310 The subjectivity of utterance

ciated with it is perhaps primarily social, being determined by social role or the relatively stable interpersonal relations that hold between speaker and addressee. But in some languages (e.g., Russian), die switch from the T-pronoun to the V-pronoun, or conversely, can also indicate the speaker's change of mood or attitude. This is but one example, however, of the tendency for social and expressive meaning to merge and to be, at times, inseparable. Hence the composite term 'socio-expressive'.

The second distinction (which is not to be confused with the distinction between pure and impure deixis) is between pri­mary and secondary deixis. Primary deixis is of the kind that can be accounted for in terms of gestural reference within the framework of the deictic context, as this has been described above. Secondary deixis involves the displacement or reinterpre-tation of the spatio-temporal dimensions of the primary deictic context. This displacement or reinterpretation can be of several different kinds, and in some cases it can be appropriately called metaphorical. Here, I will give just one example. As primary deictics, the English demonstratives can be analysed in terms of the notion of spatio-temporal proximity to the deictic centre: 'this' and 'here' refer to entities and places that are located in the place that contains the speaker (or to points or periods of time that are located in the period of time that contains the moment of utterance) - this is what 'proximity' means when it is used, technically, in discussions of deixis. Of course, the bound­aries of the place or time that contains the deictic centre can be shifted indefinitely far from the centre: 'here' can have the same reference as 'this room' or 'this galaxy', and 'now' the same refer­ence as 'this moment' or 'this year'. There are complications of detail (and arguably the traditional term 'proximity' is mislead­ing). But the principle is clear, in so far as it is relevant to the present example. Now, among the several uses of the demonstra­tives that can be analysed in terms of the notion of secondary deixis, there is a particular use of 'that' versus 'this' which is recognizably expressive, and whose expressivity can be identi- fied as that of emotional or attitudinal dissociation (or distan- cing). For example, if speakers are holding something in the hand they will normally use 'this', rather than 'that', to refer to

10.2 Indexicality and deixis 311

it (by virtue of its spatio-temporal proximity). If they say What's that? in such circumstances, their use of 'that' will be indicative of their dislike or aversion: they will be distancing themselves emotionally or attitudinally from whatever they are referring to. This is but one example of one kind of secondary deixis. I have chosen it because it illustrates fairly clearly (and without the need for long preliminary explanation of unfamiliar linguistic material or additional technical distinctions) what I mean by the displacement or reinterpretation of a primarily spatio-temporal dimension of the deictic context. There is at least an intuitively evident connexion between physical and emotional proximity or remoteness.

As we shall see in section 10.5, secondary deixis of the kind that has been illustrated here is very close to subjective modality. Before turning to that and related topics, however, I should make it clear that the distinction that I have drawn here between primary and secondary deixis rests upon the standard view according to which deixis is to be defined, first and fore­most, as a matter of spatio-temporal location in the context of utterance. The standard view of deixis is the one that is pre­sented in all textbooks of linguistics, traditional and non-tradi­tional, and in most specialized monographs and articles that deal with deixis. This is also the view which underpins treat­ments of deixis, or indexicality, in formal semantics. It is argu­able, however, that the standard view of deixis derives from philosophically challengeable, empiricist, assumptions about the primacy of the physical world (and of locutionary, rather than cognitive, deixis). An alternative, and perhaps equally defensible, view is that the egocentricity of the deictic context is of its very nature cognitive in that it is rooted in the subjectivity of consciousness - in the sense in which subjectivity will be explained later (see 10.6). So far this alternative view has had little effect upon what may be regarded as mainstream linguistic semantics. But there are signs that the situation is changing in this respect.

It is impossible to discuss in an introductory book of this kind the full range of phenomena that fall within the scope of the term 'deixis' (as this term is used nowadays by linguists). But