I happen to be visiting in Ithaca this month, and I’m reminded that Donna West of nearby SUNY Cortland is one of the leading scholars in deictic theory, which in her hands has become a fascinating mix of Peirce, Piaget, and empirical research on preschoolers’ development of semiotic capabilities. Although I didn’t cite her work in my Chapter 4, as the section there on children’s acquisition of language was too brief to do her justice, I hope to remedy that omission here. (Note my use of spatial deixis!)
In her book, Deictic Imaginings, West observes that many linguists and psychologists have taken the Greek meaning of “deixis/δειξισ” (“pointing out”) and its Latin translation (“demonstratio”) too literally, and “apply it indiscriminately to any instance of directional representation as necessarily ‘deictic.’… This line of reasoning puts deictic expressions on par with any directional expression, such that indexical and deictic expressions are indistinguishable.”
Instead, based on numerous studies of preschool children learning to communicate, West believes that while both linguistic and gestural deictic expressions derive from indexical representations, the indexical, pre-deictic, and indexical deictic uses should be separately distinguished. She notes that infants’ gestures are pre-deictic until they develop the capacities for social reciprocity, arguing that “Pre-deictic use reveals unidirectional notice of any object or object location without consideration of orientational differentials consequent to shifting origos, and their movement or position. Early gestural uses such as eye gaze, pointing, and the like are pre-deictic, since as indexes, they do not recognize particular classes. . . Even early linguistic uses, namely, of demonstratives which have the potential to express location, boundaries, and orientational shifts are likewise pre-deictic, if recognition of their shifting character is still unrecognized.”
This pre-deictic categorization is key to understanding how deixis develops, since clearly infants are only beginning to identify individual objects by shifting their gaze, and don’t attempt to include their caregivers in this action, since providing leadership in “shared attention” situations is still well beyond their capacity. Even the ability to categorize only gradually develops in young children, as they learn that “doggy” can represent more than the single household pet with which they are familiar, for instance.
West states that demonstratives (such as “this” and “that”) can also be pre-deictic if the user doesn’t recognize that such uses can express boundary, location, and orientational shifts. These demonstratives with their potentially deictic use are the most indexical terms that can be used perceptually. Demonstratives involving noticed entities in the here and now also constitute the earliest terms produced universally by children, most often within the first ten words of their vocabulary. Her studies of how blind and sighted children use demonstratives differently (blind children tend to use “this” more than “that,” due to their reliance on tactile rather than visual index, making the proximal demonstrative more useful to them) add important details to this pre-deictic/deictic continuum.
All this, of course, is consistent with Peirce’s “icon, index, symbol” ontology and shows how children’s knowledge of significance and sharing of that significance develops in conjunction with their socialization as they grow.
Keywords In and Out of Context 