Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T12:18:40.113Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Token-reflexive, anaphoric and deictic functions of ‘here’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2012

Thorstein Fretheim
Affiliation:
Department of Language and Communication Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway. [email protected]
Nana Aba Appiah Amfo
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana, P.O. Box LG 61, Legon, Accra, Ghana. [email protected]
Ildikó Vaskó
Affiliation:
ELTE University of Budapest, Department of Scandinavian Studies, H-1088 Budapest, Rákóczi út 5. [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

There are basically three ways in which the reference of a token of the English proximal spatial indexical here and corresponding terms in other languages can be resolved in the context-dependent, pragmatic phase of the addressee's determination of the propositional content of an utterance that contains this adverbial adjunct. ‘Here’ may refer reflexively to the place of utterance, including minimally the spot occupied by the speaker (token-reflexive reference), it may be anaphoric upon a discourse antecedent that provides information necessary for identification of the referent (anaphoric reference), or resolution of the reference depends on information derived from processing of a perceptual stimulus (deictic reference). These three pragmatic paths to resolution of the reference of proximal spatial indexicals are not mutually exclusive, so they do not warrant postulation of lexical ambiguity, at least not the traditional kind of ambiguity based on differences in conceptual meaning.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Baptista, Luca & Rast, Erich (eds.). 2010. Meaning and Context. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Braun, David. 2007. Indexicals. In Zalta, Edward N. (ed. [principal editor]), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu (accessed 30 January 2012).Google Scholar
Bühler, Karl. 1934. The deictic field of language and deictic words. Reprinted in Robert, Jarvella & Klein, Wolfgang (eds.), Speech, Place and Action: Studies of Deixis and Related Topics (1982), 930. New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1973. Space, time, semantics, and the child. In Moore, Timothy E. (ed.), Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, 2763. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corazza, Eros. 2004. Reflecting the Mind: Indexicality and Quasi-indexicality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cornish, Francis. 1999. Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding: Evidence from English and French. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 1999. Demonstratives: Form, Function and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Escandell-Vidal, Victoria, Leonetti, Manuel & Ahern, Aoife (eds.). 2011. Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives. Bingley: Emerald.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falkum, Ingrid Lossius. 2011. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Polysemy: A Relevance-theoretic Account. Ph.D. thesis, University College London.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. 1997. Lectures on Deixis. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Fretheim, Thorstein. 2010. The metarepresentational use of main clause phenomena in embedded clauses. Linguistics 48, 301–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69, 274307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. From Space to Time: Temporal Adverbials in the World's Languages. München: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Janssen, Theo A. J. M. 1993. Tenses and demonstratives: Conspecific categories. In Geiger, Richard A. & Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (eds.), Conceptualizations and Mental Processing in Language, 741784. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kamio, Akio. 1997. Territory of Information. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, David. 1989. Demonstratives. In Almog, Joseph, Wettstein, Howard & Perry, John (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, 481563. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuno, Susumu. 1987. Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse and Empathy. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Kuroda, S.-Y. 1972. The categorical and the thetic judgment. Foundations of Language 9, 153185.Google Scholar
Kuroda, S.-Y. 1992. Japanese Syntax and Semantics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, Robin. 1974. Remarks on this and that. Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS) 10, 345–56.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Noh, Eun-Ju. 2000. Metarepresentation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1979. The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy. Linguistics and Philosophy 3, 149–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1995. Transfers of meaning. Journal of Semantics 12, 109132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 2004a. Descriptive indexicals and indexical descriptions. In Reimer, Marga & Bezuidenhout, Anne (eds.), Descriptions and Beyond, 261279. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 2004b. The pragmatics of deferred interpretation. In Horn, Laurence R. & Ward, Gregory (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, 344364. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Powell, George. 2010. Language, Thought and Reference. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Predelli, Stefano. 1998. Utterance, interpretation, and the logic of indexicals. Mind and Language 13, 400414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Preyer, Gerhard & Georg, Peter (eds.). 2007. Context-sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Recanati, François. 1993. Direct Reference: From Language to Thought. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Recanati, François. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-conditional Pragmatics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santos, Diana Maria de Sousa Marques Pinto dos. 1996. Tense and aspect in English and Portuguese: A contrastive semantical study. Ph.D. thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan. 2000. Metarepresentations: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory. 2004. Equatives and deferred reference. Language 80, 262289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan. 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90, 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar