Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/17/09 3:17:13 PM, eitan.eg at gmail.com writes:
<<I agree with what you say, especially with the general tone. However, I 
would point out that a nicer conception of deixis is found in quite a lot of 
works: I would note the late Suzanne Fleischmann's wonderful "Tense and 
Narrativity" for tense as a deictic category in dialogue (as opposed to 
narrative), and Lenore Grenoble's excellent "Deixis and Information Structure in 
Russian". There's also some neat work on Yiddish spoken discourse (Gertrud 
Reershemius). There might be a mistake in the titles or spelling, since it's 
from my admittedly bad memory.
Best wishes, Eitan>>

Hi, Eitan.   Thanks for these other sources.   I'll try to post a 
bibliography at some point that might also add to this.

The reason I choose Stephen Levinson's piece on Deixis in the Handbook of 
Pragmatics is partly because he was mentioned on the list recently in 
connection with the Myth of Universals paper and partly because the Handbook is 
recent (2006).   To be fair, he does write that the article "does not attempt 
to review either all the relevant theory (see e.g. the collections in Davis 
1991, Section III, or Kasher 1998, Vol. III) or all of what is known about 
deictic systems in the world’s languages (see e.g. Anderson & Keenan, 1985, 
Diessel 1999)."

What I think Levinson does do is resort to the "disembodied proposition," 
free of external context, like a kee-jerk reflex, to make deixis seem so 
especially paradoxical, ambiguous and "semantically deficient."

That's probably the only way that the special deficiencies shows up -- when 
you assume that language can be rightly just studied as a logic system, an 
algorithm or independent framework for semantics.   Deixis becomes a 
convenient "special" category, or catch-all, for when the language itself doesn't 
allow you to stay within its self-logic.

That deixis is a special class of expressions is now pretty common 
throughout the literature so far as I can tell.   Grenoble, who you mentioned, and 
other practitioners of text linguistics have the broadest definition it seems 
-- probably because it was established long ago, with that approach, how 
inadequate generative grammer is once you get past the sentence.   

Various approaches speak of internal deictic versus external deictic, or 
primary and secondary deictic, or even of diectic tenses versus non-diectic 
tenses (as per D. N. Shankara Blat, who uses the terms in place of the 
traditional absolute vs relative tenses.)

Even from the diachronic perspective, dietic has not been treated as a 
basic phenomenon, but rather something special layered on language to effect a 
semantic shift.   See, e.g., Davidse, Breban and Van Linden (2008), where 
deictification “is a type of grammaticalization and semantic shift in the NP 
analogous to auxiliarization in the VP… where a general relation… is given a 
reference point in or relative to the speech event.”

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. 

And that's why it is easier to limit deixis to the orientational, aspectal 
or ostensive parts of language.   

But it's not how Buhler first used the word.   And perhaps using his 
broader concept of deixis might clear up some of these difficulties.   

At some point, I'd like to make a comment on how Levinson dismissed the 
idea that deixis might be the source of all reference (Lyons 1972), because 
that idea deserves not to be dismissed. 

Regards and thanks for your help,
steve long





















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