Deixis – a semiotic mystery: Enunciation and reference

Planting a stick in your flowerbed to remind yourself or others of having placed a bulb there is a deictic act. Sending flowers to a beloved person in order to thank her for something or to remind her of your existence is a deictic act. Looking at the ceiling and rolling your eyes while someone is speaking is a deictic gesture, most often intended to let the speaker or someone else know that you find the conveyed content of the speech less than useful. What is common in those examples of deictic acts or gestures? They all produce or present a certain object or effect – stick, bouquet, eye movement – that carries a message, and the message again contains an indication of something the receiver should attend to. Such semiotic acts often use signifiers with little direct relation to their indicative signified indication, other than the time and place of the act – the location of the stick, the temporal occasion of the bouquet, the spatio-temporal moment of the facial gesture – and their intelligibility or “felicity” depends strongly on the presupposition of a communicative intersubjective bond, such as a shared caring for something: plants, interpersonal respect, discursive relevance, etc. Their indicative force depends on this shared concern for some aspects of reality. Deictic acts, or deixis, are as essential in inter-human semiosis as they are in human-animal or inter-animal communication. ^[1]

Deictic acts are reflected in language by the demonstrative pronouns – this, that –and the demonstrative adverbs – here, there, now. These closed-class forms are the core elements that create the referential dimension in communication. ^[2] In speech, they are often accompanied by pointing gestures of different types: finger, hand, arm, body posture, eye movement. ^[3] Since in this case they both point and contain indications, they have often been associated with the index, a semantic sign type suggested by philosopher C. S. Peirce, a sign opposed to icons and symbols. Indexical signs, or indices, are signs “whose relation to their objects consists in a correspondence in fact” (Peirce 1982: 56). Curiously, Peirce included pointing fingers and proper names in the indexical category. ^[4] The most common elementary example of an index is smoke as a “sign” of fire; a more elaborate example is a weathercock as a “sign” of wind direction. The smoke in question is causally related to the fire that produced it; the angle of the weathercock to the points of the compass is caused by the direction of the wind that pushed it. But this causal “correspondence in fact” seems unrelated to the characteristics of deixis. Did Peirce think that the pointing finger was “corresponding to fact?” And that proper names were caused by the persons having them? ^[5]

One possible reading would be that Peirce takes deixis metaphorically: Nature is addressing us and calling our attention to a fire by showing us its smoke. ^[6] Nature points to an illness by showing us its symptoms. In both cases, Nature thinks that we should do something about it – the fire, the illness. So deixis would be a metaphor for what is really just an “index” in the sense of a phenomenological occurrence, that is, not a sign but just some effect that happens to make us think of some cause for it to be there. And the metaphoricity of the connection could vanish through habitual usage. But the inverse does not work well. My stick in the flowerbed is not caused by the bulb, unless we eliminate my intentional relation to stick, bulb, and care – or unless we include this relation in a wider notion of causation. This wider notion would, however, erase all differences between finality and causality as well as between consciousness and matter. It would make subjectivity and meaning disappear into Nature. That is a costly operation. I suspect that Peirce was ready to pay the price, whereas it is obvious to a semantically informed semiotician that this is less than useful: unacceptable.

As Eco (1976) notes, the structure of deixis cannot be reduced to that of a “natural sign,” that is, an index in the strict sense. ^[7] As our initial examples show, deixis structurally includes both enunciation – communicative intent and subjectivity – and reference – anchoring in the content-external world. In fact, I intend to show that reference and enunciation must be modeled as a structural whole, as a core referential enunciation, which also has to include the common concern or ground that makes reference meaningful, that is, possible. How this works has remained a mystery to standard semiotics, whereas cognitive semiotics, with its routine of finding and modeling semantic schemas, may have a chance to find an appropriate representation of the deictic schematism of this complex: grounded, referential enunciation.

Firstly, enunciation is a schema: ^[8] personhood is a basic relation between three instances, a first person (P1), a second person (P2), and the object of shared attention called third person (P3). The relation itself is a schematic act of showing. P1 shows P3 to P2. P2 is thus in a dative position, receiving P3 from P1 as a “gift.” Showing is “donner à voir,” with a French expression. P1 “gives” P3 to P2. P3 is the target of the showing, which is again the root of the deictic pointing. P3 is an object presented in a demonstrative mode: This! – “I want you to attend to this (here, now)!” – and it is therefore possible to say that the basic schematic relation between P1 and P2 is already proto-deictic. The relation develops real deicticity through a further semiotic unfolding. ^[9]

The basic schema, secondly, allows a semio-syntactic iterativity in two directions. One is dialogical: in a subsequent substructure, P2 (you) becomes P1 (I) and P1 is included in a new P2, when the addressee answers to the speaker and possibly to other hearers. It typically has propositional P3s: “You tell me that X, but I insist that ¬X!” P3 thus unfolds a maintained theme “X” across the turns of speech. Another form of iterativity, embedded enunciation, occurs when P3 includes a new substructure with P1–P2–P3 structure, and so on: “I say (to you) that he says (to someone) that she says (to everyone who wants to listen) that X …”

The structure of full-blown deixis contains both types of iterativity. The P1 of the central substructure has already been “informed” in a preceding substructure, where an authoritative instance (A) ^[10] showed P1 (dative) what to care about in some respect (R, a referential reality that makes the signified relevant); here is what matters: the reference to a real concern in the pre-enunciational world. P1 speaks or signifies “on behalf of” this preceding instance, which now functions as a relevance principle justifying the present enunciation. The present act of signification demonstratively shows P2 a signifier (this stick, this flower, this gesture …) and this P3 becomes a subsequent P1 (which is precisely why it is called a signifier: it is meant to signify, “speak” to the same P2 about something to attend to, so its signified is the deictic message. The following graph summarizes the resulting deictic complex:

Figure 1:

The enunciational structure of deixis.

As we see, P2, you, appears in two different parts of the structure: as a receiver of the deictic signifier and as a receiver of the message signified (Sé) by this signifier (Sa). ^[11] The initial reference R makes the Sa relevant “in the context,” and some convention in the level of the Sa allows a reading that yields Sé. The intentional subject (I) was first the me of the substructure A–R, a part which is necessary in any act of signification; we all express “ourselves” by transmitting a concern stemming from a presupposed domain of reality. ^[12]

This model may solve the mystery of deixis, namely that it introduces and includes both subjectivity and reference in the same basic, iterative schematic structure. Deixis thus explains the essential relation between signified meaning and its referent, the reale that the signified meaning is about. Without this “aboutness,” meaning would be meaningless.

I would like to offer a more elaborate example of the stick-and-bulb type deixis: a tombstone. The Latin inscription may be the classical one: Eram quod es, eris quod sum – “I was what you are, you will be what I am.” This is a talking stone, not just a stick; the text has a P1 that represents the person buried under it. The stone with the engraved text is a deictic object addressing any passer-by, that is, a P2 in the embedded part of the schema above. It confers a message, transmits an idea: you and I are the same, we live, we die – so, in a sense, apart from the time difference, you are me, and you should think about it. Why? Well, since this is what will become of you before or later, consider now how you are spending your life! Now is the deictic moment of the fortuitous encounter here between tombstone and (by-)passing wanderer. ^[13] The speaking tombstone is not verbally deictic, since it lets the stone carry the spatio-temporal “pointing”, while the words, all closed-class, of course set up the enunciation with their elegant chiasm (crossing {I was – I am} with {you are – you will be}).

Now consider a non-verbal traffic sign, supposed to say: Wrong way! See Figure 2 below.

Figure 2:

Traffic sign.

It is a deictic object equivalent to a gesture telling you, the driver or biker, not to turn into the lane, street, road that could be accessed right where the signpost carrying it is planted. The sign, issued by a public institution, maybe a ministry of transport, is thus signed by an instance (P1) informed by a societal interest (A) in assuring safe motorized circulation (R). The targeted subject (P2) receives first the address by the signpost as such, as a signpost, standing there instead of a police agent, showing a signifier composed by a white horizontal stroke in a red circle. Since P2 is supposed to know the traffic code, this sign expression is then read by P2 in the final substructure (of Figure 1) as a negative order: “Don’t go there!” This implicit deictic there refers back to the implicit here and now of the Sa on the sign post encountered by the driver, and further back to R, meaning: the turn is prohibited because for some traffic-relevant reason that street has been defined as a one-way channel. The enunciational structure is present and includes as in former examples a strong reference to the domain-relevant reality. ^[14]

Traffic signs such as this one are classical examples of the sign type of symbols, because they are explicitly coded by convention. The Wrong Way sign could additionally be said to iconically include the figurative association of a head’s or hand’s horizontal movement in the gesture meaning No, or it could just be a simplified gestural drawing of a barrier. But nowhere has it been made a theoretical point of insight that symbols, as well as icons, must communicate by the inscription of their Sa–Sé relations in a deictic structure. Nevertheless it is the case that deicticity, including its entire enunciational scaffolding, is responsible for our making sense of any iconic, symbolic, verbal, or mixed, semiotic act or object. ^[15] A written text will “speak” like a tombstone. A fictive text will include a simulated narrator as P1, informed by a literary A–R grounding substructure. Literary enunciative embedding can be deep, include many hypotactic P3 layers, and it can be polyphonic, offering a paratactic multitude of P1-voices. ^[16]

We may be able to formulate a revised basic typology of signs on the grounds ^[17] of deixis as described above. It can even be illustrated just by one hand gestures, as in the following presentation:

Simple deixis (D) without further unfolding (e. g.: P1’s pointing finger orienting P2’s gaze toward an object – the demonstrative pronouns in language orienting P2’s attention to some phenomenon in the situational or the discursive context).

D – Ic. Deixis with Iconic unfolding (e. g.: pointing as above but with facial expression of emotion added; the “come here” finger sign; or the “air kiss”).

D – Sy. Deixis with symbolic unfolding (e. g.: upwards pointing finger as “I want to speak” sign; the “o.k.” finger sign; the “thumbs up” sign).

D – Ic – Sy. Deixis with unfolding from iconic to symbolic (e. g.: the ILY “I love you” finger sign, which (Ic) combines shapes of the letters “I”, “L”, and “Y” from American Sign Language (Sy) by extending the thumb, index finger, and little finger while the middle and ring finger touch the palm; an informal expression of love). See Figure 3, below.

Figure 3:

The American ILY sign and the Latin benediction sign.

D – Sy – Ic. Deixis with symbolic unfolding further used iconically (e. g.: the Christian benedictio sign, a raised right hand with the ring finger and little finger touching the palm, while the middle and index fingers remain raised. This sign was used by the Romans for “I am speaking” (Sy) and then copied (Ic) by the Christians to perform blessings. Blessings further use gesture drawing of the sign of the cross: D – Ic – Sy.)

The latter combination D – Sy – Ic is, as the example illustrates, rather unstable and readily embeds the more intuitive D – Ic – Sy form. Most of what we find in the semiosic activity of daily life, including the social media, can be analyzed in terms of such semiotic series or sign cascades, often even deeper than such embeddings: D1 – Sy – Ic (D2 – Ic – Sy) … When D appears more than once in the embedding cascade, it in fact does refer multiply to the grounding reality: D1 – “I am hereby blessing you”, D2 – “(In order to do so) I am hereby transmitting to you the force of Christ”. One “hereby” can contain another “hereby”).

This series summarizes the sign types we will find in most practical forms of communication, a case of special interest, in this deictic framework, being that of diagrams, which I will reserve for special treatment at another occasion. For the moment, we can conclude that D is both a sign and a structure that necessarily frames the two well-known basic semantic types, icons and symbols. Icons and symbols cannot appear without this deictic framework. The notion of the index as a sign type should be eliminated; it totally lacks justification.

Writing is used in mathematics, music, and language. In all three cases, the graphic deixis iconically represents the relevant operative, performative, and phonetic concepts, respectively, and the represented concepts are again signifiers for concepts of mental, instrumental, or pronunciational operations.

In theatre, one of the foundational cultural practices of human societies, we may also identify certain deictic cascades. D1: The framing deixis of theatricality (“I am now acting, and not behaving naturally”); D2: The narrative deixis (“I am now playing the role of a character in the story X”); D3: The aesthetic deixis (“I am shaping this role in a certain way and signing this version as “this way” of playing it here now”). As this example shows, the deictic emphasis increases down through the iterative cascade, because its third instance points to the manner, the timbre, the je-ne-sais-quoi of the present experience; the deepest deixis is perceived as the strongest or most intense, since it can not be contained in a nominal concept. This may contribute to explaining the forceful impact of art in general and in particular. The here-now-this-ness could be the root of beauty.