The Heart of the Matter. Wesley M. Collins

Becker, and Duranti (whom we’ll meet later). In that chapter we will look in depth, and in ethnographic style, at a Mam agreement ritual.

      1.3.2 Linguistic methods and models

      Linguistically, I follow Charles Fillmore and John Lyons in terms of my discussion of deixis. We talked about this (if not about Fillmore and Lyons) a number of pages back. Deixis projects from a traditional “egocentric” idea of the deictic center. Actually, deictic notions aren’t limited to here and there, although these will be the most relevant in our study since it is spatial relations that particularly concern us. Regarding the fuller notion of deixis, Fillmore says: “I carry around with me, everywhere I go, my own private world. The spatial centre of this world is my location (here)…the temporal centre of this world is the passing moment of my consciousness (now)…the social centre of this world is me” (1998:40–41) (1998:40–42, parenthetical glosses, WMC). The speaker—ego—is the center point from which all deictic notions (person, place, and time) are determined. By virtually all accounts, deixis is quintessentially egocentric, based on where the speaker is at the moment of utterance. This deictic center serves like a surveyor’s monument stake, a binding starting point from which all deictic measurements are calculated. This deictic center anchors the meaning of the words you and me, this and that, now and then. These words don’t have an exact denotation like the word dog or joy or Ralph, things we can point to. Indeed, the term “deictic” means to point or indicate. The meaning of deictic terms is determined contextually. When I am speaking, the words I and me refer to me. But when the conversation swings and you are speaking, your use of I and me refers to you, not me. The same holds for here and there. Here is close to me and there is away from me; but when you wrest the floor from me and you are doing the talking, here is close to you and there is away from you—perhaps close to me. Which is which depends on who is speaking, and to whom. As complicated as this seems to be, deictics are among the early lexical forms that children acquire, albeit not without some confusion.

      The present study is not specifically about deixis, at least not directly; rather it deals with the formal, grammatical apparatus the Mam use that relates to and is defined by centeredness, of which the idea of a deictic center is the prime formal example.

      I also talk in chapter five about a field of linguistics called discourse analysis. The basic question here is, What makes a text a unified whole as opposed to a simple gluing together of unrelated sentences? A classic work in the field was done by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (1976), where they identify what they call ties between what comes earlier in a text and what comes later, like pronouns and their antecedents, and related vocabulary that moves a text forward as it unfolds. The study of discourse has tended to have two emphases. One deals with the mechanics of discourse, how the grammar of a language links what comes next to what has come before. The other downplays the grammar of discourse16 for a number of reasons and is more interested in the connected ideas themselves, how the story or the arguments flow from one proposition to the next.