Demonstratives such as, “here” and “there”, “this” and “that” constitute a very special class of ‘spatial deictics’, which typologists seem to regard as a universal property of language. Moreover, even if demonstratives are not necessarily marked for distance, the data seem to suggest (e.g., Breunesse 2019) that the deictic contrast between distal and proximal demonstratives exists – at least in terms of the two-marked demonstratives (i.e., ‘here’ and ‘there’) - across different languages. The study of spatial deictics has therefore the potential to shed light on some fundamental aspects of language cognition tout court, and more specifically, their analysis may be revealing of the interplay between perception, action, and language. In fact, unlike other linguistic terms (e.g., nouns and verbs) for which the linguistic meaning is the essential factor for their usage and interpretation, demonstratives are semantically under-determinate, and in speech they highly rely on pragmatic and perceptual contextual features, such as the perceptual saliency of the referent in the context of communication, the coordination and negotiation of joint attention (Tommasello et al. 2005), expectations, and affordances.

Questions about the spatial demonstratives’ core features are addressed from various disciplinary perspectives, but the general interdisciplinary debate revolves around the role of space and embodiment in the cognitive mechanisms related to the interpretation and use of these special terms (Diessel & Coventry 2020): while some researchers regard spatial demonstratives as based on our bodily experience with (reachable and graspable) objects in the external space, others place much less importance on embodiment and consider spatial demonstratives as tool for social interaction. In the case of the distal/proximal demonstratives “this” and “that”, the debate also can be interpreted as a divide between two views of spatial deixis: the ‘Bühlerian’ view, according to which demonstratives allow for spatial referentiality via an egocentric strategy providing orientation in space (e.g., Bühler 1934; Coventry et al. 2008; Diessel 2014), and the opponent view deflating the notion of spatial reference and assigning centrality to social and interactive purposes (e.g., Jarbou, 2010; Peeters and Ozyürek, 2016; Gipper, 2017).

This work provides a preliminary assessment of the general debate on the distal/proximal deixis testing the two views for their ability to respond to the problem of the distal/proximal choice and alternation, which can be formulated as follows: what are the cognitive processes grounding the choice and interpretation of a distal vs proximal demonstrative in speech? The assessment will highlight the extent to which the Bühlerian approach is more suitable than the competing view in addressing the question, while also discussing some of its intrinsic difficulties. In fact, if spatial deixis is intended as based on an egocentric paradigm, and the alternation between distal and proximal terms (in English, ‘this’ and ‘that’) is guided by the relative distance between the speaker’s body (‘origo’) and the specific position of the demonstrative referent in space, then the notion of ‘distance’ and ‘space’ need to be further clarified as it can’t be defined in terms of physical space.

References

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Bühler, K. (1934). Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Fischer.

Coventry, K. R., Valdés, B., Castillo, A., and Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2008). Language within your reach: near-far perceptual space and spatial demonstratives.

Diessel, H. (2014). Demonstratives, frames of reference, and semantic universals of space. Lang. Linguist. Compass 8, 116–132.

Diessel, H., Coventry, K.R. (2020). Demonstratives in Spatial Language and Social Interaction: an Interdisciplinary Review. Front. Psychol. 11. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.555265

Gipper, S. (2017). Pre-semantic pragmatics encoded: a non-spatial account of Yurakaré demonstratives. J. Prag. 120, 122–143. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2017. 08.012Cognition 108, 889–895.

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Peeters, D., and Ozyürek, A. (2016). This and that revisited: a social and multimodal approach to spatial demonstratives. Front. Psychol. 7:222.

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