Demonstratives in Spatial Language and Social Interaction: An Interdisciplinary Review
Open Access
- 25 November 2020
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
This paper offers a review of research on demonstratives from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, we consider the role of demonstratives in current research on language universals, language evolution, language acquisition, multimodal communication, signed language, language and perception, language in interaction, spatial imagery, and discourse processing. Traditionally, demonstratives are analyzed as a particular class of spatial deictics. Yet, a number of recent studies have argued that space is largely irrelevant to deixis and that demonstratives are primarily used for social and interactive purposes. Synthesizing findings in the literature, we conclude that demonstratives are a very special class of linguistic items that are foundational to both spatial and social aspects of language and cognition.This publication has 95 references indexed in Scilit:
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