From ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK Ukn Aug 3 19:36:09 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 3 Aug 1993 19:36:08 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 9179; Tue, 03 Aug 93 19:35:01 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 8609; Tue, 03 Aug 93 19:36:29 EDT Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 00:34:48 +0100 Reply-To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK Sender: Lojban list From: Mr Andrew Rosta Subject: deixis X-To: lojban@cuvma.BITNET, Nick Nicholas To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: (Your message of Tue, 03 Aug 93 13:50:37 W.) <9308030353.AA54514@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: Nick says: > Deixis is what deictics do, and deictics (ja'ovla) are words that explicitly > or implicitly point to entities in the real world. Personal pronouns do > this, obviously; so do tense words, since tense is relative to a speaker > and/or to the event being spoken of. Spatial deictics, like 'there', exist > too; once again, they are relative to a speaker. "Words that explicitly or implicitly point to entities in the real world" is not the clearest definition of deixis one could think of. I offer instead, the following (hoping that Nick will agree): Deictic words are partly self-referential, in the sense that the entities they refer to are defined relative to themselves. For example, the meaning of "me" is "person who says this word", and the meaning of "now" is "the time at which this word is uttered". In principle a language needs only one deictic word - a word that refers to itself. Thus one could translate "now" as "time of xxx", where "xxx" is the solitary deictic word. As Nick says, tense is deictic, as are 1st & 2nd person (tho not necessarily 3rd person) pronouns. ------ And