ABSTRACT
Speakers can use a range of linguistic devices to ‘point’ to features of the context of an utterance. These devices include adverbs (Bill lives here ), demonstrative noun phrases (The boss is on leave this week ), and personal pronouns ( We are leaving early). Speakers can also direct hearers to aspects of spoken and written discourse through adjectives (The last chapter was interesting) and adverbs (You make a strong point here ). These so-called deictic expressions exemplify the extent to which linguistic utterances are embedded in various spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts. These contexts extend to aspects of the social relationships between speakers and hearers in the choice of pronoun in utterances such as Parlez-vous français? in languages like French and German. This chapter examines the different types of deixis that can be performed by utterances and the linguistic devices that have this pointing function in language.
