrdy and others are on to something here in  
the looking at the importance of deixis, especially joint-attention,  
in the development of language. But, as Tom just said, it is  
principally in the 'other minds' recognition ability that humans  
shine. My dog gives me no reason to believe that he thinks of me as  
having a mind like his.

Recognizing and cooperating with entities that have minds like one's  
own seems to be a/the crucial evolutionary step in developing  
language. Once you have this, you can use just about anything to  
communicate, though speech works best.

Dan



On 18 May 2009, at 13:11, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> 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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