ABSTRACT
Demonstratives are an intriguing and challenging topic for philosophers and linguists, and anyone who pretends to have a theory of meaning and empirical evidence to support it has to be able to reconstruct the meaning of demonstratives. This chapter is about I-Sayer, which is often considered the central 'demonstrative' in natural language. He calls this type of theory the egocentric theory of demonstratives, as opposed to the ostensive theory of demonstratives. To re-evaluate the heuristics is to reevaluate the pragmatics of demonstratives. Pragmatics concerns the role of the I-sayer in an interactional situation and an intersubjective community. The whole structure of language is organised around the I-sayer and his referring to the role delegated by the community. This is no doubt the essence of the socio-pragmatic view on language, and it would be of great interest to see how this anthropologically oriented position on demonstratives, on demonstrative language use, on the I-sayer, would behave under testing conditions in empirical linguistics.
