Dexis/Demonstrative

[zelos]

Tried googling but failed.

How does Dexis and Demosntratives such as "This" "That" etc develop in a language lacking them? And what would they tend to come from=

[Salmoneus]

No languages lack deixis. They could develop easily enough from any other deictic word, or from the implements of demonstration - fingers, hands, directions - or its concomitants (performative verbs). Definiteness and anaphora are also nearby.

[zelos]

I doubt humans started with "this and that" and like most grammatical things it started from somewhere but my question is where does it come from exacly?

Definite articles usually come from them which can render one of them useless (since it is now taking definite form and not deixis) so where would the replacement come? (if one do come that is)

[Mecislau]

I doubt humans started with "this and that" and like most grammatical things it started from somewhere but my question is where does it come from exacly?

Definite articles usually come from them which can render one of them useless (since it is now taking definite form and not deixis) so where would the replacement come? (if one do come that is)

Demonstratives and adverbs of time can easily come from one another: this <-> there, that <-> there.

They can also be related to personal pronouns: this <-> (near) me, that <-> (near) you, yon <-> (near) it.



And in terms of humans starting with "this" and "that", why not? They strike me as being perhaps the most basic type of pronoun, even more basic than personal pronouns, since they're so closely tied with the physical action of pointing.

[zelos]

I doubt humans started with "this and that" and like most grammatical things it started from somewhere but my question is where does it come from exacly?

Definite articles usually come from them which can render one of them useless (since it is now taking definite form and not deixis) so where would the replacement come? (if one do come that is)

Demonstratives and adverbs of time can easily come from one another: this <-> there, that <-> there.

They can also be related to personal pronouns: this <-> (near) me, that <-> (near) you, yon <-> (near) it.



And in terms of humans starting with "this" and "that", why not? They strike me as being perhaps the most basic type of pronoun, even more basic than personal pronouns, since they're so closely tied with the physical action of pointing.

I say they cant have started with it because they are more grammatical than concrete, if you are going to explain "this" to a person whom have no understanding of it, how do you do?

I can explain a rock by showing one, a verb by doing it or shoiwng the event in question but grammatical words are not the same. when language first came to be it would be more concrete stuff and from that grammatical words came into being. "Near" would be more concrete than "This" for example

[linguoboy]

Definite articles usually come from them which can render one of them useless (since it is now taking definite form and not deixis) so where would the replacement come? (if one do come that is)

Often from a determiner plus an augment, such as a locative adverb. Cf. colloquial German dieser Mann da (lit. "this man there"), Welsh y gŵr 'na (lit. "the man there"), both equivalent to "that man" (literary jener Mann, y gŵr hwn). This itself is a compound of an earlier demonstrative (the ancestor of the) and a particle meaning "see".

I say they cant have started with it because they are more grammatical than concrete, if you are going to explain "this" to a person whom have no understanding of it, how do you do?

By the same token, how do you explain "you" to someone who has no understanding of it? Do you think personal pronouns are also a very late development crosslinguistically?

[zelos]

Often from a determiner plus an augment, such as a locative adverb. Cf. colloquial German dieser Mann da (lit. "this man there"), Welsh y gŵr 'na (lit. "the man there"), both equivalent to "that man" (literary jener Mann, y gŵr hwn). This itself is a compound of an earlier demonstrative (the ancestor of the) and a particle meaning "see".

Now we are getting somewhere

By the same token, how do you explain "you" to someone who has no understanding of it? Do you think personal pronouns are also a very late development crosslinguistically?

I simply mean that it cannot have been from the absolute start (though close to it is most likely) since if it was from the start it would be more of a genetic thing which "you" cannot be obviously. I would say both of them developed early due to need/desire but my question was simply from what does deixis come from? which you answered well enough

[linguoboy]

By the same token, how do you explain "you" to someone who has no understanding of it? Do you think personal pronouns are also a very late development crosslinguistically?

I simply mean that it cannot have been from the absolute start (though close to it is most likely) since if it was from the start it would be more of a genetic thing which "you" cannot be obviously.

It is not at all obvious what you mean here.

[zelos]

By the same token, how do you explain "you" to someone who has no understanding of it? Do you think personal pronouns are also a very late development crosslinguistically?

I simply mean that it cannot have been from the absolute start (though close to it is most likely) since if it was from the start it would be more of a genetic thing which "you" cannot be obviously.

It is not at all obvious what you mean here.

What I meant is that pronouns/deixis cannot be geneticly coded into our DNA.

While Deixis and Pronouns are fundamental in languages (and probably came early as grammatical words) they are not concrete.

You can teach a monkey/dog simple concrete words/phrases but grammatical words are impossible.

[zompist]

What I meant is that pronouns/deixis cannot be geneticly coded into our DNA.

You can teach a monkey/dog simple concrete words/phrases but grammatical words are impossible.

Those are both pretty strong claims— and they contradict each other. If we have a capability that monkeys do not, the difference is ultimately genetic! (There may be intermediate factors, of course— "writes a blog" is not a genetic difference from other animals, but does depend on such differences.)

You have deixis as soon as you have pointing. The relevant question isn't whether dogs and monkeys can point, but whether apes can. And they can, but they apparently do not do so in the wild.

Here's an article giving some details: http://www.psyk.uu.se/hemsidor/spadbarn ... _point.pdf

Note that human infants can point at one year of age, well before they can produce language.

And we can see precursors of this behavior in apes— e.g. chimpanzees are very good at following the gaze of other chimps, and they are conscious of sophisticated things like noticing whether or not another chimp is aware of a food source.

[rotting bones]

offtopic: Chimps turned out to have photographic memory according to the new Cambridge intelligence test.

[Salmoneus]

1. Deixis is more fundamental than classification. All animals know the difference between themselves and other animals (though they may not recognise pictures of them), which is what underlies 1st vs non-1st person, a form of deictic reference.

2. Your other argument is also backwards. If you can teach people the meaning of nouns easily, once they learn demonstratives, but you can't teach demonstratives no matter how many nouns they know, isn't it backward to say that nouns are more basic than demonstratives? A hell of a lot of the earliest language-learning is done relying on deictic concepts ("that's a cat!" *points*, "what's this!?", "wheeeere is the dog? can you point to the dog?").

3. As someone with a young relative: babies learn deixis before classification. Said relative can't say any nouns yet, and only recognises a small handful of nouns and perhaps a larger handful of verbs... but she's mastered games of pointing and naming and fetching, and the only words she has with fixed meaning are demonstratives (all accompanied by pointing) meaning "what's that?", "look at that!"/"that one!" (when answering questions) and "give me that!" (plus a general "oh dear!" word). Sadly, she's not German, so the fact she points at things while saying "da!" can't qualify as actually talking, but...

[zelos]

What I meant is that pronouns/deixis cannot be geneticly coded into our DNA.

You can teach a monkey/dog simple concrete words/phrases but grammatical words are impossible.

Those are both pretty strong claims— and they contradict each other. If we have a capability that monkeys do not, the difference is ultimately genetic! (There may be intermediate factors, of course— "writes a blog" is not a genetic difference from other animals, but does depend on such differences.)

You have deixis as soon as you have pointing. The relevant question isn't whether dogs and monkeys can point, but whether apes can. And they can, but they apparently do not do so in the wild.

Here's an article giving some details: http://www.psyk.uu.se/hemsidor/spadbarn ... _point.pdf

Note that human infants can point at one year of age, well before they can produce language.

And we can see precursors of this behavior in apes— e.g. chimpanzees are very good at following the gaze of other chimps, and they are conscious of sophisticated things like noticing whether or not another chimp is aware of a food source.

We have genetics for language but specific words and classes are not something that is genetical =/ Context.

Salmoneus, I agree alot with what you say but that is mostly because it is already a fundamental well established words that is used over adn over again far more often than any noun class. I am not saying modern people or anything because what you say is logical once deixis DO exist.

[zompist]

We have genetics for language but specific words and classes are not something that is genetical =/ Context.

Deixis isn't a class of words, it's a cognitive capability and the evidence is that it is genetic.

[Radagast]

And its a cognitive ability that probably existed before the emergence of the genus homo.

Tomasello argues that language did not evolve form primate vocal communication but from primate gestural communication. This would probably mean that deixis at the root of human language.

As an exercise Zelos try to imagine a language with out deixis. Try to build a couple of sentences. Remember that pronouns are deictic, anaphora are deictic, forms of adress are deictic, tempus is deictic. How would you talk about space and location ior time without using deictics?

[Count Iblis]

Tried googling but failed.

How does Dexis and Demosntratives such as "This" "That" etc develop in a language lacking them? And what would they tend to come from=

Verbs of motion.

[Radagast]

Tried googling but failed.

How does Dexis and Demosntratives such as "This" "That" etc develop in a language lacking them? And what would they tend to come from=

Verbs of motion.

Can you even have verbs of motion without already having deixis? Where would you go?

[Salmoneus]

And its a cognitive ability that probably existed before the emergence of the genus homo.

Tomasello argues that language did not evolve form primate vocal communication but from primate gestural communication. This would probably mean that deixis at the root of human language.

As an exercise Zelos try to imagine a language with out deixis. Try to build a couple of sentences. Remember that pronouns are deictic, anaphora are deictic, forms of adress are deictic, tempus is deictic. How would you talk about space and location ior time without using deictics?

I don't disagree, but just to note some differences over terminology: I was using the term "deixis" in a more constrained way, as a subtype of indexicality. Broadly, I would define an "indexical" as a reference dependent on the context of the act, and "deixis" as specifically for physical context of the speaker and/or listener. So I'd include pronouns and tense as deictic, but anaphora (reference by the textual, rather than physical, context) as a different type of indexicality.

Don't know how widespread this is.

[Salmoneus]

Tried googling but failed.

How does Dexis and Demosntratives such as "This" "That" etc develop in a language lacking them? And what would they tend to come from=

Verbs of motion.

Can you even have verbs of motion without already having deixis? Where would you go?

Certainly you couldn't come or go anywhere, because they're deictic -but surely you could fly, or fall?

[Radagast]

You could fly neither here nor there and you couldn't fall down so you'd never hit the ground.

[Radagast]

And its a cognitive ability that probably existed before the emergence of the genus homo.

Tomasello argues that language did not evolve form primate vocal communication but from primate gestural communication. This would probably mean that deixis at the root of human language.

As an exercise Zelos try to imagine a language with out deixis. Try to build a couple of sentences. Remember that pronouns are deictic, anaphora are deictic, forms of adress are deictic, tempus is deictic. How would you talk about space and location ior time without using deictics?

I don't disagree, but just to note some differences over terminology: I was using the term "deixis" in a more constrained way, as a subtype of indexicality. Broadly, I would define an "indexical" as a reference dependent on the context of the act, and "deixis" as specifically for physical context of the speaker and/or listener. So I'd include pronouns and tense as deictic, but anaphora (reference by the textual, rather than physical, context) as a different type of indexicality.

Don't know how widespread this is.

I think the most standard interpretation is the one given in Levinson's Pragmatics (1983) here he defines subcategories of personal, spatial, social, temporal and discourse deixis (anaphora). There is a tendency I guess to use "Spatial deixis" as the unmarked category and all the other ones as marked. I think that comes from Bühler originally - but its not really possible to define spatial deixis as fundamentally different from the other kinds which I think is what motivated first Fillmore and then Levinson to include them under the label as well.

Newer intepretations (such as those by Hanks and Silverstein) seem to regard both deixis and indexicality as much more pervasive and difficult to divide from other kinds of signs. Basically almost any kind of reference is also indexical, in the sense that the precise meaning is dependent on many different kinds of non-linguistic context. E.g. a statement such as "Goldberg is communist" had a radically different meaning in USSR in 1922 than in the US in 1952. And even the use of here or there is influenced by social, context and speakersø common ground in a way that makes it difficult to say that they are simply "spatial".

[Count Iblis]

Tried googling but failed.

How does Dexis and Demosntratives such as "This" "That" etc develop in a language lacking them? And what would they tend to come from=

Verbs of motion.

Can you even have verbs of motion without already having deixis? Where would you go?

Perhaps I misinterpreted the OP, but I assumed the speakers already had the concept of deixis but merely lacked deictic pronouns.

[Radagast]

I don't know how that would be possible. Can speakers even begin to speak with each other without deictic pronouns (you/ I for example)?

[Noriega]

In Heine & Kuteva's The genesis of grammar: a reconstruction there is a very speculative chapter called Early Language, in which they present "Layers of grammatical evolution" (based on earlier discussions in the book). This is their idea of which types of words are the most basic (based on earlier chapters), and how other words and word classes can develop from the underlying layers:
http://books.google.dk/books?id=Tu7ijDO ... &q&f=false

[Mecislau]

I don't know how that would be possible. Can speakers even begin to speak with each other without deictic pronouns (you/ I for example)?

Mecislau thinks avoiding personal pronouns is possible (even if avoiding personal pronouns sounds rather tiring after a while), but other pronouns can be much trickier.