306 The subjectivity of utterance

If the utterance contains a personal pronoun, a demonstrative of any kind, a verb in the past, present or future tense, any one of a whole host of expressions such as 'yesterday', 'next year', 'abroad', or a verb such as 'come' or 'bring', the fact that it will express different propositions in different deictic contexts is obvious enough; and this fact is very properly noted and dis­cussed in all contemporary textbooks of semantics.

But the spatio-temporal dimensions of the deictic context may be implicit in an utterance even when they are not made explicit either grammatically or lexically; and this fact is not always mentioned or, if mentioned, given the emphasis it deserves. Let us consider, for example, an utterance such as

(4) It is raining.

Unless there are contextual indications to the contrary (e.g., the speaker might be reporting the content of a long-distance tele­phone conversation), it will refer to the time and place of the act of utterance itself: it will be logically equivalent to (i.e., express the same proposition as)

(5) It is raining here and now.

English, of course, like many (but by no means all) languages, grammaticalizes the temporal dimension of the deictic context in its tense-system. If we were to tra.nslate It is raining into a language without tense (e.g., Chinese or Malay), there would be no explicit indication in the utterance-inscription itself of the fact that it refers to the present, rather than to the past or the future: both "now" and "here" (and not only "here" as in English) would be implicit.

Languages vary enormously with respect to the degree to which they grammaticalize or lexicalize spatio-temporal deixis. It is also important to realize that even languages that are super­ficially very similar (e.g., English, French, German) may differ considerably in many points of detail. For example, French 'ici' and 'là' do not have exactly the same meaning as 'here' and 'there'; German 'kommen' and 'bringen' do not exactly match 'come' and 'bring'. A good deal of research on spatio-temporal deixis has been carried out recently from several points of view,

10.2 Indexicality and deixis 307

but so far on only a very limited number of the world's languages. The evidence currently available reinforces the view taken here: that its role in natural languages is all-pervasive. Theoretical semantics and pragmatics have made a start, as we have seen, with the formalization of deixis (or indexicality); but none of the systems developed so far is sufficiently general or suf-ficiently comprehensive to cope with the range and diversity of deictic information encoded in different natural languages.

Two distinctions must now be drawn. The first is between what I will call pure and impure deixis: between expressions whose meaning can be accounted for fully in terms of the notion of deixis and expressions whose meaning is partly deictic and partly non-deictic. For example, the first-person and second-person pronouns in English, ' I ' and 'you', are purely deictic: they refer to the locutionary agent and the addressee without conveying any additional information about them. Similarly, the demonstrative adjectives and adverbs (in contrast with the demonstrative pronouns), 'this' versus 'that' and 'here' versus 'there', when they are used with spatio-temporal reference, are pure deictics: they identify the referent (an entity or a place) in relation to the location of the locutionary act and its partici­pants. But the third-person singular pronouns - 'he', 'she' and 'it' - are impure deictics: they encode the distinctions of mean­ing which are traditionally associated with the terms 'mascu­line', 'feminine' and 'neuter'. Since these distinctions are based upon properties of the referent which have nothing to do with his, her or its spatio-temporal location or role in the locutionary act, they are clearly non-deictic. Impure (i.e., not fully) deictic expressions encode and combine both deictic and non-deictic information.

The terminologically non-standard distinction which I have just drawn between pure and impure deixis - there is no stan­dard terminology - is very important and so far has not received the attention it deserves in semantic theory. Consider, for

example,

(6) What's that? in contrast with