ABSTRACT
Once a deaf mother signed CHARLOTTE WHERE (“Where is Charlotte?”), Charlotte being her daughter standing right next to her. Charlotte responded by pointing energetically to herself. She did not point to the ground where she was standing as a way of answering the request for a location. Neither did she point first to herself and then to the location to indicate who was where. A point to an entity X in a location Y as a response to the question Where is X? can be seen as a condensed way of saying X is at Y; the point has the same communicative function as a simple proposition used to refer to X and predicate of X its existence at Y. But while the pointing gesture simply links two entities, X and Y, Y is predicated of X in the linguistic expression X is at Y, and in this sense Y is subordinate to X (Greenberg, 1985, pp. 277-278; Lakoff, 1987, pp. 489-491; Lyons, 1977, pp. 646-657). When we point to entities in locations, we do exactly that: we point to the entity, not the location. We focus on entities, but use space to keep track of them. The indexical aspect of a pointing gesture is its use of a location in space, but in a pointing gesture the two functions, reference and predication, are expressed by one form.
