304 The subjectivity of utterance

and demonstrative pronouns, in their relevant uses, are the most obvious kinds oflinguistic expressions that have such properties and are clearly deictic in terms of this etymological definition. For example, instead of saying I am happy, one could point to one­self and say Happy; instead of saying That's beautiful, one could point to a particular painting at an exhibition and say Beautiful. Of course, one could simultaneously point to the referent and use the appropriate deictic expression; and many deictic expres­sions are normally used, in fact, in association with some kind of gestural reference.

It is worth noting at this point that the philosophical notion of ostensive definition (as was made clear, though not in these terms, in Chapter 3) rests upon an understanding of gestural reference and deixis. Ostension is non-verbal, gestural, reference intended and, when successful, understood as fulfilling an essen­tial role in the definition of linguistic expressions; and 'ostension' is simply a Latin-based word with much the same meaning, ety-mologically speaking, as 'deixis'.

Etymology may explain the source of the term 'deixis'; it can­not of course account fully for its current use. To do this we must invoke the notion of the deictic context, operating as an integral part of the context of utterance. Every act of utter­ance — every locutionary act - occurs in a spatio-temporal con­text whose centre, or zero-point, can be referred to as the here-and-now. But how do we identify the here-and-now on par­ticular occasions of utterance? Clearly, there is no other way of defining the English demonstrative adverbs 'here' and 'now' (or comparable expressions in other languages) than by relating them either (i) to the place and time of utterance or (ii) to the time and place of a mental act of more or less conscious aware- ness or reflection. The former may be referred to as locutionary deixis; and the latter, for reasons which will become clear when we take up the discussion of subjectivity in the final section of this chapter, as cognitive deixis. (It is a philosophically and psychologically controversial question, which, if either, of these two kinds of deixis is more basic and how they are related to one another.) Defined in terms of locutionary deixis, 'here' refers to where the speaker is (at the moment of utterance) and

10.2 Indexicality and deixis 305

'now' refers to the moment of utterance (or to some period of time which contains the moment of utterance). The complemen­tary demonstrative adverbs 'there' and 'then' are negatively defined in relation to 'here' and 'now': 'there' means "not-here" and 'then' means "not-now".

The deictic context, then, is centred upon the speaker's here-and-now: it is, in this respect, egocentric. The first-person pro­noun, ' I ' in English, refers (normally) to the actual speaker: i.e., to whoever is speaking at that moment. As the role of speaker - more generally, the role of the locutionary agent -passes from one person to another in the course of a conversation, so the zero-point of the deictic context will be switched back and forth, together with the reference of ' I ' and 'here'. The refer­ence of 'now' does not, of course, switch back and forth in the same way, since speaker and hearer normally operate with the same temporal frame of reference and with common assump­tions about the passage of time. But 'now' is continuously re­defined, within this shared temporal frame of reference, by the act of utterance. So, too, of course, are past, present and future, which (in locutionary deixis) are defined, explicitly or implicitly, in relation to the now of utterance. We can think of the pronoun ' I ' and the demonstrative adverbs 'here' and 'now' - and com­parable expressions in other languages - as referring expressions which single out and identify the logically separable components of the spatio-temporal zero-point of the deictic context. In model-theoretic semantics, all three components (with or with­out others that will not be discussed here) are commonly included in the index, or point of reference. Each such index, as we have seen, distinguishes one possible world from its alterna­tives (see 7.6).

The way in which spatio-temporal deixis can tell us what proposition has been expressed (in the utterance of a particular sentence by a particular speaker at a particular time) has been illustrated in section 9.3. All that needs to be done here is to emphasize the general point that most utterances (i.e., utter­ance-inscriptions) in all languages are indexical or deictic, in that the truth-value of the propositions that they express is deter­mined by the spatio-temporal dimensions of the deictic context.