Pointing with Words: Deixis, Joint Attention, and Vocatives

“Put that there tomorrow.” The sentence is grammatical, but without a scene it is nearly useless. What object? Which place? Tomorrow relative to when?

Words such as I, you, here, there, now, then, this, and that are deictic: they direct a listener to recover a referent from a context. They are less like labels printed on objects and more like coordinates whose zero point moves with the speaker, time, place, discourse, or adopted perspective.

The deictic field

The usual deictic center is the current speaker at the current place and time. But language shifts centers easily. In “Maya called from Milwaukee and said, ‘I’ll be here tomorrow,’” I, here, and tomorrow inside the quotation are anchored to Maya’s reported speech situation, not automatically to the present narrator.

This and that do more than measure distance

Beginner rules often define this as near and that as far. Physical distance matters, but real use also tracks:

• whether the referent is currently visible;
• who is attending to or holding it;
• whether it was just mentioned or is about to be introduced;
• emotional or interactional stance;
• contrast with another candidate;
• the speaker’s adopted viewpoint.

A server can say “How is that tasting?” about a plate physically near the diner. A storyteller can say “And this is the surprising part” about an event decades away. Diessel argues that demonstratives are fundamentally tied to coordinating joint attention, often with gesture, and that this communicative role connects their spatial, discourse, developmental, and grammatical behavior ¹.

Joint attention is not merely two people looking in the same direction. Each participant has evidence that the focus is shared. Pointing, gaze, demonstratives, naming, and repair can establish or update that common focus.

Reference is collaborative

Suppose two mugs sit on a table:

A: Pass me that mug.
B: The blue one?
A: Yes, thanks.

The phrase that mug underdetermines the referent. B proposes a candidate; A confirms it. Successful reference emerges across turns.

This explains why “be more specific” is sometimes impossible in advance. Speakers design a reference from what they believe is mutually available; recipients display whether that belief was sufficient. When it is not, repair refines the description.

Chat is an address, not a new person

Streamers say things such as “Chat, is this real?” or “What do you think, chat?” Some observers playfully call this a fourth-person pronoun. A Way with Words offers a simpler analysis: chat is a noun used vocatively to address the audience ².

Run the substitution test:

• “Audience, should we continue?”
• “Friends, should we continue?”
• “Chat, should we continue?”

The noun changes; the first-person plural subject we and the sentence’s grammar do not. That is evidence for a vocative, not a new grammatical person.

A vocative can sit outside the clause’s argument structure:

• “Maya, the door is open.”
• “The door is open, Maya.”

Maya is addressed but is not the grammatical subject of is open. Prosody and punctuation often set the vocative apart.

The page also describes chat as standing for the larger audience or streaming community. Be cautious with terminology: meronym normally names a part in a part–whole relation, while metonymy is the broader figure in which one associated expression stands for another. Here, the secure grammatical claim is vocative noun; the exact semantic pathway can be analyzed separately.

Semantics versus inference

If a person points at two chairs and says “I like that one,” the demonstrative helps identify a referent. A listener may additionally infer distance, disapproval of the other chair, or a request to buy the selected one. Those conclusions are not all encoded in that.

Keep two layers:

1. Semantic instruction: locate a contextually salient distal or contrastive referent.
2. Pragmatic inference: use the activity and conversational expectations to infer stance or intended action.

The scholarly literature on implicature provides tests and cautions for that second layer ³. Do not stuff every recurring inference into the dictionary definition.

The POINT method

• P — Place the center: whose person, time, and location organize the expression?
• O — Observe attention: gaze, gesture, visibility, prior mention, and contrast.
• I — Identify the grammatical job: pronoun, demonstrative determiner, adverb, vocative, or discourse marker?
• N — Name the referent: what candidate do participants display?
• T — Test uptake: confirmation, action, correction, or repair?

Practice lab: remove the scene

Collect five public examples containing this, that, here, there, now, or a vocative. For each:

1. Copy only the sentence and list what cannot be resolved.
2. Restore the surrounding scene or turns.
3. Mark the deictic center and attention cues.
4. Separate encoded reference from inferred stance.
5. Note any repair used to secure the referent.

Then write a text message whose here or tomorrow could be ambiguous across time zones. Revise it with an absolute place or date. Deixis is efficient when context is shared and risky when messages travel beyond it.

Rule of thumb

Deictic words do not contain their referents; they contain directions for finding them. Locate the center, follow attention, identify the grammar, and let the next action confirm the result.