ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its raw material pointing in the speech of two different individuals from Zinacantán, a Tzotzil (Mayan)-speaking peasant community in Chiapas, Mexico: a 3-year-old girl named Mal immersed in learning how to interact with other people, and her grandfather Petul, a partially blind octogenarian. Field material from Zinacantán suggests the possibility of a “natural history of pointing” that encompasses a range of narrative and nonnarrative discourses, different sorts of speakers and interactive contexts, and both the emerging skills of language-learning infants and the full-blown competence of adult speakers. As a preliminary to such a study, in this chapter I present several examples of apparent pointing, first to argue against the oft-assumed simplicity of “pointing gestures.” Second, I suggest the essentially linguistic nature of pointing, as part of the system of determiners and pronouns, using as evidence links between pointing and spoken language, the form of pointing, and its use by young Tzotzil children.
