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Deictic this and speaker containment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2023

PHILIP MILLER Open the ORCID record for PHILIP MILLER [Opens in a new window]
PHILIP MILLER*
Affiliation:
UFR d'Etudes Anglophones Université Paris CitéUniversité Paris Cité, Clillac-Arp Case 7046 5, rue Thomas Mann 75205 Paris cedex 13 France philip.miller@u-paris.fr
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Abstract

This article examines a hitherto unnoticed set of deictic uses of the English proximal demonstrative this, namely those where the speaker is contained in the referent of the demonstrative NP. The usual case, where the speaker is not contained in the referent, has been extensively studied and the choice between proximal and distal has been argued to be based on a combination of physical (proximity of the referent to the speaker) and psychological/subjective factors. The present article focuses on those cases where the speaker is contained in the referent, arguing that this leads to a categorical choice in deictic uses, with only proximal this being possible. The article further shows that there are four relevant types of containment. First, spatial containment, where the speaker is physically located in the referent (e.g. this room); second, situational containment, where the referent is an event or state and the speaker is a participant in it (e.g. this conversation); third, set containment, where the referent is a group of people of which the speaker is a member (e.g. in this family); and fourth, temporal containment, where the speaker (or more precisely the time of utterance) is contained in the referent (e.g. this week).

Keywords

referencedemonstrativesdeixisexophoradistal vs proximal
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 303 - 319
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Francis Cornish, Anne Jugnet and Fons Maes, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for very useful comments on previous versions of this article.

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