The deictic content of demonstratives

Abstract

What do demonstratives, like this/that and here/there, encode about their referents? The traditional answer argues that the deictic content of demonstratives is mostly about distance from the speaker – that proximals like this encode that the referent is near the speaker, while distals like that mean it is far from them. This speaker-centered, distance-based view is intuitively appealing, but recent research in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology has challenged it in many ways. I review three of the most active debates in this new literature, where recent authors – in contrast to the traditional view – have argued that (i) the spatial deictic content of demonstratives is about location relative to socially or perceptually defined perimeters, not distance; (ii) deictic content often concerns perception or attention, not space; and (iii) deictic content can relate the referent to the addressee or the speaker-addressee interactive dyad, as well as to the speaker. Under these new analyses, the deictic content of demonstratives is fundamentally social and interactive, not purely speaker-centered or distance-based.