Deixis, Buhler and the Problem of Ambiguity

[Tom Givon]

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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