I’m currently reading this and I’m having a pretty hard time understanding the ideas of animism-naturalism-totemism and cosmocentrism. Would be really grateful for an explanation and some enlightenment on this very abstract topic.

Also, would like to get a sense of what questions you had after reading this?

Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.

Epistemicity and Deixis: Perspectives from Central Alaskan Yupʼik (Tamura)

This week's paper was submitted by u/Lichen000 and talks about deixis in Central Alaskan Yupʼik. This might seem similar to the third edition of this activity which talked about spatial prefixes in Dargi, but this time I'm taking a slightly different approach. Instead, today I shall focus on demonstratives and, by extension, determiners. Now onto the prompts:

• Are there articles, determiners or demonstratives being used in your language?
  • If not, how do you express concepts like spatial proximity ('this house' vs. 'that house') or definiteness ('a man' vs. 'the man')?
  • If these exist, how do they work morphologically and syntactically? Are there any interesting distinctions like visibility or accessibility?
• How did articles etc. evolve, if you considered diachronics while creating your language?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

Submit your papers here!

So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_YBe0P3HsU

I've made this vid about an endonym,
Wherein you'll find a chat of deixis brief
And how it links with derivational
Morphology. What's more, I wrote it all
In iambs, with five feet per line. Enjoy!

(n.b. <deixis> /ˈdaɪksɪs/ )

Apologies in advance, this is going to be a bit on the niche side, and possibly veers a little bit into crank territory.

For those unaware, deixis is a category in modern linguistics that describes the pragmatic function of words in a statement which refer back to the context, and thus the act, of making the statement itself; deictic terms, in other words, are a specific form of self-reference. The classic examples of terms that often work via deictic self-reference are indexical pronouns: 'this,' 'here,' 'now.' Indexicals aren't always examples of deixis--they might be used, for instance, as anaphora, referring to the content of a previous sentence--but they function deictically when they refer contextually to the act of speaking itself. Linguists sometimes liken deixis to 'pointing' at something. For example:

• Anaphora: Toronto is a nice place; I like it here. ("Here" refers back to Toronto, which has already been named)
• Deixis: The weather in Toronto is terrible; I like it much better here. ("Here" refers to no previously elaborated content, but rather to the speaker's location, as understood by the hearer)

Anyway, in contemporary continental philosophy, I can think of at least two major living writers (Badiou and Agamben) who place various paradoxes that arise from uses of deixis at the center of their understanding of philosophy and language. In particular, both understand Russell's paradox as a paradigmatic example of a paradox that arises by admitting similar forms of self reference within formal languages; in this case, set theory. Thus, when Badiou describes ZFC set theory as the 'language' of pure multiplicity, ZFC's solution to the paradox--as I understand it, essentially axiomatizing away the possibility of self-reference--is the key feature that sets ZFC apart from 'informal' language. While Badiou and Agamben differ wildly in their philosophies of language, one thing that seems implicit in both is that a major difference between formal and informal language--and Agamben, at least, ties the function of philosophy directly to the experience of (informal) language--is that language as we use it in our everyday lives is irreducibly self-referential; and deixis is one of the key examples of this.

Why does this matter? In part because, if this is right, then it means that paradoxes of self-reference are ineliminable from the type of language that philosophy typically take

Some of my favourite clues are ones that refer to the solver, the setter, the act of solving or to the clue or grid itself. I'm using a fancy word here, but this week lets come up with clues that are either deictic or are just about clues or crossword puzzles in general.

(x-posted here)

I'm curious about more direct ways of expressing concepts in the vein of "the person he speaks to" and "the place you are in": The equivalent of basic deictics like "you" and "here", but as seen from a perspective that is distinct from the speaker's perspective.

The "second-order" qualifier in the subject line is meant to imply that that distinction of perspective can in turn be expressed via deixis, as it is in the examples. A diagram form may be useful:

> (I) -> he -> you

> (I) -> you -> here

In English, using the possessive form for the first yields "his you" and "your here", which I'd say are somewhere in the grey area between grammatical and not, as well as meaningful and not. Anyone come across any languages, natural or constructed, that handle this with more aplomb and elegance? :)

Hi guys!

I have a question.

If I point at a calendar and say 'we don't have school here and here,' does the word here pertain to time or spacial deixis?

I thought it should be spacial deixis, since the word 'here' usually belongs to that category. However, the referent are specific dates, which might pertain to time deixis, so I am really confused. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

I've been sitting on this idea for well over a decade, but like pretty much all of my conlang ideas, it's never gone very far. The idea is that, instead of inflecting nouns for case or number, have them inflect to indicate the person and relative position of the referent (where we typically would use demonstratives). I think this would open up a whole world of discourse potential. Most pronouns could be dropped entirely, replacing them with any short noun. This in turn could lead to interesting honorifics and indications of mood. I haven't really developed this idea yet, but a potential noun declension table might look something like this:

G

Since every place that would normally have a personal pronoun would now have (possibly the same) noun instead, I could see semantic saturation becoming a problem.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw the idea out there.

but "that's" neither "here" nor "there"!

This is a question for class. I have looked at Dore's primitive speech acts and the development of pragmatics and I can't seem to find information that indicates which would appear first.

Or at least direct me to somewhere that explains it well? I keep finding either too basic or WAY too complicated explanations of it and they never have enough examples.... And some say anaphora are deixis and some say they aren't? And then there are anaphoric deixis.... My head hurts just thinking about this all.

Hello, everyone!

This post is going to be discussing deixis in Qɨtec. You may have seen my comments on various 5moyd and TG threads on this subreddit, but this is my first actual post on Qɨtec (and my first actual post in general). Qɨtec is my most recent and by far most developed conlang; it’s the first time I’ve ever extensively explored the depths of language beyond morphosyntax, and most of the development of the language has been focused more on its semantics and pragmatics than anything else. I’ve recently been working on writing a grammar of Qɨtec, since it is, for the most part, not documented in writing. I plan on making more posts like this one, which will serve as small glimpses into various aspects of Qɨtec grammar.

Deictics are words whose meanings are contextually dependent (eg. ‘here’, ‘now’, etc.). Such words can identify referential identity, location, time, manner, etc. They are, as far as I know, a linguistic universal, yet still differ a lot cross-linguistically. Beyond their spatial function, deictics also often serve various discursive functions, which will be outlined in this post too.

There are five types of deictics I will be discussing – demonstratives, location, time, manner, and reason/purpose. Personal deixis will not be included in this post. Deixis in Qɨtec is split along three terms – proximal, medial, and distal. These are primarily defined by their relationship to the speech act participants (SAPs) of the discourse. Proximal refers to referents close to the speaker, usually within or almost within touching range; medial refers to referents close to the addressee, again usually within touching range; distal refers to referent far from both the speaker and listener.

ihi yon a-kuan-qe-sc-raka ce

leaf ᴘʀᴏx ᴅɪʀ-eat-ɴᴇɢ-3ᴘʟ.ᴇʀɢ-3ᴘʟ.ᴀʙꜱ-ᴘᴀʀᴛ ᴅᴇᴏɴ

‘This is a leaf, it is not edible.’

yunaq-esc ihlib hin as=keti

reside-3ᴘʟ.ᴀʙꜱ fish ᴍᴇᴅ shallow.water=river

‘The fish live over there [where you are], in the river.’

u-irab-ku-s-han incoqsan quzon-esc-la bi⁊a e-riga-ɨn-esc lijuo

ᴘᴇʀᴄ-call.to-3ᴇʀɢ-1ᴘʟ.ᴀᴄᴄ-ʀᴇᴘ tomorrow depart-3ᴘʟ.ᴀʙꜱ-ꜱꜱ ᴅɪꜱᴛ ɪɴᴅ-carry-1ᴘʟ.ᴇʀɢ-3ᴘʟ.ᴀʙꜱ bow

‘Tomorrow he will call for us; then we will leave, we will bring our bows.’

Even though pointing is not uncommon when a proximal referent is out of direct touching range, it is also not uncommon to see a speaker run over to touch something nearby when using the proximal. There is a small preference to physically touchin

having just 2, like in english (here & there) is popular in natural languages, although 3 distinctions are also found, as sometimes more. How is it with your language?

Hi guys!

I am taking pragmatics this term and we are currently learning about deixis. One of the statements my professor said today was how person, time, social, and discourse deixis are based from space deixis. I have thought about this problem a lot but I did not understand what they meant by it, and would be very grateful if someone could explain it to me and provide examples to aid in my understanding.

Thank you!

Dive Deeper vol II: The World of Deixis

Deixis in linguistics refers to ideas whose semantic meanings are fixed, but requires additional information such as context to parse successfully. Common deictic categories found in languages include person deixis (pronouns etc.), spacial deixis, temporal deixis (words like "tomorrow", tense and aspect etc.), social deixis (honorifics), and discourse deixis. This installment of Dive Deeper will not go over every category in great detail, but strives to talk about enough to get people thinking.

§1: Spacial Deixis Categories

English has two states of spacial deixis, demonstrated in its demonstratives, "this" and "that", usually refering to the closer and the farther items respectively. However, this hasn't always been the case: English used to have "yon", a category farther than "that". This is a distance based system, with the three categories usually being refered to as "proximal", "medial", and "distal". WALS notes that languages with three or more adnominal demontratives are almost always person-oriented, which is the other system.

A person-oriented system divides the space by using the people in the conversation to deliniate the boundaries. An example of this is Hausa, with its four categories: "nán", if the item is near the speaker; "nan", if the item is near the listener; "cán", if the item is away from both speaker and listener; and "can" if the item is far away from both speaker and listener.

It is quite evident that languages can have a large number of such distinctions, or very few. Some notable examples from langauges include having a neutral demonstrative, distinguish if the speaker cannot see the item or don't know where it is, or having proximal/distal distinction only if they are close to the speaker. It is worth noting that a majority of natural languages have either two or three gradations of distance contrasts.

The things that a conlang should also worry about, is the fuzzy cases. Please think about how the following would be translated, noting that your translation may not necessarily use the same demonstrative as it does in English:

• I don't know where that is.
• This is on the way.
• That is it! (cf. when the speaker finds the item they are looking for)

§2: Metaphorical Use of Spacial Deixis

Sometime in English, we use "this" and "that" to refer to ideas, which don't have a physical manifestation. Consider the following responses to the question "Have you heard of t

I've read a lot about how some natural languages (amerindian languages, specifically Navajo) indicate deictal information on verbs of motion. Is there any specific documentation of this in either a grammar or some sort of scholarly paper? It doesn't have to be for Navajo specifically, because I'd love to read about it how it works in different languages in order to understand it more.

Montaut, A. (2015). Deixis et particule énonciative: l’exemple de to en hindi. Faits de langues, 45(1): 35-63.

10.3726/432041_35

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/plg/fdl/2015/00000045/00000001/art00003

I have been reading Brandom's work on Hegel and have been hitting a rather large vocabulary wall. I have listed some samples of the unfamiliar vocabulary. I know that these kinds of terms are important in analytic philosophy of language, so I was wondering if someone could recommend some articles about things like "indexicals" "tokens" and "types."

Although, for the most part, I grasp the meanings of these words, I want to make sure I understand how they are deployed, their history, and the important papers that develop them (or at least some good SEP articles on the debates surrounding this kind of stuff).

Also, are there any good general introductions to what analytic philosophers mean by "semantics?"

Just would love some stuff to read up on so I can better assess this material.

I'm trying to wrap my head around Deixis. I understand how it's related to pragmatics but I keep seeing it described as some kind of juncture between semantics and grammar too. I just don't understand.

The other one.

I'm trying to wrap my head around Deixis. I understand how it's related to pragmatics but I keep seeing it described as some kind of juncture between semantics and grammar too. I just don't understand.