Pronominal Typology and Reference to the External World

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge in research on speech-accompanying gestures, often focusing on iconic gestures. This paper explores pointing gestures and their interaction with different types of 3rd person pronouns (e.g., anaphoric vs. deictic pronouns). While pointing gestures are often mentioned in the formal linguistic literature on deictic expressions, such as demonstratives, these gestures are less frequently investigated for their own sake. I aim to contribute to our understanding of pointing gestures by mapping the relationships that pronominal expressions can have with referents present in the utterance situation, and by investigating how they interact with pointing. I argue that pointing gestures are attention-directing devices that freely co-occur with anaphoric expressions; by contrast, the introduction of a new referent through deixis requires contrastive focus in addition to pointing.