Agreement or indicating verbs?

[Ronnie Wilbur]

Joe Martin notes:

> So Scott is asking us to make up our minds--either diectic gestures are
> linguistic, as claimed by the Sign camp, or they are non-linguistic, as
> claimed by the Spoken camp. We can't have it both ways.
>

It seems to me that this is the best statement of the problem I have seen,
and put this way immediately suggests the nature of the solution. Most
recent formal apporaches to semantics, esp. dynamic semantics such as that
dsicussed in the Larsen and Segal Knowledge of Meaning text, provide a way
to deal with the use of words, decitic or otherwise, to the conversational
situation (or other choices, cf. situaiton semantics, possible worlds
semantics, etc).  There is terminology such as assigning word or variable
to a peg (like hanging your coat on a peg) and then working with whether
the word is free to be assigned to another peg (put your coat on another
hangar) or when a peg is free to be assigned a new word (the hangar is
empty and you can use it again).  If you think then of either deictics, or
pronouns, or even first and subsequent mentions of the same noun, or the
morning star = evening star = Venus (sense and reference problems), you
can see that deictics can be spoken or gestured (cf. McNeill also) and
that even things we don't normally think of as 'deictic' are in fact
'referential' and require SOME context for interpretation. The
semanticists do not seem at all concerned about whether the means of
reference is spoken word, written word, gesture, picture, sign, index ...
these are forms, any of which may be associated with 'meaning'.

Given this, the problem of whether pointing and other gestures are
linguistic or not exists because we have narrowly defined what is
'deictic' or 'situationally referential'.

Consider another example -- suppose that mathematicians were to worry
about what the interpretation of 'three X' was.  Would they ever be able
to pin down the 'meaning' of 'three' if they were to consider all the
possible things that there could be 'three' of? If instead they treat
'three' as simply a number (not a referential word) they can say that in
any situation when #three' is sued, it has the same meaning, even thois
the expression 'three boys' 'three girls' 'three types of cheese' might
appear to be endless in possibilities.  Isn't this the same as 'pointing'?
Do we want to say that 'three' is not a word because in any given
situation it could be interpreted with respect to a different noun? Or do
we want ot say that in conjunction with a noun, it gets an interpretation
in each situation. And we would then say that 'pointing' is a 'rferemce
marker' that gets an interpretation in each situation in conjunction with
the location set up in that situation (parallel to the noun chosen in the
'three' situation).   Put this way, there doesn't seem to me to be a
problem in the first place.

Your thoughts?


P.S. I am on a trip and am not sure if I have referenced the Larsen book
correctly - it may be LArsen and Siegal.