Spatial Deixis The Use of Spatial Co-ordinates in Spoken Language

On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: (Ecce Homo. F. Nietszche) The idea of a speaker 'pointing out ' something in space or time in order to draw the attention of the addressee to it is basic to both spatial and temporal deixis (see e.g. Lyons 1977, Fillmore 1982b, Lakoff 1987). The reason why it has come to be represented by a specific linguistic category and thus has special terminology is that all languages in some way or another allow for the 'pointing out ' feature to be incorporated into their grammar. As we shall see, not all languages make the same distinctions with regard to deixis, but nevertheless it features to some extent in every natural language. The present essay wil l concentrate specifically on spatial deixis with examples from spontaneous spoken dialogue in English. Deixis is particularly important in dialogue because it serves to hold the participants to a specific point in time and space. Without such anchorag