Or is it... This, that, and yon. The idea is PROXIMAL: "This" (cited by Witters, below) DISTAL: "That" AND MEDIAL. Originally, "That" was MEDIAL, and "yonder" was DISTAL. (I refer only to English, rather than Persian). From wiki: "A distal demonstrative exists in German, cognate to the English yonder." "Demonstrative pronouns in English: PROXIMAL: this, MEDIAL: that, DISTAL: yon. Author Bill Bryson laments the "losses along the way" of yon: "Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, this and that [Witters only uses 'this'] but in Shakespeare's day there was a third, yon (as in the Milton line "Him that yon soars on golden wing"), which suggested a further distance than that. You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon hat. Today the word survives as a colloquial adjective, yonder, but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss". R. Paul: "[U]ntil the ambiguity is removed in ordinary language, i.e., whether 'Every boy loves some girl.' means 'Every boy loves some girl, namely, Alice.' or 'Every boy loves some girl or other.'" Note that 'or other' should perhaps be disambiguated too: as in "this, that, and th'OTHER". "Every boy loves some girl, Alice, or another girl, Lorina" (Lorina is Alice Hargreaves's sister). But I know focus not to much on 'other' ("th'other") but on "this" as used by Witters. In a message dated 6/26/2012 5:10:23 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, rpaul@xxxxxxxx quotes extensively from Witters. Some running commentary: "If I were to reserve the word "pain" solely for what I had hitherto called "my pain", and others "L.W.'s pain", I should do other people no injustice, so long as a notation were provided in which the loss of the word "pain" in other connexions were somehow supplied." ----- cfr. "my name" "Grice's name". --- "Other people would still be pitied, treated by doctors and so on. It would, of course, be no objection to this mode of expression to say: "But look here, other people have just the same as you!" But what should I gain from this new kind of account? Nothing. But after all neither does the solipsist want any practical advantage when he advances his view!" "When I say 'I am in pain', I do not point to a person who is in pain, since in a certain sense I have no idea who is." And this can be given a justification. For the main point is: I did not say that such-and such a person was in pain, but "I am . . . . . " Now in saying this I don't name any person." --- i.e. "my pain" versus "Ludwig Wittgenstein's pain" -- -- "Just as I don't name anyone when I groan with pain. Though someone else sees who is in pain from the groaning. What does it mean to know who is in pain? It means, for example, to know which man in this room is in pain: for instance, that it is the one who is sitting over there, or the one who is standing in that corner, the tall one over there with the fair hair, and so on.—What am I getting at? At the fact that there is a great variety of criteria for personal 'identity'''." but the good one is memory -- vide Grice, "Personal Identity", Mind, 1941, repr. in Perry, "Personal Identity" with an intro by Perry who, I think, does not dedicate ONE line to Witters. "Now which of them determines my saying that '/' am in pain? None." ""But at any rate when you say 'I am in pain', you want to draw the attention of others to a particular person."—The answer might be: No, I want to draw their attention to myself.—" The implicature seems to be that Witters did not think of himself as a _person_ -- never mind a "particular" one. (Why does he have to have those idiots as interlocutors. Socrates always did better than that!). ""But surely what you want to do with the words 'I am. . . .' is to distinguish between yourself and other people."—Can this be said in every case? Even when I merely groan? And even if I do 'want to distinguish' between myself and other people—do I want to distinguish between the person L.W. and the person N.N.? ... It would be possible to imagine someone groaning out: "Someone is in pain—I don't know who!"—and our then hurrying to help him, the one who groaned. "Someone is in pain—I don't know who!"—and our then hurrying to help him, the one who groaned. ... "But you aren't in doubt whether it is you or someone else who has the pain!"—The proposition "I don't know whether I or someone else is in pain" would be a logical product, and one of its factors would be: "I don't know whether I am in pain or not"— and that is not a significant proposition." I could find a scenario. What SEEMS otiose, rather, is the "or not". I think "I don't know whether I am in pain" should be enough. Witters seems to think of this as nonsensical, which would presuppose that he takes this as tautologous: I am in pain ----- Therefore, I know that I am in pain. ----- (Others restrict the use of 'know' to more interesting scenarios. The use of 'know' there seems otiose in that nobody ever claimed to DOUBT that the utterer was in pain when he uttered, "I am in pain"". Cfr. A: I am in pain. B: Are you really? ---- "Imagine several people standing in a ring, and me among them. One of us, sometimes this one, sometimes that, is connected to the poles of an electrical machine without our being able to see this. I observe the faces of the others and try to see which of us has just been electrified.—Then I say: "Now I know who it is; for it's myself." In this sense I could also say: "Now I know who is getting the shocks; it is myself." This would be a rather queer way of speaking.—But if I make the supposition that I can feel the shock even when someone else is electrified, then the expression "Now I know who . . . ." becomes quite unsuitable. It does not belong to this game. ... "I" is not the name of a person, nor "here" of a place, and "this" is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them. It is also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words." "These words," as Witters calls them, are 'deictic', and while physics doesn't use them, physicists do. Mrs Einstein: Where are you? Einstein: I'm here. (Note the use of "I" and "here" in the same sentence) Mrs Einstein: I know that. Can you be more specific? Einstein: What's _this_? an interrogation? (Below some notes from wiki on 'deixis'). Cheers, Speranza Deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to convey any meaning – for example, English pronouns – are deictic. Deixis is closely related to both indexicality and anaphora, as will be further explained below. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concepts can apply to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. While this article draws examples primarily from English, deixis is believed to be a feature (to some degree) of all natural languages. The term’s origin is Ancient Greek: δείξις deixis "display, demonstration, or reference", the meaning point of reference in contemporary linguistics having been taken over from Chrysippus. Possibly the most common categories of contextual information referred to by deixis are those of person, place, and time - what Fillmore calls the “ major grammaticalized types” of deixis.[3] Person deixis concerns itself with the grammatical persons involved in an utterance, (1) those directly involved (e.g. the speaker, the addressee), (2) those not directly involved (e.g. overhearers—those who hear the utterance but who are not being directly addressed), and (3) those mentioned in the utterance.[4] In English, the distinctions are generally indicated by pronouns. The following examples show how. (The person deictic terms are in italics, a signaling notation that will continue through this article.) I am going to the movies. Would you like to have dinner? They tried to hurt me, but he came to the rescue. In many languages, the third-person masculine pronoun is often used as a default when using "it" is inappropriate but the gender of its antecedent is unknown or inapplicable. For example: To each his own. Also common is the use of the third-person plural, even when a singular pronoun is called for: To each their own. Less common is the usage of the gender-neutral pronoun "zir": To each zir own. In some languages which distinguish between masculine and feminine plural pronouns, such as French, the masculine is again used as default. "Ils vont à la bibliothèque" may refer either to a group of males or a group which comprises both genders. "Elles vont..." would only be used for a group of females. In Cherokee, however, the opposite is true. The feminine pronoun is used when the sex is unknown or if it is a man within a group of women. Place deixis, also known as space deixis, concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person deixis, the locations may be either those of the speaker and addressee or those of persons or objects being referred to. The most salient English examples are the adverbs “here” and “there” and the demonstratives “this” and “that” - although those are far from being the only deictic words.[3] Some examples: I enjoy living in this city. Here is where we will place the statue. She was sitting over there. Unless otherwise specified, place deictic terms are generally understood to be relative to the location of the speaker, as in The shop is across the street. where “across the street” is understood to mean “across the street from where I am right now.”[3] It is interesting to note that while “here” and “ there” are often used to refer to locations near to and far from the speaker, respectively, “there” can also refer to the location of the addressee, if they are not in the same location as the speaker. So, while Here is a good spot; it is too sunny over there. exemplifies the former usage, How is the weather there? is an example of the latter. Languages usually show at least a two-way referential distinction in their deictic system: proximal, i.e. near or closer to the speaker, and distal, i.e. far from the speaker and/or closer to the addressee. English exemplifies this with such pairs as this and that, here and there, etc. In other languages, the distinction is three-way: proximal, i.e. near the speaker, medial, i.e. near the addressee, and distal, i.e. far from both. This is the case in a few Romance languages and in Korean, Japanese, Thai, Filipino and Turkish The archaic English forms yon and yonder (still preserved in some regional dialects) once represented a distal category which has now been subsumed by the formerly medial "there".[5] Time, or temporal, deixis concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in an utterance. This includes time adverbs like "now", "then", "soon", and so forth, and also different tenses. A good example is the word tomorrow, which denotes the consecutive next day after every day. The "tomorrow" of a day last year was a different day from the "tomorrow" of a day next week. Time adverbs can be relative to the time when an utterance is made (what Fillmore calls the "encoding time", or ET) or when the utterance is heard (Fillmore’s "decoding time", or DT).[3] While these are frequently the same time, they can differ, as in the case of prerecorded broadcasts or correspondence. For example, if one were to write It is raining out now, but I hope when you read this it will be sunny. the ET and DT would be different, with the former deictic term concerning ET and the latter the DT. Tenses are generally separated into absolute (deictic) and relative tenses. So, for example, simple English past tense is absolute, such as in He went. while the pluperfect is relative to some other deictically specified time, as in He had gone. Though the traditional categories of deixis are perhaps the most obvious, there are other types of deixis that are similarly pervasive in language use. These categories of deixis were first discussed by Fillmore and Lyons.[4] Discourse deixis, also referred to as text deixis, refers to the use of expressions within an utterance to refer to parts of the discourse that contains the utterance — including the utterance itself. For example, in This is a great story. “this” refers to an upcoming portion of the discourse, and in That was an amazing day. “that” refers to a prior portion of the discourse. Distinction must be made between discourse deixis and anaphora, which is when an expression makes reference to the same referent as a prior term, as in Matthew is an incredible athlete; he came in first in the race. Lyons points out that it is possible for an expression to be both deictic and anaphoric at the same time. In his example I was born in London and I have lived here/there all my life. “here” or “there” function anaphorically in their reference to London, and deictically in that the choice between “here” or “there” indicates whether the speaker is or is not currently in London.[1] The rule of thumb to distinguish the two phenomena is as follows: when an expression refers to another linguistic expression or a piece of discourse, it is discourse deictic. When that expression refers to the same item as a prior linguistic expression, it is anaphoric.[4] Switch reference is a type of discourse deixis, and a grammatical feature found in some languages, which indicates whether the argument of one clause is the same as the argument of the previous clause. In some languages, this is done through same subject markers and different subject markers. In the translated example "John punched Tom, and left-[same subject marker]," it is John who left, and in "John punched Tom, and left-[different subject marker]," it is Tom who left.[citation needed] Social deixis concerns the social information that is encoded within various expressions, such as relative social status and familiarity. Two major forms of it are the so-called T-V distinctions and honorifics. [ T-V distinctions, named for the Latin “tu” and “vos” (singular and plural versions of “you”) are the name given to the phenomenon when a language has two different second-person pronouns. The varying usage of these pronouns indicates something about formality, familiarity, and/or solidarity between the interactants. So, for example, the T form might be used when speaking to a friend or social equal, whereas the V form would be used speaking to a stranger or social superior. This phenomenon is common in European languages.[6] Honorifics are a much more complex form of social deixis than T-V distinctions, though they encode similar types of social information. They can involve words being marked with various morphemes as well as nearly entirely different lexicons being used based on the social status of the interactants. This type of social deixis is found in a variety of languages, but is especially common in South and East Asia.[6] Generally speaking, anaphora refers to the way in which a word or phrase relates to other text: An exophoric reference refers to language outside of the text in which the reference is found. A homophoric reference is a generic phrase that obtains a specific meaning through knowledge of its context. For example, the meaning of the phrase "the Queen" may be determined by the country in which it is spoken. Because there are many Queens throughout the world, the location of the speaker provides the extra information that allows an individual Queen to be identified. An endophoric reference refers to something inside of the text in which the reference is found. An anaphoric reference, when opposed to cataphora, refers to something within a text that has been previously identified. For example, in "Susan dropped the plate. It shattered loudly" the word "it" refers to the phrase "the plate". A cataphoric reference refers to something within a text that has not yet been identified. For example, in "He was very cold. David promptly put on his coat" the identity of the "he" is unknown until the individual is also referred to as "David". A deictic center, sometimes referred to as an origo, is a set of theoretical points that a deictic expression is ‘anchored’ to, such that the evaluation of the meaning of the expression leads one to the relevant point. As deictic expressions are frequently egocentric, the center often consists of the speaker at the time and place of the utterance, and additionally, the place in the discourse and relevant social factors. However, deictic expressions can also be used in such a way that the deictic center is transferred to other participants in the exchange, or to persons / places / etc. being described in a narrative.[4] So, for example, in the sentence I’m standing here now. the deictic center is simply the person at the time and place of speaking. But say two people are talking on the phone long-distance, from London to New York. The Londoner can say We are going to New York next week. in which case the deictic center is in London, or they can equally validly say We are coming to New York next week. in which case the deictic center is in New York.[1] Similarly, when telling a story about someone, the deictic center is likely to switch to them. So then in the sentence He then ran twenty feet to the left. it is understood that the center is with the person being spoken of, and thus, "to the left" refers not to the speaker’s left, but to the object of the story’s left, that is, the person referred to as 'he' at the time immediately before he ran twenty feet. It is helpful to distinguish between two usages of deixis, gestural and symbolic, as well as non-deictic usages of frequently deictic words. Gestural deixis refers, broadly, to deictic expressions whose understanding requires some sort of audio-visual information. A simple example is when an object is pointed at and referred to as “this” or “that”. However, the category can include other types of information than pointing, such as direction of gaze, tone of voice, and so on. Symbolic usage, by contrast, requires generally only basic spatio-temporal knowledge of the utterance.[4] So, for example I broke this finger. requires being able to see which finger is being held up, whereas I love this city. requires only knowledge of the current location. In a similar vein, I went to this city one time … is a non-deictic usage of "this", which does not reference anything specific. Rather, it is used as an indefinite article, much the way "a" could be used in its place. The terms deixis and indexicality are frequently used almost interchangeably, and both deal with essentially the same idea: contextually dependent references. However, the two terms have different histories and traditions. In the past, deixis was associated specifically with spatiotemporal reference whereas indexicality was used more broadly.[7] More importantly, each is associated with a different field of study; deixis is associated with linguistics, while indexicality is associated with philosophy.[8] See also Indexicality Anaphora Demonstrative Generic antecedents Pro-form References ^ a b c Lyons, John (1977) "Deixis, space and time" in Semantics, Vol. 2, pp. 636–724. Cambridge University Press. ^ Stoica 2,65. ^ a b c d Fillmore, Charles J (1971) Lectures on Deixis. CSLI Publications (reprinted 1997). ^ a b c d e f Levinson, Stephen C. "Deixis" in Pragmatics. pp. 54–96. ^ Lyons, Christopher. Definiteness. Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 111. ^ a b Foley, William. 1997. Anthropological linguistics: An introduction. Blackwell Publishing. ^ Silverstein, Michael. (1976) "Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description". In K. Basso and H. Selby (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology. SAR pp. 25. ^ Levinson, Stephen C. (2006) "Deixis". In Laurence R. Horn, Gregory L. Ward (eds.) The Handbook of Pragmatics, pp. 978–120. Blackwell Publishing. REFERENCES Anderson, Stephen R.; & Keenan, Edward L. (1985). Deixis. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description: Grammatical categories and the lexicon (Vol. 3, pp. 259–308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fillmore, Charles J. (1966). Deictic categories in the semantics of ‘come’ . Foundations of Language, 2, 219–227. Fillmore, Charles J. (1982). Towards a descriptive framework for spatial deixis. In R. J. Jarvell & W. Klein (Eds.), Speech, place and action: Studies in deixis and related topics (pp. 31–59). London: Wiley. Gaynesford, M. de I: The Meaning of the First Person Term, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. Traut, Gregory P. and Kazzazi, Kerstin. 1996. Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Routledge. 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