I examine the ordinary-language use of deictic terms, notably the personal, spatial and temporal markers 'I' and 'you', 'here' and 'now', in order to make manifest that their meaning is inextricably embedded within a pragmatic, perceptual and interpersonal situation. This inextricable embeddedness of deixis within the shared natural and social world suggests, I contend, an I-you connectedness at the heart of meaning and experience. The thesis of I-you connectedness extends to the larger claim about the situatedness of embodied perceivers (...) within a shared perspectivally configured milieu. This claim can be cast in terms of a polycentric orientation to the natural and social world, which provides a robust alternative to an egocentric conception of experience. I develop this claim via a renewed phenomenological reflection on speech, assisted by ordinary-language philosophy, as well as relevant contributions from empirical sociolinguistic studies and developmental psychology. These reflective and empirical perspectives help make a case for the primacy of socially and spatially situated experience, which departs from the received notion of an asocial and uprooted mind. (shrink)

The article analyzes the grammatical category of time as a means of actualizing temporal deixis in Belarusian and English in the typological aspect. Traditionally, the reference point of temporal deixis is the moment of speech. Nevertheless, it is important to take into account both the speaker and the observer. The purpose of the research is to carry out the comparative analysis of the grammatical category of time in Belarusian and English in terms of the speaker and the observer, (...) as well as to reveal universal characteristics and national and specific features. The research is based on the contexts selected from Belarusian and English parallel corpuses of Russian National Corpus and Internet resources. (shrink)

This research presents an analysis of the pericope of 2 Thessalonians 2 from the perspective of the linguistic phenomenon of deixis. And, in doing so, the theory of enunciation will be taken as a theoretical contribution, in order to highlight a small body of words that link the encoder to the enunciation situation. The asymmetry of the act of enunciation is recognized and, therefore, the interpreter's need to reconstruct its meaning from indications present in the enunciation. In the case (...) of the epistolary text, the presence of the deictic device is essential, since the communication situation lacks anchorage. Thus, the objective of this work is to identify the enunciative coordinates of the author (enunciator). (shrink)

This paper is about knowledge construction in music listening. It argues for an experiential approach to music cognition, stressing the dynamic-vectorial field of meaning rather than the symbolic field. Starting from the conceptual framework of deixis and indexical devices, it elaborates on the concept of pointing as a heuristic guide for sense-making which allows the listener to conceive of perceptual elements in terms of salience, valence and semantical weight. As such, the act of (mental) pointing can be predicative, either (...) in a nominalistic or processual way, giving a description of the temporal evolution of a situation as against episodic nominalizations that refer to just one single instance of the process. The latter, especially, are characterized by distancing and polarization between the listener and the music, allowing him/her to deal with the music also at a level of mental imagery and to construct a mental or cognitive map of its unfolding. (shrink)

Two approaches to indexicality are comparatively taken into analysis: John Parry's analytic approach on the one hand, and a sort of Saussure-inspired approach within the domain of Functionalist Linguistics, on the other hand. It is argued that these two approaches do diametrically oppose each other in some important aspects. The notion of Saussurean arbitrariness of reference, opposing the analytic notion of rigid designation, is eventually argued to have a good explanatory power when some ordinary language phenomena are to be explained.

considerations are given about the state of quantificational views about terms that were to involve the metacognitive ability of self deixis.

Lawyers and judges cannot adequately address the nature of text, meaning, or interpretation without reference to the insights provided by linguists and philosophers of language. Exploring some of those insights, this article focuses upon what linguists and philosophers of language call “pragmatics.” Pragmatics examines the relations between words and users rather than the relations of words to words (syntax) or the relations of words to the world (semantics). In other words, pragmatics studies how language users actually use and interpret words (...) and other signs in communication. -/- Pragmatics recognizes that speaker meaning can differ from (and even contradict) linguistic meaning, including the literal meaning of text. In its proper context, for example, “Bob is indeed a good lawyer” can ironically mean just the opposite. Pragmatics also recognizes that relevant text is not a thing-in-itself that is simply given. Good lawyers look at such things as purpose and cohesion when determining relevant text. They do not simply take their opponent’s (or even their client’s) assertions of relevance. -/- Pragmatics also provides lawyers with a number of specific concepts and tools which are helpful in determining speaker meaning. For user convenience, this article attempts to set out in one place a number of such concepts and tools. These include: (1) types of cohesion that help determine relevant text, (2) types of context that help determine meaning, (3) pragmatic principles of construction such as principles of relevance and politeness, and (4) important pragmatic notions or devices such as anaphora, cataphora, ellipsis, deixis, presupposition, unstated premises, entailment, and implementives. -/- Finally, as a recurring example (among others) of pragmatics in action, this article examines from multiple perspectives textual issues raised in King v. Burwell, 576 U.S. __ (2015). -/- Keywords: Pragmatics, Semiotics, Interpretation, Textualism, Plain Meaning, King v. Burwell, Affordable Care Act, Text, Meaning, Speaker Meaning, Implicature. (shrink)