Joint attention and the development of the use of demonstrative pronouns in Turkish

Abstract

Demonstrative pronouns such as this, that, here, and there provide ways to encode or grammaticalize features of the context of the utterance (Levinson, 1983; Lyons, 1977). Most traditional analyses of demonstratives propose that these forms provide primarily specifications about the position and the distance of the intended referent with respect to the location of the speech event participants (e.g., Anderson & Keenan, 1985; Diessel, 1999; Fillmore, 1971; Lakoff, 1974; Levinson, 1977). For example, Levinson (1977) pointed out that demonstrative pronouns depict the clearest paradigm for pragmatic variation along a proximal-distal dimension. However, more recent linguistic work on demonstratives has turned its attention to interactional factors that determine the speaker's choice of specific forms (Hanks, 1990; 1992; Laury, 1996; Levinson, in press; Özyürek and Kita, 2000). Hanks (1992) states that cover labels such as "relative proximity" used for characterizing deictic reference "is not a matter of spatial contiguity. Instead, what is basic to deixis is the access (cognitive, perceptual, spatiotemporal) that participants have to objects of reference in the current speech event" (p. 60). Laury (1996), drawing on work on Finnish, shows that the meanings of demonstratives is not primarily based on concrete distance, but that instead, speakers use them to negotiate their mutual access to referents in conversation. Özyürek and Kita (2000) show that encoding joint attention of conversational participants is an essential semantic notion that is contrastively used in the demonstrative systems of Turkish and Japanese. In an overview of recent work on the pragmatics of deixis, Levinson (in press) proposes that the most important function of indexicality is directing the addressee's attention to some feature of the spatio-temporal physical context or indicating the speaker's presumption of the prior existence of that attention.