Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person (review)

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the annual conference of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS) in 2001. Its eleven papers deal with empirical and theoretical investigations of different aspects of conceptualization and the encoding of local, temporal, and personal entities. A short introduction by the editor provides a synopsis of the contributions. The volume is divided into three sections, focusing on ‘Space’, ‘Time’, and ‘Person and text’.

Sérgio Meira’s paper about “Addressee effects” in demonstrative systems: The cases of Tiriyó and Brasilian Portuguese’ is the first of four contributions in the ‘Space’ section. It provides an analysis of the demonstrative systems of Tiriyó and Brazilian Portuguese, showing that the location of the addressee plays an unexpectedly important role in both. The second paper, ‘Deictics in the conversational dyad: Findings in Spanish and some cross-linguistic outlines’ by Konstanze Jungbluth, discusses findings from an investigation of Spanish demonstratives; it is shown that different relative positions of speaker and hearer(s) (e.g. face to face, face to back, etc.) yield different patterns of usage of demonstratives. Claudio di Meola provides a detailed analysis of ‘Non-deictic uses of the deictic motion verbs kommen and gehen in German’, showing that these verbs are not inherently deictic and that whether they have a deictic or nondeictic reading is context-dependent. In the last paper in this section, Ellen Fricke focuses on ‘Origo, pointing, and conceptualization: What gestures reveal about the nature of the origo in face-to-face interaction’.

The second section, ‘Time’, begins with Christiane von Stutterheim, Mary Carroll, and Wolfgang Klein’s paper on ‘Two ways of construing complex temporal structures’; the authors’ analysis of English and German data reveals that differences in the grammatical system lead to differences in the organization of information. Thomas Fritz discusses ‘“Look here, what I am saying!”: Speaker deixis and implicature as the basis of modality and future tense’. The third and last paper, ‘The “subjective”’ effects of negation and past subjunctive on deontic modals: The case of German dürfen and sollen’ by Tanja Mortelmans, advocates an integrated account of root and epistemic modals in German.

The last section, ‘Person and text’, includes four papers. Johannes Helmbrecht discusses ‘Politeness distinctions in second person pronouns’ and shows that these are areal phenomena. Unfortunately there is no information about the kind of data (texts, grammatical descriptions?) used in Helmbrecht’s corpus of in fact 101 (not 100) languages and the language families they belong to. The latter would have been interesting because he suggests contact-induced borrowing as one explanation for the areal distribution. Katharina Kupfer investigates the ‘Deictic use of demonstrative pronouns in the Rigveda’. In his paper ‘Towards a unified model of domain-bound reference’, Manfred Consten argues against an anaphora-deixis dichotomy, based on his analysis of cross-references between text and pictures in newspapers. Finally, Heiko Hausendorf’s paper, ‘Deixis and speech situation revisited: The mechanism of perceived perception’, discusses the notion of situation from a conversation analysis perspective.

This volume is well structured and provides interesting contributions to the study of deixis and its connections to cognitive and cultural aspects. It will be useful to anyone interested in these areas.