Words like this and that play a key role in composite utterances, like glue for sticking the linguistic system onto the physical world. But their semantics remain poorly understood, despite advances in typological description (Fillmore 1982: 47ff., Anderson and Keenan 1985, Himmelmann 1996, Diessel 1999, Dixon 2003), primarily because demonstratives have seldom been examined in situ. Due to the inherently context-bound character of demonstratives, it is necessary to examine their use in spontaneous interaction, in all its richness (Hanks 1990). This is the method pursued in this chapter, using data from video recordings of natural interaction.

The aim of this chapter is to present a case study of the kind of resources a language can offer in guiding an interpreter's unification of word and world in utterance comprehension. The Lao demonstrative determiner system is a typologically unremarkable two-term system (nii4 versus nan4) opposing so-called proximal and distal (Hasan 1968, Halliday and Hasan 1976, Anderson and Keenan 1985, inter alia). Despite this apparent simplicity, a traditional analysis – assuming a symmetrical opposition of ‘distance’ marking between the two terms – fails. Close attention to distributional facts and the pragmatics of interlocutors' interpretations of physical space in interaction (including contingent factors like attention, common ground, cultural and personal conceptions of space) supports a lean semantic analysis of the two Lao demonstratives, whereby neither literally encodes distance (i.e. neither makes specification of notions such as ‘near’ or ‘far’), and only one encodes location (namely the semantically more specific ‘distal’ demonstrative, which refers to something ‘not here’). The proposed semantics are minimal, yet they remain consistent with the use of these forms in rich contexts.