128 Francis Cornish
(9)
HIGHEST
ipse
hic
Deixis iste
ille
is
se
LOWESTHence, to use my own English example, in (10), the distal demonstra-
tive determiner is used initially, since the intended referent is new to the
discourse, the addressee being assumed not already to have noticed it:
(10) [It is dusk, and John and Mary are returning from a shopping trip. As John
is parking the car, Mary exclaims:]
Good God! Look at that incredibly bright light! [Mary gestures towards a
point in the evening sky] What on earth do you think it could be? (Cornish
1999: 26, ex. (2.6a))
Here, the indexically ‘stronger’ determiner that, together with the lexical
component of the term and the associated gesture, are used initially, since
the addressee John is assumed not already to be attending to the bright
light in question; while the indexically ‘weaker’ ordinary pronoun it is used
in the second sentence to refer back to something assumed by this point to
be within his attention focus.
But it is not just the ‘degree of obviousness’ of a given referent in a dis-
course which is the criterial factor in the organization of the field of
DEIXIS, in the CS sense. It is also, and mainly, that referent’s degree of
importance, as judged by the speaker, within the immediate discourse at
the point of use, which determines which form will be chosen from within
the relevant scale. This is the so-called ‘direct’ strategy for referent
establishment, the strategy in terms of the assumed degree of obviousness
of the referent being the ‘indirect’ one.
DEIXIS, in the CS conception, is claimed to be encoded by (among
other expression-types) clitic pronouns of different varieties. Clitic reflex-
ive pronouns in languages such as Latin, French and Spanish (but not in
English, where reflexive pronouns are not clitic and so have different dis-
tributional properties) signal the lowest degree of DEIXIS (in this sense of