Deixis as the source of reference

Summary

In this paper I shall be concerned with what Quine (1960: 108) describes as the first two phases in the ontogenesis of reference. Like Quine, I shall venture no psychological details as to the actual order in which ‘the child of our culture’ masters the ‘provincial apparatus of articles, copulas, and plurals’ as he ‘scrambles up an intellectual chimney, supporting himself against each side by pressure against the others’ (1960:102, 80, 93). What I have to say about the child's acquisition of the grammar of referring expressions is not incompatible, as far as I am aware, with any of the data that has been collected and discussed in the psycholinguistic literature: but I am not claiming that all children ‘of our culture’, and still less children of all cultures, must go through the same stages in the acquisition of their native language and that these stages must succeed one another in a fixed order. My purpose, rather, is to show how the grammatical structure and interpretation of referring expressions (other than proper names) can be accounted for in principle on the basis of a prior understanding of the deictic function of demonstrative pronouns and adverbs in what might be loosely described as concrete or practical situations. I will argue that the definite article and the personal pronouns, in English and other languages, are (in a sense of ‘weak’ to be explained below) weak demonstratives (see Sommerstein (1972); Thorne (1973)), and that their anaphoric use is derived from deixis.