A linguistic/cognitive system of “targeting” is proposed that unifies the traditionally distinct domains of anaphora and deixis. As a speaker communicates with a hearer, her attention can come to be on something in the environment — her “target” — that she wants the hearer's attention to be on as well at a certain point in her discourse. This target can be located near or far in either the speech-internal (anaphoric) or the speech-external (deictic) environment. At her selected discourse point, she places a “trigger” — one of a special set of mainly closed-class forms (e.g., English this, that ... More

A linguistic/cognitive system of “targeting” is proposed that unifies the traditionally distinct domains of anaphora and deixis. As a speaker communicates with a hearer, her attention can come to be on something in the environment — her “target” — that she wants the hearer's attention to be on as well at a certain point in her discourse. This target can be located near or far in either the speech-internal (anaphoric) or the speech-external (deictic) environment. At her selected discourse point, she places a “trigger” — one of a special set of mainly closed-class forms (e.g., English this, that, here, there, now, then). This trigger directs the hearer to perform a certain three-stage procedure. In the first stage, he seeks all available “cues” to the target. Such cues belong to ten different categories representing ten distinct sources of information. In the second stage, he combines the cues he has determined so as to narrow down to the speaker's intended target. In the third stage, he maps the concept of the target he has determined back onto the trigger and integrates it into the overall conception expressed by the sentence. A trigger is lexicalized to occur in a particular interaction between the speaker and hearer. This interaction incrementally leads to their joint attention on the target. In a special process of constructive discrepancy, the speaker can introduce conflicting cues that lead the hearer to resolve the conflict and find the intended target.