MCCWBUCK wrote:
> Agreed. But you, of course, haven't refected on them here! Deictic is
> NOT a linguistic category. It means 'pointing', and is a cognitive
> activity humans use to orient themselves in space. If you ask me
> for directions, and I point, this is a deictic activity. You have
> made a category mistake by thinnking that 'deictic' is a
> linguistic category. Deixis is manifest in language in terms of
> personal pronouns. And if I used 'personal pronouns' rather than
> 'deictic', then your criticism would have been valid. As it is,
> you have confused two things.
>
> Warren Buckland
> Liverpool John Moores University
> Dean Walters Building
> St James Road
> Liverpool
> L1 7BR
> ENGLAND.
>
> +44 (0)151 231 5111
No, excuse me Warren, but I do meant deixis as a linguistic category,
like the case when ones says this is a deictic sentence, a deictic
speech a deictic gesture etc., i.e. the deixis is in linguistics always
bound up with meaning, and in this sense IT IS a linguistic category, or
at least they use it as such (for example Lyons in his famous book
'Semantics').
You abstracted deixis from language, and that is ok, but in linguistics
things are going different, isn't it? In a sense you separated deixis as
THE WORLD (an organism pointing etc.) from deixis as linguistic category
(i.e. the meaning referring to that world), this is rather a cogent
philosophical problem which falsifies in my opinion the same use of
deixis in linguistics by creating problems to the analitical theory of
meaning.
In any case what is more important is that we agree on the subject.
Best regards,
Paolo
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