308 The subjectivity of utterance

(7) What's that thing?

The pronoun 'that' in (6), though not in all contexts, is a pure deictic. The noun-phrase 'that thing' in (7), on the other hand, is impurely deictic: it is composed of the purely deictic 'that' (here functioning as an adjective) and the noun 'thing' (which is in implicit contrast with such descriptively non-synonymous words as 'person' and 'animal' and encodes the speaker's cate-gorial, or ontological, assumptions about the entity in question). To be compared with (6) and (7) in this respect are

(8) Who's that?

and

(9) Who's that person?

Once again, the pronoun 'that' (in (8)) is purely deictic and the noun-phrase 'that person' is impurely deictic. It will be noticed, however, that (here is a categorial distinction in the interroga­tive pronouns 'who' and 'what' in English which encodes the dif­ference between "person" and "thing". It follows that, as whole utterances, (6) and (7) are semantically equivalent; and so, in turn, are (8) and (9).

This apparently simple example illustrates not only the nat­ure of the distinction which I am drawing between pure and impure deixis, but also the gaps and asymmetries which exist in the grammatical and lexical structure of natural languages and the problems which arise, in consequence, when one starts to take seriously the principle of compositionality in relation to the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.

We cannot go into such questions here. But students with a native or near-native command of English will get some sense of the complexity which lies behind or underneath even appar- ently simple examples such as (6)—(9) if they reflect upon the fol- lowing facts:

(i) There is a categorial gap between the interrogative pro- nouns and adjectives 'who' and 'what', such that one would not normally use either (6) or (8) to query the indi- vidual identity of an entity which is presupposed to be

10.2 Indexicality and deixis 309

neither a person nor a thing, but an animal. There is no such gap between the personal pronouns: animals, like babies, can be referred to either with 'it' or, in the appro­priate circumstances, with 'he' or 'she'.

(ii) Whereas (8) is non-ambiguous, (6) has both an individual (or entity-referring) and a sortal (or categorial) meaning: "What (or which) individual [thing] is that?" versus "What kind [of thing] is that?".

(iii) The utterance-inscriptions What person is that? and What is that person? are non-ambiguous, the former, like (8) and (9), having only an individual meaning and the latter only a sortal meaning; What animal is that? is in this respect ambiguous, but What is that animal? has only a sortal mean­ing.

Facts such as these, which any native speaker of English takes into account, for the most part unconsciously, in the production and interpretation of utterances, cannot be discounted by semanticists: they are part and parcel of one's linguistic com­petence.

Languages vary considerably with respect to the kind of non-deictic information which they combine with deictic infor­mation in the meaning of particular expressions. And it is important to note that the non-deictic part of the meaning of impure deictics may be either descriptive (or propositional) or socio-expressive. The latter is very commonly encoded in the meaning of pronouns: notably, and on a scale that is unparal­leled in European languages, in Japanese, Korean, Javanese and many languages of South-East Asia. The so-called T/V distinction that is found in many European languages - 'tu' versus 'vous' in French, 'du' versus 'Sie' in German, 'tu' versus 'usted' in Spanish, etc. - which has been much discussed in the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic literature, exemplifies the phenomenon on a relatively small scale and in respect only of the pronouns used to refer to the addressee. In all languages that have the T/V distinction, the non-deictic meaning that is asso-