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Book Review: Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person
Article · January 2003
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LINGUIST List 14.2209
Wed Aug 20 2003
Review: Semantics/Pragmatics: Lenz, ed. (2003)
Lenz, Friedrich (ed.) (2003). Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and
Person. John Benjamins Publishing Company (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series
112).
Zouhair Maalej, Department of English, University of Manouba-Tunis, Tunisia
Purpose and contents
The book under review is an edited collection of eleven papers distributed over
the conceptualization of deixis as represented by space, time, and pronouns.
PART I: SPACE
Sergio Meira: “Addressee effects” in demonstrative systems: The cases of Tiriyo
and Brazilian Portuguese (pp. 3-11)
Working on two unrelated languages, Meira argues against the distinction made
between distance and person-oriented systems of demonstratives, invoking the
fact that even distance-oriented systems are essentially person-oriented.
Konstanze Jungbluth: “Deictics in the conversational dyad: Findings in Spanish
and some cross-linguistic outlines (pp. 13-40)
Rejecting the distance and person-oriented systems for Spanish, Jungbluth
offers a dyad-oriented system for demonstratives as an alternative, involving
speaker and hearer.
Claudio Di Meola: “Non-deictic uses of the deictic motion verbs kommen and
gehen in German” (pp. 41-67)
Di Meola describes non-deictic unrestricted motional uses of kommen and
restricted uses of gehen in German. In its non-deictic use, kommen, for instance,
has to do with the (i) overcoming of an obstacle, (ii) accidental movement, and
(iii) passive movement, with the prepositional phrase of place or time becoming
mandatory. Di Meola mentions the inherent link between the deictic and nondeictic uses of kommen and gehen as mediated through metonymic extention.
Ellen Fricke: “Origo, pointing and conceptualization—What gestures reveal about
the nature of the origo in face-to-face interaction” (pp. 69-93)
Fricke investigates the relevance of speech-associated gestures to origo, which
is differentiated into personal, local, and temporal. The personal is further
differentiated hierarchically into primary (with the addresser) and secondary (with
the addressee).
PART II: TIME
Christiane von Stutterheim, Mary Carroll, and Wolfgang Klein: “Two ways of
construing complex temporal structures” (pp. 97-133)
von Stutterheim et al investigate the way speakers of different languages (here
English and German) convey temporal information in the construal of events.
English and German were found to adopt different strategies of retelling events
that are basically amenable to the formal linguistic features of the language in
question.
Thomas A. Fritz: “’Look here, what I am saying!’: Speaker deixis and implicature
as the basis of modality and future tense” (pp. 135-151)
Fritz explains modality and futurity by scalar implicature, which is derived from
“saying” or deictically the amount of factuality or epistemic commitment to which
speakers want to commit themselves.
Tanja Mortelmans: “The ‘subjective’ effects of negation and past subjunctive on
deontic modals: The case of German dürfen and sollen” (pp. 153-182)
Mortelmans argues for a speaker-oriented conception of deontic modality, using
negation and the past subjunctive as evidence. Mortelmans defends the view
that dürfen (may) is pragmatically reactive and sollen (should?) is non-reactive.
PART III: PERSON AND TEXT
Johannes Helmbrecht: “Politeness distinctions in second person pronouns” (pp.
185-202)
In a study of a hundred world languages, Helmbrecht isolates four classes of
honorific types: (i) languages showing no politeness distinctions in their pronoun
system, (ii) languages showing a binary politeness distinction, (iii) languages
showing two or more politeness distinctions, and (iv) languages avoiding the use
of second person polite address. These types show unequal geographic
distribution, and are explained functionally and cross-linguistically as being
affected by contact-induced borrowing.
Katharina Kupfer: “Deictic use of demonstrative pronouns in the Rigveda” (pp.
203-321)
Through elaborate syntactic argumentation, Kupfer presents a view of
demonstratives as opaque deictic expressions whose deictic center has to be
created by addresser and addressee in Rigveda, a collection of ancient Indian
texts.
Manfred Consten: “Towards a unified model of domain-bound reference” (pp.
223-248)
Consten argues for a model of domain-bound reference where deixis and
anaphora interact and can be direct or indirect, hoping that the two terms, deixis
and anaphora, will not be part of the vocabulary of cognitive linguistics.
Heiko Hausendorf: “Deixis and speech situation revisited” (pp. 249-269)
Hausendorf offers a view of speech situation as involving participants in a
mutually shared sensory perception in a socially and interactionally constructed
discourse. Using Jakobson’s framework, Hausendorf phrases his view as follows:
deixis “operates at the interface between code and message where sensory
perception is required as a channel of communication in its own right” (p. 264).
Critical evaluation
Some critical comments are in good order. Mortelmans mentions in her paper
that the concept of “projected reality” (p. 154) originates in Langacker (1991) and
Achard (1998). If we abstract from the use of “world” instead of “reality”, we find
that we owe the distinction between “real world” and “projected world” to
Jackendoff (1985), who acknowledges that the distinction is at least as old as
Kant, although for Mortelmans the “projected world” is part of irreality whereas for
Jackendoff (1985: 28) it is the “experienced world” or “phenomenal world.”
Mortelmans also talks about the possibility of including negation as a “modal
deictic marker.” Invoking Lehmann (1991) in a footnote as arguing for the
inclusion of negation as part of the modal system, Mortelmans seems to consider
Lehmann as being at the origin of this idea. The author, however, might want to
know that, in Halliday’s functional/systemic grammar (1985-1994), negation (as
part of Polarity) is called “a Modal Adjunct” (1994: 90) within the Mood System (in
the Hallidayian perspective, the clause as an exchange is divided into MOOD
and RESIDUE). If negation is definitely modal in essence, it is not made clear by
the author how it could have a deictic dimension.
The inclusion of Mortelmans’s paper by the editor under the conceptualization of
time is not where a paper on modality and negation should belong. In fact,
Mortelmans hardly ever even alluded to time.
To end this review, some tentative conclusions can be made about some of the
findings arrived at in this volume:
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
Many of the papers in the collection use Bühler’s theory of deixis
and the origo by either rehabilitating his work, or pointing out
sources that pass over his theory, which scientifically counts as
important acknowledgment.
If, as Jungbluth found out, the Spanish demonstrative system can
refer to parts of the body with proximal, medial, and distal
pronouns, and is neither distance- nor person-oriented, the notion
of deictic center should be revised as being not only egocentric but
also hearercentric. A confirmation of this polycentric dimension of
deixis is what Fricke discusses as a hierarchy of primary and
secondary origos, and even more types of origos or centers.
As von Stutterheim et al demonstrate, formal language-specific
constraints can be invoked to explain differences in the construal of
events cross-linguistically, whereby grammaticization seems to play
a major role.
With very few exceptions, the papers making up this book are insightful by
shedding fresh cognitive light on the pragmatics of deixis.
References
Achard, Michel (1998). Representation of Cognitive Structures: Syntax and
Semantics of French Sentential Complements. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Jackendoff, Ray (1985). Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge/London: The MIT
Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (Vol.2):
Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lehmann, Christian (1991). Startegien der Situationsperpektion.
Sprachwissenschaft 16, 1-26.
About the reviewer
The reviewer is an assistant professor of linguistics. His interests include
cognitive linguistics, metaphor, cognitive pragmatics, psycholinguistics, critical
discourse analysis, etc.
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