Abstract
In this chapter, I look at the role of adpositions in deixis, specifically in spatial and temporal deixis. There may be more controversy with respect to this word class than with, e.g., demonstratives: there are some who would say that deictic adpositions do not exist (at least in a particular language), and among those who say that they do exist, there may be disagreement as to which adpositions are deictic. After examining several spatial adpositions, I discuss anti-deixis; some adpositions in some contexts appear to be anti-deictic, that is, they point to locations which are not the same as that of the speech situation (which is different from being far from the speech situation, i.e., distal). I then discuss some temporal adpositions which may be deictic or anti-deictic. On closer examination, it turns out that the anti-deictic effects observed may not always be due to the adpositions involved. In any case, anti-deixis is a complex phenomenon worth exploring further.
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Notes
- 1.
The same situation holds with respect to adpositions and conversational implicatures; the topic has been discussed, but not fully, and I hope to deal with it in the future.
- 2.
Van Engelenhoven may have a similar notion of deixis; he states (2011, p. 247), “By deixis…we mean here all cues provided by a language that localize a speech event and its participants in space and time. By contrast, reference is based on the privative distinction ‘related to the deictic center ( origo)’/‘not related to the deictic center’.” A difference between these “some scholars” and van Engelenhoven is that the former (if Cruse’s description of their views is accurate) may consider only spatial locations to be deictic, while the latter sees both spatial and temporal locations as deictic. Both would probably view many or most adpositions as deictic items, since a large proportion of adpositions have spatial meanings. However, for van Engelenhoven spatial adpositions would only be deictic when they “localize a speech event”, while for the “some scholars” they would always be deictic.
- 3.
A reviewer is not persuaded by my argument here (and presumably would also not be persuaded by my James William Ivens example later in this section), saying:
the meaning of me and Mary is not of the same type. Of course, the reference of Mary is context dependent, but not its meaning, as well as the reference of me is contextual. But its meaning includes a reference to the speaker. The meaning of a proper name (it is a rigid designator) cannot be said contextually dependent.
However, Fludernik (1991, p. 199) says, “proper names…are deictics at least for Todorov and Ducrot (1972, p. 322), as well as for several philosophers, among them Donnellan (1971) and Searle (1969, 1979)” (unlike for Jakobson); and Zouhar (2005, p. 355) states, “it is quite widespread today to take proper names as a sort of indexical expressions [sic]”, although he rejects this view. Thus, the position that I have taken in this paragraph does not appear to be out of line with the thinking of some analysts, although there is also disagreement with it.
- 4.
Levinson also (ibid., p. 105) says, “deictics may contain both descriptive properties and contextual variables in the one expression”; among his examples are today and nearby. In other words, a deictic item does not have to depend totally on context for its interpretation. The question is, as I have already mentioned, what percentage of the interpretation must involve extralinguistic context. I do not think that there is an (easy) answer to this question. Levinson (ibid., p. 117) mentions languages which have “uphill” and “downhill” deictic items; some of the meaning of these terms is descriptive, not context-based, since we know that they involve a hill or mountain (i.e., they would not be used in a literal sense to describe location in an apartment, while here could be used anywhere. The same sort of remark holds for the “upstream,” “downstream,” and “across river” deictic terms of Yupik mentioned by Levinson (ibid.); even in the absence of any knowledge about the context of utterance, we know that there will be a river (stream, creek, etc.) in the vicinity of the speaker (or hearer?).
- 5.
i.e., the “deictic suffixes” (ibid., p. 157).
- 6.
On the other hand, Anderson and Keenan (1985 p. 279) say that “Spatial deictic notions are expressed in a variety of parts of speech,” but do not bring up adpositions as one of those parts of speech; they do mention locative adverbs, demonstrative adjectives and pronouns, “presentatives” (e.g., voici “here is” in French), “bound verbal morphology”, and verb roots. Similarly, in their section “Temporal deixis in the lexicon” (p. 300), they cite now, today, etc., but do not bring up adpositions, though they say that there are many words which involve temporal deixis. Perhaps one of the reasons that adpositions are not considered by some authors to be among deictic items is that they do not refer, unlike me or today, and deixis is sometimes thought to be connected with reference (as we saw in Sect. 1.1. above). One might say that deictic adpositions, if they exist, enable deictic reference, although they themselves do not refer (or in the case of anti-deixis, they prevent deictic reference).
Writing about Spanish, Hottenroth (1982) may not accept the idea that some adpositions are deictic, or at least she is not willing to commit herself to it. Speaking of “those prepositions which organize the space around a given object as in to the right of, to the left of, above, below, in front of, behind, etc.” (p. 138) she says, “Such prepositions are sometimes treated as part of the deictic system (for example, Vernay (197[4]))” (pp. 138–139). If Hottenroth strongly believed that the prepositions in question were deictic, she would not have used the words “are sometimes treated as.” Andre et al. (1987) have the same sort of view as Vernay; according to them (p. 380), “the four basic relations, in front of, to the left of, to the right of, and behind” have “intrinsic and deictic uses.” Green (1992a, p. 128) explicitly denies the possibility of deictic prepositions, saying, “I consider prepositions in prepositional phrases to be non-deictic, as they relate to an internal system in the way that say, aspect relates to tense.” However, the example, which he is discussing in this paragraph, is above the car; perhaps he did not consider prepositions such as behind.
An author who does mention adpositions among deictic items (unlike Anderson and Keenan (1985)) is Cairns (1991), who says (p. 20), “The devices used to encode deictic information in language are systems of demonstratives (in English this/that), prepositions and other locating expressions ( here/there; in front of/behind), personal pronouns ( I/you) and systems of motion verbs.”
- 7.
Retz-Schmidt herself (1988, p. 103), says, “Disagreement prevails concerning…which prepositions can be used deictically and intrinsically, in particular, whether prepositions describing spatial relations in the vertical axis can be used deictically”.
- 8.
- 9.
I am not sure whether I agree with this: one has to know the situation, or have common knowledge with the speaker to know which drugstore is involved. Therefore, this example could, in some contexts, be deictic due to the definite article preceding drugstore. One might say that across here can be indirectly deictic, since in some sense it depends on the drugstore; we cannot know which way across the street from the drugstore is if we do not know where the drugstore is.
- 10.
In fact, Göksel and Kerslake (2005, p. 219) say, “Postpositional phrases headed by beri always have temporal meaning.”
- 11.
The adverb near( by) is arguably itinerative; in, e.g., The park is near( by), which means that the park is not far following a path from the speaker (and/or hearer). No such path exists with, e.g., The park is near the hotel, although, of course, there is a path from the park to the hotel.
- 12.
This may be similar to, but not the same as, the kind of subjective judgment which affects many adjectives, e.g., large; what counts as a large city for someone from a rural area might not be considered a large city for someone from New York. I would hesitate to say that large is, therefore, deictic (you cannot know what large means until you know about the person uttering it). (However, Strässler (1982, p. 50) says, “According to Terence Moore [in a personal communication?], even adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘great,’ etc., are deictic (or quasi-deictic (his term)) in that they refer to the speaker’s beliefs and intensions.”) Near might be slightly different because the judgment of what counts as near does, in part, depend on a spatial issue.
- 13.
If I understand correctly, Colombo and Seymour (1983) use near and far when referring to words, and NEAR and FAR when referring to actual “location of an object (relative to the self or to another object)” (p. 76), i.e., to the concepts which these words stand for.
- 14.
Of these speakers, one (who is linguistically sophisticated) stated that he would not say it, “at least not without a ‘too’ at the end”; the other originally said that she would say it, but later said that she would not, and said that in normal conversation she would say something else (which one can interpret to mean that she could say it under certain conditions).
- 15.
The same holds for at home; even if John and Mary share a home, it might be odd for Mary to say “John is at home” if Mary were in the same house/apartment as John; she would say “John is here.” However, none of this applies with a first-person subject; in fact, obviously if I say “I am at school/work/home/the beach,” I must be there (if I am stating a true proposition). Perhaps all of the implications involved are covered by Grice’s maxims: if I say “John is at the beach” when in fact John and I are at the beach, I am not giving the right amount of information for some contexts, and not cooperating, since I am giving the mistaken impression that I am not at the beach.
- 16.
The reference here is to line 43 of Ezra Pound’s “Canto II.”
- 17.
I.e., the opening line of the second stanza of Pound’s “Canto II.”
- 18.
I believe that “S” stands for subject; I do not know what “P” and “A” mean, as Green does not explain this.
- 19.
As I noted above, I may have come up with the term anti-deictic independently, although I am not certain of this; in any case it does not seem to be a common term. It occurs several times in an earlier work by Bouchard, namely his (1995) book.
- 20.
This suffix has another function—to indicate focus.
- 21.
The example is actually written as mā:-mhcɔ, but I believe that this may be an error.
- 22.
The form that appears in the text here is -mhc, but again this may be an error.
- 23.
A reviewer apparently disagrees with my analysis and believes that tomorrow is deictic, saying, “The reference’s point [sic] is the day of speaking, so reference to the speaker is clear. This meaning is necessary to get the right temporal reference, which var[ies] from utterance to utterance”. This is true, but since tomorrow cannot mean the day of speaking, it is anti-deictic. As I stated earlier in this section, there may be terms which are both deictic and anti-deictic.
- 24.
I chose Maitland for the examples in (15) since (by my standards as a former New Yorker) it is a very small city. My original examples had New York, but John lives in New York is less likely to be anti-deictic than John lives in Maitland; in other words, the size of a place may have a bearing on how strongly a PP containing its name is anti-deictic.
- 25.
Macrae (2010, p. 131) lists prepositions among temporally deictic items: “Temporal deixis includes tensed verbs, temporal adverbs…, and prepositions (for example, ‘beyond,’ ‘with,’ ‘over,’ etc.)”.
- 26.
See Kurzon (2008) on this issue.
- 27.
One might argue that deixis is involved here if (16b) means “sundown on the day of utterance” (e.g., You must be out of town before sundown). A clearer example would have been “before my father’s death.” I might then disagree with Haspelmath (1997, p. 44) (or perhaps I just have a broader notion of deixis than he does) when he says, “As a rule, NP-based simultaneous adverbials are non-deictic, i.e., the forms of ‘at 5 o’clock,’ ‘at Christmas,’ and ‘in the morning’ do not depend on the relation between the reference times and the moment of speech.” These seem deictic to me (although not because of the preposition), just like temporal terms which he (ibid., p. 45) sees as deictic, e.g., tomorrow. If someone says that something will happen tomorrow, we know that it will happen during a certain day, but we do not know which day unless we know when the act of speaking occurred; if someone says something will happen at 5 o’clock, we know that it will happen at a certain time, but, unless we know when he said it, we do not know on which day at that time (i.e., we do not know exactly when, or even close to exactly when, since there have been a huge number of days since time began being measured fairly precisely: there have been hundreds of thousands of days which could be said to have a 5 o’clock). For that matter, there is a requirement not only for temporal information about the act of speaking, but also for locational information: 5 o’clock on a given day is not the same time for me here in eastern Australia as it is for someone in New York (which is why statements about deadlines for, e.g., abstract submissions sometimes specify not only the time and the date that something is due, but also a time zone).
- 28.
There is a type of exception to this involving ceremonial contexts, e.g., a wedding celebrant might say “On this day, we celebrate the love of John and Mary.” (I thank Ben Shaer for leading me to think of such exceptions.)
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Libert, A. (2016). Adpositions, Deixis, and Anti-Deixis. In: Capone, A., Mey, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6_19
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