Linguistics 48–4 (2010), 1309–1342 0024–3949/10/0048–1309DOI 10.1515/LING.2010.042 © Walter de Gruyter

Differences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German texts*

VIKTOR BECHER

Abstract

The article presents a contrastive analysis of the use of English and German deictic expressions. Its focus is on the communicative role of these items, i.e., the way in which they are used by authors to communicate effectively with their readers. The analysis tries to combine a qualitative (discourse analytic) and a quantitative (corpus linguistic) perspective by making use of a small corpus containing the endings of 32 English and 32 German texts from the genre pop-ular science. All deictic expressions present in the corpus were manually iden-tified, counted and analyzed according to the function(s) they fulfill in their respective context. The results suggest that deictic expressions are more fre-quent in German than in English texts. Two (related) reasons seem to account for this finding: first, deictics figure more prominently in the German system of textual cohesion. Second, they were in many instances found to serve as an (optional) instrument for maximizing explicitness, a communicative strategy which is customary in German but not in English discourse.

1. Introduction

The present article compares the use of deictic expressions in English and Ger­man texts from a pragmatic perspective. It aims to address the different ways in which deictic expressions are employed by English and German authors in order to convey their ideas, interact with their readers and create textual cohe­sion. It will be shown that there are considerable differences in the English and German uses of deictic expressions, which are due not only to differences be­tween the two language systems, but also to the (tacit) norms and conventions which govern their use.

The current state of research does not permit a satisfactory definition of the concept of deixis. Anderson and Keenan (1985) adopt the “standard usage” in considering as deictics “those linguistic elements whose interpretation in

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simple sentences makes essential reference to properties of the extralinguistic context of the utterance in which they occur” (p. 259). When we go beyond the “simple sentence”, however, we find that this common sense definition no longer holds, because in actual written texts, most deictics do not refer to the extralinguistic context (which for the most part is not shared between author and reader and thus cannot be referred to), but to the context built up by the text itself (Ehlich 2007). How about “reference to properties of the linguistic and extralinguistic context”, then? The problem with such a definition — as well as with similar definitions which try to cover deictic reference in text — is that it blurs the boundary between deixis and a related phenomenon, anaphora. The following section, which reviews some important steps towards a theory of deixis, will thus be concerned with this important boundary.

The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we will discuss Konrad Ehlich’s approach towards a theory of deixis, which pays close at­tention to the different nature of deixis and anaphora and may thus serve as a useful guide for investigating the use of deictic expressions in text. After Sections 1.2 and 1.3 have introduced the data and hypothesis of the present study, the results will be presented and discussed in Section 2. The final section (Section 3), contains a short summary of the findings as well as some general conclusions.

1.1. Towards a theory of deixis: distinguishing deixis from anaphora

This section presents Konrad Ehlich’s (approach towards a) theory of deixis. The theory is rooted within the research tradition of Functional Pragmatics (see Redder 2008 and Rehbein and Kameyama 2006 for recent overviews). This research tradition views language as a “sociohistorically developed action form” (Redder 2008: 136) that a speaker may use to effect changes in the hearer’s knowledge. Ehlich’s theory of deixis was chosen as a basis for the study presented in this article rather than another approach to coreference or deixis (see below for references) because it pays special attention to the differ­ence between deictic and anaphoric expressions in terms of the cognitive proc­esses they trigger. It will be argued that this difference is crucial for the proper description of the use of deictics in written discourse. Since the focus of this paper lies on the contrastive study that it presents, this introductory section can do no more than outline the theoretical approach and present the termi­nology1 to be used, thus largely avoiding comparisons with other approaches to coreference (e.g., Ariel 1990, 2001; Gundel et al. 1993; Grosz et al. 1995; Arnold 2008) and deixis (see e.g., Herbermann 1988; Blühdorn 1995; Diewald 1991; Levinson 2004; and Sidnell 2005 for critical overviews of research on deixis).

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The traditional paradigm of personal pronouns is a ragbag of two fundamen­tally different groups of expressions (cf. e.g., Lyons 1977: 638–639 and the extensive discussion in Ehlich 1979). The so­called first and second person pronouns are prototypical members of the Zeigfeld der Sprache (= deictic field of language; Bühler [1934]), as they refer to the speaker (I, we2) and to the ad­dressee (you) of the respective speech situation, i.e., to entities of extralinguis­tic reality. They may be termed deictic expressions, or deictics (< Gr. deiknynai ‘to show, point out’).

The so­called third person pronouns (he/she/it, they), on the other hand, do not directly refer to the real world. Rather, they presuppose the existence of an antecedent, i.e., an expression in the preceding discourse3 with the same refer­ent, with which they can thus be said to be coreferential (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 3–4). Accordingly, these expressions may be adequately termed ana-phoric expressions, or anaphorics (< Gr. anapherein ‘to carry back’)4. In (1), for example, all three occurrences of it (in the last case taking the possessive form its) are coreferent with the antecedent noun phrase society.

(1) Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children.5

As the example shows, we can say that anaphoric expressions like it ‘indi­rectly’ refer to the world, i.e., through their antecedent (cf. Lyons 1977: 660). It thus turns out that the term pronoun is only suitable to describe anaphorics, which (in most cases6) actually stand for, i.e., instead of (“pro”), a noun, or rather a noun phrase (cf. Lyons 1977: 636–637 on the infelicity of the term pronoun). Deictics, on the other hand, are attention-managing devices (Ehlich 1992; a similar point is made by Diessel 2006) that may directly refer to extra­linguistic entities. They are the linguistic correlates of attention­directing ges­tures such as the pointing of a finger (“You!”)7. Whether through language or through gesture, the directing of the addressee’s attention takes place in a dem­onstration space which has its origo, i.e., its center, in the ‘here’, ‘I’ and ‘now’ of the respective speech situation (Bühler 1934). Following Ehlich (1982), we may say that while the function of deictics is to establish a new attention focus in the addressee (by directing their attention to an element of extralinguistic reality), the function of anaphorics is to maintain, i.e., to carry on, an existing focus8. That is, deictic and anaphoric expressions trigger different cognitive processes, which we will call deixis and anaphora.

So far, the difference between deictics and anaphorics is clear­cut. The con­fusion begins when we take the so­called demonstrative pronouns (this/these, that/those) into account, which we will call object deictics (following Diewald 1991: 228–230). These may not only directly refer to the extralinguistic world (“Look at that!”); it appears that they, like anaphorics, can also refer ‘indi­rectly’, as in the following examples.

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(2) To prevent the cataplectic attacks of narcolepsy, physicians can prescribe agents that increase the availability of norepinephrine in the brain. These include monoamine oxidase inhibitors [. . .].

(3) Applied to insects, transgenic technology can offer biologists new ways to investigate, control and exploit these creatures [. . .].

In (2) and (3), the deictic these is obviously coreferent with preceding lin­guistic expressions, its antecedents being agents that increase [. . .] in (2) and insects in (3). The only difference between the two uses of these is that in (3), its referent is pre­categorized as creatures. In principle, the deictic could be replaced by an anaphoric in both cases (they and them, respectively). Occur­rences of this/these like those above are usually called “anaphoric uses of deictics”. Such terminology, however, is problematic, as it implies that the deictic in this case triggers a focus­maintaining (i.e., anaphoric) instead of a focus­establishing/focus­shifting (i.e., deictic) cognitive process in the ad­dressee. If this were true, deictics could always be replaced by anaphorics. But as the following example shows, that is not the case.

(4) The outflows from the sun and its stellar contemporaries blew away the leftover gas and dust that threaded the space between them. This weak-ened the gravitational glue that bound them together [. . .].

In (4), no antecedent expression of this can be identified. The deictic seems to have the whole preceding sentence as its antecedent. It thus cannot be said to maintain an existing attention focus — the meaning of the whole sentence would have to be focused. The deictic rather establishes a new attention focus by shifting the addressee’s attention to the state of affairs expressed in the pre­ceding sentence (cf. Consten et al. 2007; Consten and Knees 2008). This is why the substitution of an anaphoric (it) for the deictic would have a confusing effect on the reader, to say the least. It is thus not surprising that anaphoric reference to “higher­order entities”9 such as states of affairs or propositions is rare (Webber 1991; Hegarty et al. 2001), while deictic reference to these enti­ties is so common that it can be said to have a “central function” in creating textual cohesion (Consten et al. 2007: 83). We should also note that once a higher­order entity has been referred to by means of a deictic like this, further reference to this entity may be made with an anaphoric (2007: 95): cf. It also weakened . . . as a possible continuation of (4). This observation too is pre­dicted by Ehlich’s theory: once the addressee’s focus has been shifted to a referent, the referent becomes accessible to (focus­maintaining) anaphorics.

The previous example has shown that, due to their focus­shifting nature, deictics work better in coreferring with complex antecedents than anaphorics. The following (constructed) example shows that in coreference with concrete

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1313

antecedents the two types of referential expressions also show a clear division of labor:

(5) [Modern computers]i can perform [different tasks]k. Theyi / #k / These #i / k . . .(a) # Theyk include mathematical calculations, text processing . . .(b) Thesek include mathematical calculations, text processing . . .(c) Theyi can solve mathematical equations, process textual data . . .(d) # Thesei can solve mathematical equations, process textual data . . .

The first sentence in (5) introduces two referents, modern computers and dif-ferent tasks. When we continue the sentence with a coreferential expression, the anaphoric they tends to be coreferent with the subject of the sentence (modern computers), while the deictic these tends to corefer with its object (different tasks) (cf. the provided subscripts). Sentences (5a) through (5d), which present possible continuations of (5), illustrate this. In these sentences the meaning of the predicate (include . . . vs. solve . . .) forces the coreferential expression to corefer with either the subject or the object of the preceding sen­tence. It turns out that when the “wrong” coreferential expression is chosen, the utterance is pragmatically awkward (marked with #).

The discussion of Example (5) suggests that deictics and anaphorics are in a quasi­complementary distribution (cf. Byron et al. 2008 for English; Bosch and Umbach 2007 for German), “quasi” meaning that there are cases where both kinds of coreferring expressions may be used in a semantically and prag­matically appropriate sentence (cf. the discussion of (2) and (3) above). This conclusion is supported by the findings of Bosch et al. (2003). In their study of a corpus tagged for coreference relations, they found that deictics more fre­quently refer to non­nominative constituents than anaphorics, which, in turn, more frequently occur with nominative antecedents. They interpret these re­sults as evidence for the Subject Hypothesis, which postulates that personal pronouns prefer subject antecedents while demonstratives prefer nonsubject antecedents10. This is exactly what we observed in Example (5) and what one should expect from the difference between anaphora and deixis as it has been outlined above, since it can be plausibly assumed “that entities introduced in syntactically prominent positions are more likely to be brought into focus of attention than ones introduced in a less prominent position.” (Gundel et al. 2003: 297)11

I have argued that it is misleading to describe the function of coreferential deictics in written discourse as “anaphoric”, since deictics are associated with a distinct cognitive process, namely the shifting of the addressee’s attention focus. It is plausible to assume that the focus­shifting function of coreferring deictics has developed from their function of directing the addressee’s atten­tion to objects of the (extralinguistic) speech situation (cf. Lyons 1977: 670;

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Diewald 1991: 110–111). But how exactly are the coreferential use and the extralinguistic use of deictic expressions related? To answer this question, let us draw a more accurate picture of deictic coreference in discourse that makes explicit its connection to extralinguistic deixis:

During discourse, be it spoken or written, the knowledge of the addressee is updated by each utterance. This enables the author of a written text to reconstruct the “running knowledge” of the addressee, which may then serve as a target of deictic expressions (Blühdorn 1993, 1995), i.e., as a demonstration space in its own right: text space (Eh­lich [1983: 89]; cf. Lyons’ [1977: 670] notion of a “universe­of­discourse”). From this perspective, coreferential deixis is not qualitatively different from deixis in (real) space or time, only the demonstration space is different (Ehlich 2007: 41). What both corefer­ential deictics and “real” deictics have in common is that they instruct the addressee to focus their attention on a referent already represented in or yet to be introduced into their knowledge (cf. Ehlich 1982 and Blühdorn 1993: 45). As for the cognitive process underlying deictic coreference, in many cases we should expect a refocusing rather than a focusing, assuming that an initial focusing of the addressee has already taken place (e.g., when the item referred to was introduced into the discourse).

In this section, I have stressed the differences between deictic and anaphoric expressions. Still, we should bear in mind that authors have considerable lee­way in deciding whether it is necessary or desirable to employ a deictic rather than e.g., an anaphoric. This becomes particularly evident when we recall ex­amples such as (2) and (3), where different types of referring expressions would do the job. In general, the choice of referring expressions in written discourse has been shown to be crucially dependent on the communicative in­tention of the writer (Moya Guijarro 2006) and on the assumptions she makes about the knowledge of the addressee (Arnold 2008). From this perspective deictic expressions may be seen as one particular way of achieving addressee orientation (cf. Böttger and Probst 2001). Now a host of contrastive studies12 has shown that English and German texts rely on quite different strategies of addressee orientation. English and German authors make quite different “glo­bal assumptions” about the addressee, which are an important factor influenc­ing the production of referring expressions (Arnold 2008). So it makes sense to ask which role(s) deictic expressions qua attention­managing devices play in the different strategies of addressee orientation operative in the English and German language communities. This is the purpose of the study to be pre­sented in the following.

1.2. Data and scope of study

Differences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German are rarely mentioned (but see Canavan 1972 and von Stutterheim 1997). The aim of the

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present study is to obtain a first impression of possible differences in the use of deictics in English and German texts. To achieve this, a mixed quantitative­qualitative approach was chosen: 32 random German texts and 32 random English texts were singled out for analysis. To ensure maximum comparability, all texts are of the same genre (popular science) and from the same time period (1978–2002). As it would not be feasible to manually analyze all occurrences of deictics in all 64 texts, only the last 10 orthographical sentences of each text were extracted to form a “minicorpus” of text endings. The structure of the corpus is outlined in Table 1.

Table 1. Structure of the corpus of text endings

English German

32 text endings 32 text endings320 sentences 320 sentences6213 words 5457 words39585 characters 41388 characters

It is no coincidence that the endings of the texts were chosen as a basis for the corpus to be compiled rather than their beginnings or middle parts. First of all, it was found that the text beginnings contain only few object deictics, since the introductory parts of popular science texts seem to be mainly concerned with introducing new referents rather than with referring to previously introduced ones. The middle parts of the texts, on the other hand, were judged to be quite heterogeneous (and therefore unsuitable for the compilation of a small­scale corpus), since they feature a variety of different discourse types such as short narratives or direct speech. In contrast, the text endings were found to be quite homogenous; they generally feature a short outlook that highlights the rele­vance of the topic of the article to the reader or to society as a whole (cf. Sec­tion 2.1.1 and the examples provided there).

The reader is reminded, however, that text endings are not necessarily repre­sentative of the genre as a whole — not to mention the many other genres of English and German. Research has shown that the use of referring expressions in general (Fox 1987, Moya Guijarro 2006) and of deictics in particular (Diewald 1991) is dependent on genre (but see Toole 1996, who argues that the same cognitive mechanisms are operative regardless of the genre at hand). Further study is needed to assess how far the use of deictic expressions in the investigated texts is influenced by genre­internal conventions (as opposed to crosslinguistically different communicative conventions). One possible way of doing this would be to repeat the study presented here using texts from other genres.

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Methodologically, the small­scale corpus used for the present study com­bines the best of two worlds, as it enables a qualitative analysis of all occurring deictic expressions in context while still being representative enough to allow for a quantitative perspective on the data. However, statistical significance was not computed in order to highlight the tentative character of the quantitative findings. It is not the prime goal of this study to deliver reliable quantitative results (the investigated corpus would be too small for that anyway) but rather to provide directions for further research by identifying items which seem worthwhile for detailed contrastive investigations on the basis of larger cor­pora (e.g., English then vs. German dann, cf. Section 2.4).

1.3. Hypotheses

Ehlich suggests that the high degree of complexity in German scientific texts (cf. Fabricius­Hansen 2000) “implies the use of a large variety of deictic ex­pressions being used for text organizing deictic procedures” (Ehlich 1992: 224) and that “English seems to have chosen different strategies for represent­ing complexity and abstractness in scientific texts. So English seems to be poor in deixis, German rich, and French even richer” (p. 225). Ehlich’s suggestions led to the formulation of the following two hypotheses for the present study: 1. The investigated German text endings make more frequent use of deic­

tic expressions than their English counterparts. 2. The reason for the frequency difference is a stronger reliance in German

on deictics for the establishment of textual cohesion.The hypotheses build upon each other: while the first hypothesis postulates a certain quantitative result, the second one makes a claim about its qualitative explanation.

2. Results

The deictic expressions13 identified in the corpus are listed in Table 2. The clas­sification underlying the table is deliberately heterogeneous: quality deixis is really a subclass of object deixis (see Section 2.3); and composite deictics might as well be distributed among the other classes. However, this would conceal an interesting finding: while composite deictics are an important re­source for German popular science authors, their use is almost nonexistent in the English text endings (64 occurrences in the German text endings vs. a sin­gle occurrence in the English ones). In contrast, English popular science au­thors seem to put much more emphasis on personal deixis than their German colleagues. Departing from these preliminary insights, the categories of deictic expressions listed in Table 2 will be discussed in the following sections14.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1317

Table 2. Types of deictics and frequency of occurrence in the corpus

English German

personal 98 42object 56 71quality 43 39temporal 27 39spatial 5 4composite 1 64total 230 259

2.1. Personal deixis

Personal deictics are of considerable interest for functional approaches to (popular) scientific texts because they “may reveal writers’ perceptions of their own role in research and their relationship with expected readers as well as the scientific­academic community” (Kuo 1999: 121). The initial finding that per­sonal deictics are much more common in the English than in the German text endings (98 vs. 42 occurrences, cf. Table 2) is consistent with the findings of House (1997, 2006). Summarizing her own and the empirical studies of others on English–German differences in communicative style (see Note 12 for refer­ences), she concludes that, inter alia, English discourse is generally character­ized by an orientation towards persons (“interactional”), while German dis­course tends to be content­oriented (“transactional”). As will be seen below, these different style preferences of English and German are indeed the most likely cause of the observed frequency difference.

Table 3, which lists the personal deictics found in the corpus, shows that almost exclusively plural speaker deictics (“first person”) were encountered15, i.e., English we, us, our and the corresponding German wir, uns, unser (which will be subsumed under their “dictionary forms” we and wir in the following; this practice will be adopted for all deictics discussed in the remainder of this article).

Table 3. Personal deictics in the corpus

English German

we, us, our (90) wir, uns, unser (39)you, your (5) –I, my (3) ich, mein (3)total: 98 total: 42

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The deictics were categorized according to referent type, where a broad dis­tinction can be made between reader­exclusive and reader­inclusive uses (cf. Harwood 2005). The results of this first classification can be seen in Table 4.

Table 4. Inclusive and exclusive uses of English we and German wir

English German

inclusive 46 (51%) 7 (18%)exclusive 38 (42%) 32 (82%)unclear 5 (6%) 0in direct speech 1 (1%) 0total 90 (100%) 39 (100%)

The table suggests that the frequency difference between the English and the German text endings is due to the abundance of reader­inclusive uses of we in the English texts. These will be given a closer look in the following section. (The 5 occurrences of we with unclear referents and the single occurrence in direct speech will not be dealt with.)

2.1.1. Inclusive we/wir. Interestingly, the referent of almost all encoun­tered uses of inclusive we is as extensive as society (Examples (6) and (7)) or even humankind (Examples (8) and (9)). That is, almost all occurrences of we in the corpus can be classified as “rhetorical we” (Quirk et al. 1985: Section 6.18).

(6) Today, as we live longer, exercise less, eat too much and smoke, many of us suffer from inflammation’s dark side [. . .].

(7) We must also become more proactive in addressing the state of our waterways, instead of reacting to each fish kill as if it were a limited, isolated crisis.

(8) But because we visualize numbers as complex shapes, write them down and perform other such functions, we process digits in a monumentally awkward and inefficient way.

(9) We are still some 80,000 years from the peak of the next ice age, so our first chance for an answer is far in the future.

The term “rhetorical” is quite a fitting label for the uses of inclusive we found in the corpus. By using the deictic, authors seem to pursue the rhetoric goal of highlighting the relevance of their claims and findings not only to humankind in general, but particularly to the reader of the article, who is included in the “global” reference of inclusive we. The deictic thus serves authors as an impor­

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tant means of achieving an addressee­oriented style. Tang and Suganthi (1999: 27) go as far as to claim that inclusive we, “far from giving the reader informa­tion about the writer, effectively reduces the writer to a non­entity”. The few uses of inclusive wir in the German text endings are used in a similar way:

(10) Auf diese Weise lernen Physiker mehr über die fundamentale Struktur unserer Welt [. . .]. ‘In this way, physicists learn more about the fundamental structure of our world.’

(11) Die Dunkelheit des Nachthimmels berichtet uns also von der zeitlichen Endlichkeit des Kosmos [. . .].‘The darkness of the night sky thus tells us of the temporal finiteness of the cosmos.’

(12) Was können wir also tun, um der BSE-Krise ein Ende zu bereiten?‘So what can we do to put an end to the BSE crisis?’

In light of these examples, it is evident that the difference in the use of inclu­sive we and wir is solely a quantitative one. In the German text endings, inclu­sive wir is used for the same communicative purposes as inclusive we in their English counterparts. However, the considerably less frequent use of inclusive wir suggests that German authors are more reluctant to use the personal deictic to project a reader into the text (cf. Thompson 2001) in order to highlight the relevance of the presented material. This reluctance can be seen as a result of the content­oriented communicative style of the German linguaculture.

2.1.2. Exclusive we/wir. The analyzed reader­exclusive uses of we/wir serve a very different function. In the corpus, authors use exclusive we/wir to refer to themselves and their research team (see (13), (14) and (16)) or to the whole scientific community (see (15)) in order to provide information about their methods (see (13)), to draw a conclusion from their findings (see (14)) or to give an evaluation of the prospects (see (15)) and limits (see (16)) of their research:

(13) Zum Beispiel werden derzeit von uns schon Mikrocontainer mit glattem perforiertem Boden genutzt.‘For example, at present we are already using micro containers with a smooth, perforated base.’

(14) Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place [. . .].

(15) But every risk factor that we are able to identify takes away some of the mystery.

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(16) Auch die Ergebnisse unserer Versuche in der Klimakammer liefern nur Auskünfte über einzelne Faktoren.‘The results of our experiments in the climate chamber also only pro­vide information about single factors.’

As the choice of examples already implies, no qualitative difference be­tween the English and German uses of exclusive we/wir could be identified. Quantitatively they also do not differ much.

The short contrastive analysis of English and German plural speaker deictics provided in this section could only sketch some of the most important differ­ences. For a more detailed contrastive analysis of we and wir in popular sci­ence texts, see Baumgarten (2008).

2.2. Object deictics

Within the category of (noncomposite) object deictics, only the “standard” demonstratives are represented in the corpus, namely English this, that and German dies ‘this’, das ‘that’. Rare (and slightly archaic) deictics like e.g., German jenes were not encountered. Table 5 presents a summary of the lexical items found in the corpus16.

Table 5. Object deictics in the corpus

English German

this (42) dies (53)that (14) das (18)total: 56 total: 71

The term object deixis should be taken in its broadest sense, because in English as well as in German only approximately a quarter of all object deictics in the corpus actually refer to (concrete or abstract) objects as it is the case in the fol­lowing example.

(17) [D]er Himmel glimmt im Licht des kosmischen Hintergrunds. Wenngleich wir große Fortschritte dabei gemacht haben, diesen Hinter-grund zu erklären, bleibt noch viel zu tun.‘The sky glows in the light of the cosmic background. Although we have made great progress in explaining this background, much remains to be done.’

In Example (17), diesen Hintergrund ‘this background’ refers to the aforemen­tioned cosmic background (additional examples of object deictics with actual

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1321

objects as referents are (2) and (3) above). In the remaining three quarters of all cases, the deictic focuses a higher­order entity in the addressee’s running knowledge (cf. Section 1.1):(18) Sowohl VLIW-Prozessoren als auch der Netzwerkprozessor haben Be-

fehlssätze, die zu den heute gängigen nicht kompatibel sind. Um diesen Nachteil zu umgehen [. . .]‘Both VLIW processors and the network processor have instruction sets that are not compatible with the ones common today. In order to avoid this disadvantage [. . .]’

In (18), dies is used to refer to a state of affairs mentioned previously (for an­other example of this type see (4) in Section 1.1). The author uses the pre­modifier variant of this in order to retrospectively categorize the state of affairs referred to as a disadvantage (cf. Consten and Knees 2008), thus tagging the prior discourse as the description of a problem, to which a possible solution is subsequently presented. The deictic thus contributes to the establishment of the discourse pattern Problem–Solution as it has been described by various authors (e.g., Jordan 1984; Mann and Thompson 1988; Hoey 1994, 2001). Deictic ex­pressions regularly serve as “cue words” signaling a variety of discourse pat­terns (cf. Grosz and Sidner 1986).

As the presented examples indicate, object deictics serve as an important means of establishing textual cohesion. A quantitatively visible correlate of this is that, as Table 6 shows, most of the analyzed object deictics refer to a referent mentioned in a previous sentence (as opposed to a referent mentioned in the same sentence).

Table 6. Sentence-external vs. sentence-internal coreference with object deictics

English German

external 43 (77%) 57 (80%)internal 13 (23%) 14 (20%)total 56 (100%) 71 (100%)

Interestingly, this tendency seems to be stronger in German than in English. In fact, the overall frequency difference in object deictics seems to be due to the fact that demonstratives with sentence­external antecedents are more frequent in the German text endings than in the English ones (57 vs. 43 occurrences). While the figures are too small to draw firm conclusions, they do suggest that object deictics are indeed more central to the German system of cohesion (cf. hypothesis 2 in Section 1.3); in the German text endings, object deictics are more frequently used to establish coreference relations across sentences than they are in the English ones.

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2.3. Quality deictics

The quality deictics found in the corpus are listed in Table 7.

Table 7. Quality deictics in the corpus

English German

soa (8) so (10)such as (13) so . . . wie (7)so that, so . . . that (3) so dass, sodass (7)such + NP (17) solches + NP (8)– derartig (1)so­called (1), thus (1) so genanntes (5), sozusagen (1)total: 43 total: 39

a. The combination so far was counted as a temporal deictic, see Table 8 in Section 2.4.

The term quality deixis (Ehlich 1987: “aspect deixis”; Herbermann 1988: “modal deixis”) has been coined by Blühdorn (1993) to describe the deictic character of German expressions like so and solches. While object deictics re­fer to objects themselves, German so and solches selectively refer to certain qualities of objects (Ehlich 1987; Blühdorn 2003: 22–28; Umbach and Ebert forthcoming). It turns out that this analysis is also valid for English so and such. In (19), for example, so refers to the quantity of the listed areas of physics.(19) The concept of negative energy touches on many areas of physics: grav-

itation, quantum theory, thermodynamics. The interweaving of so many different parts of physics illustrates the tight logical structure of the laws of nature.

If the author had wanted to focus the aforementioned objects per se, he could have written these different parts of physics. The quality deictic so, however, creates an additional effect of emphasis: while these would just focus gravita-tion, quantum theory, thermodynamics, the specific function of so, modifying the quantifier many, is to establish a new attention focus on one of their “qual­ities”, namely their number.

Quality deictics, particularly such and solches ‘such’ can also focus several qualities at once. In (20), for example, solchen focuses certain qualities of the treatments presented in the preceding sentences.

(20) [Different ways of treating injuries are presented.] Mit solchen Verfahren und Mitteln ist auch ein Abheilen von Operationswunden zu erreichen [. . .].‘With such methods and agents, a healing of surgery wounds is also possible.’

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1323

The addressee has to infer from the context which qualities of the presented medical treatments are relevant to the healing of surgery wounds (and thus those that are being referred to). In Example (21), such even focuses all men­tioned qualities of the spins in question.

(21) For example, 150-femtosecond laser pulses have been used to tilt coher-ent electron spins, demonstrating that such spins can, in principle, be manipulated thousands of times before their coherence is lost.

The consequence of such “wholesale focusing” is that both German solches and English such may often be replaced by the corresponding object deictic (diesen in (20) and these in (21)) with hardly any change in meaning. The meaning difference between this and uses of such as in Example (21) is that the former favors an identity reading while the latter favors a similarity reading.

It is interesting to observe how the etymologically related quality deictics of English and German have developed different (yet still related) meanings. For example, the English collocation such as is used to introduce examples:

(22) The observational surveys under way, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, will enormously improve the data on both nearby and distant galaxies.

A comparable construction (*so/solche wie) is not available in German, where nondeictic expressions such as wie zum Beispiel ‘as for example’ are typically used for this purpose. But then, German uses so . . . wie, a construction very similar to such as, to draw comparisons:

(23) Wird es eines Tages künstliche Hände geben, die so gut wie die natürli-chen sind?‘Will there one day be artificial hands which are as good as the natural ones?’

Here it is the other way round: German uses a deictic where English would make use of a nondeictic expression (as . . . as).

We have seen that although English such as and German so . . . wie serve different purposes in discourse, they have one thing in common: both construc­tions rely on a quality deictic for coreference with the prepositional phrase that introduces the example or object of comparison. That the deictic is still “alive” in such as (as opposed to fossilized deictics like also, cf. Note 13) becomes apparent in the fact that this seemingly fixed expression can be taken apart. Cf. Example (24), where such fulfills the same function as in (22), although the deictic now modifies a noun (diverse conditions), thus providing special emphasis.

(24) [. . .] treating such diverse conditions as stroke, paralysis and Alzheim-er’s disease.

1324 V. Becher

Another example of different developmental pathways in English and German are uses of so establishing cohesion across clauses or sentences (cf. Gast and König 2008). In both languages, so may be used to refer to higher­order enti­ties. Cf. the following example from the English part of the corpus.

(25) Some of it may have been driven away by the outflows; if so, the jets may have served to limit the sun’s final mass.

Here, the “object” whose qualities are focused by so seems to be the proposi­tion expressed by the preceding sentence. (Note, however, that the epistemic operator may is not in the scope of so.) Such uses of so have probably been the starting point for the emergence of so as a causal connective in English (see (26)) and as a “verificative” connective in German (see (27)).

(26) We are still some 80,000 years from the peak of the next ice age, so our first chance for an answer is far in the future.

(27) Die numerische Simulation ist nicht nur deutlich billiger als das Ex-periment, sondern häufig auch aussagekräftiger. So ist es im Experi-ment sehr schwierig, Tropfenkollisionen gleichzeitig von verschiedenen Seiten zu beobachten.‘Numerical simulations are not only considerably cheaper than experi­ments, but often also more meaningful. As a matter of fact, in experi­ments it is very hard to observe drop collisions from different sides at the same time.’

Although it is by no means clear how the “verificative” relation (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) may be properly defined, the term describes the argumenta­tive function of so in (27) quite well. However, the verificative connective as a matter of fact (see gloss) seems to be too strong a translation. The close but semantically vague connection that German so imposes on its two conjuncts has no direct equivalent in English; it can only be paraphrased as something along the lines of ‘in accordance to what has been said before’.

Much more could (and needs to) be written about the mostly uncharted ter­ritory of English and German quality deictics. For the moment, suffice it to say that:

1. English so/such and German so/solches have retained their deictic force. Even collocations like such as still rely on the “pointing” per­formed by the contained quality deictic.

2. Although the quality deictics of English and German have followed dif­ferent trajectories of semantic development, both fulfill a very similar function in discourse, namely the establishment of semantic relations within and across clauses as well as sentences.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1325

2.4. Temporal deictics

The temporal deictic expressions found in the corpus are listed in Table 8.

Table 8. Temporal deictics in the corpus

English Germana

so far (1) bisher (7), bislang (4)now (7), today (7), these days (1), this century (1), this year (2)

jetzt (2), nun (3), heute (5), derzeit (4), dieses Jahr (1)

then (4), soon (4) dann (10), bald (3)total: 27 total: 39

a. Some of the German deictics have adjectival variants (such as heutig < heute), which are not listed separately.

A first glance at the table already reveals a difference between the English and German data sets: the German text endings contain more temporal deictics to express anteriority than the English ones (11 occurrences of bisher and bislang [both meaning ‘so far, until now’] vs. 1 occurrence of so far). A frequency count in the full texts from which the corpus of text endings was compiled confirms this result: 104 occurrences of bisher and bislang vs. 16 occurrences of so far (until now and up to now: 1 occurrence each)17.

Why is this type of temporal deictic so much more common in the German texts than in the English ones? Consider the following two examples of the German temporal deictics in question, bisher and bislang.

(28) Auf diese Weise hoffen die Forscher, das bislang hohe Rückfallrisiko von Patientinnen mit Eierstockkrebs zu verringern.‘In this way, researchers hope to reduce the relapse risk of patients with ovarian cancer, which has been high so far.’

(29) Nach derzeitigem Kenntnisstand konserviert ein Schutzmantel aus Kunstharz die Stücke bisher am besten.‘According to current knowledge, a protective coating of synthetic resin so far conserves the pieces best.’

Examples (28) and (29) are intended to illustrate the observation that the use of the deictics bisher and bislang in the corpus would make a somewhat redun­dant impression on most Anglophone readers; the glosses provided in italics sound even more awkward than in the previously cited material. In both cases, the meaning of the deictic is easily inferable from the context. When in (28) the reader is told that researchers want to reduce the relapse risk of cancer patients, she will understand that the risk has only been and will only continue to be

1326 V. Becher

high until the researchers succeed in their efforts. And in Example (29) a quan­tity implicature18 (cf. Levinson 1983: Ch. 3) suggests that the described protec­tive coating only works best according to current knowledge — which, as the reader will know, is subject to constant change. In both cases, a felicitous trans­lation to English can only be achieved when the temporal deictic is omitted altogether:

(28′) In this way, researchers hope to reduce the high relapse risk of patients with ovarian cancer.

(29′) According to current knowledge, a protective coating of synthetic resin conserves the pieces best.

The upshot is that bisher and bislang, by encoding meanings which would otherwise be inferable from the context, are used by German authors to in­crease the explicitness of their texts. This result is consistent with findings from several studies which suggest that German discourse tends towards a greater degree of explicitness than English discourse (see e.g., Stein [1979] and House [2004a], [2004b]; for a summary of earlier studies see House [1997: 88–95]).

A second difference between English and German lies in the diverging use of then and dann ‘then’. While the two deictics are almost identical in mean­ing, it seems that they are put to very different uses by English and German popular science authors. In the English text endings, then is chiefly19 used to express temporal relations:

(30) Conventional structural biology is based on purifying a molecule, coax-ing it to grow into crystals and then bombarding the sample with x-rays.

(31) A laser pulse excited a ‘puddle’ of coherently precessing electrons, much as in the lifetime experiments, but then a lateral electric field dragged the electrons through the crystal.

(32) If humankind is still here in 2050 and still capable of doing SETI searches, it means that our technology has not yet been our own undoing — a hopeful sign for life generally. By then we may begin considering the active transmission of a signal for someone else to find [. . .].

In Examples (30) and (31), then is used to make clear that the temporal relation between the described actions or events is a sequential one; and in Example (32), then refers to an earlier mentioned point in time (we could say that the deictic is coreferential with the expression in 2050) (cf. Schiffrin 1992). In contrast, only two occurrences of dann in the German text endings are used to express temporality. In the eight other cases, dann refers to a hypothetical state of affairs, as in the following examples.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1327

(33) Im zweiten Fall könnte die erhöhte Temperatur bestimmte Immunfunk-tionen verstärken, also die Antigenität verbessern; das Immunsystem würde dann den Kampf gegen den Krebs aufnehmen beziehungsweise ihn verstärkt führen.‘In the second case, the heightened temperature could strengthen certain immune functions and thus improve antigenity; the immune system would in this case enter combat against the cancer or intensify it.’

(34) [. . .] sodass die Dunstpartikel unter bestimmten Umständen vielleicht die Atmosphäre eben doch aufheizen, statt sie abzukühlen. Dann würde der Arctic Haze den Treibhauseffekt in der Nordpolarregion sogar verstärken.‘. . . so that the vapor particles under certain conditions perhaps do heat up the atmosphere instead of cooling it down. In this case the Arctic haze would even intensify the greenhouse effect in the northern polar region.’

In both examples, we could say that a hypothetical state of affairs is set up as a mental space (cf. Fauconnier 1985) in the cognition of the addressee (cf. Dancygier and Sweetser 1997 on English if . . . then). In (33), the non­factuality of the state of affairs is marked by the subjunctive and in (34) by the adverb vielleicht ‘perhaps’ (cf. Fauconnier 2007: 371–372). Subsequently, the state of affairs is referred to by the temporal deictic dann. It is characteristic of such uses of dann that they may be replaced by in diesem Fall ‘in this case’ or similar (deictic) paraphrases which make explicit that reference is not being made to a point in time but to an imagined state of affairs (cf. the English glosses).

Again the result was confirmed by a complementary analysis of the full texts from which the text endings corpus was extracted. The analysis identified oc­currences of English then which were similarly used to refer to hypothetical states of affairs. But while in German popular science texts it seems to be cus­tomary to gradually set up complex hypothetical states of affairs which are later referred to by means of dann, ‘hypothetical then’ is rare in the full English texts and confined to the conditional construction if . . . then.

2.5. Composite deictics

The composite deictics (a translation of Rehbein’s [1995] term zusammenges-etzte Verweiswörter) of English and German are more or less frozen com­pounds of a deictic20 and a preposition21. In most cases, the two components still fulfill their original function:

1328 V. Becher

– The deictic instructs the addressee to direct his attention to a referent retrievable from the extralinguistic context or from his knowledge.

– The preposition (syntactically) anchors the focused referent in the con­taining clause and (semantically) relates it to the clause’s meaning.

(Rehbein 1995, similarly Braunmüller 1985 and Pasch et al. 2003: 9–11, 557–562)

However, there are also composite deictics which are fossilized, i.e., whose components have not retained their original function. Instead, these words have grammaticalized e.g., into connective adverbs (e.g., therefore22) or sub­ordinating conjunctions (e.g., German indem, originally ‘in’ + ‘that’). In English, this tendency seems to be much stronger than in German. The following exam­ple (adapted from Waßner 2004: 380; capitals indicate stress) is representative:

(35) [A discovers B smoking](a) Deshalb gehst Du immer auf den Balkon!(b) * Therefore you are always going on the balcony!(c) ThaT’s why you are always going on the balcony!

As Example (35) shows, deshalb ‘therefore’ may be used to refer to a state of affairs present in the situational, i.e., extralinguistic context (B’s smoking) (cf. Pasch et al. 2003: 3–4). This is only possible because speakers of German still analyze des­ as a deictic (although ­halb no longer exists as an independent preposition in German; see Rehbein 1995 for a detailed analysis of deshalb). In English, however, therefore has lost its ability to directly refer to extra­linguistic entities and is thus confined to its use as a connective.

The partial loss of their deictic force seems to be one reason for the English composite deictics’ decline. Words like therewith, hereby and hitherto have become increasingly rare, archaic, and confined to formal registers. Example (36) shows the only occurrence of a composite deictic in the investigated corpus.

(36) Heating also slows the descent of gas toward the center of the galaxy and thereby reduces its tendency to transfer angular momentum to the dark matter [. . .].

It is quite evident that thereby has not completely lost its deictic quality, as it is still able to focus elements of the addressee’s running knowledge. In (36), there­ seems to refer to the state of affairs described in the preceding clause (‘Heating slows the descent of gas . . .’), while ­by establishes a relation of in­strumentality with the clause containing the composite deictic. The example also gives a first impression of the composite deictics’ versatility in establish­ing cohesive relations in texts. But despite their potential, composite deictics are a rare sight in contemporary English.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1329

In contrast, the composite deictics of German are still thriving; damit (da ‘there’ + mit ‘with’) has even undergone a notable increase in frequency in popular scientific texts from 1978 to 2002 (Becher 2009). Table 9 lists the German composite deictics present in the corpus along with their respective frequencies.

Table 9. Composite deictics in the German text endings

damit (11) dabei (7) dazu (6) dafür (4)darüber (4) daher (3) daran (3) darin (3)somit (3) außerdem (2) daraus (2) davon (2)deshalb (2) trotzdem (2) zudem (2) dadurch (1)danach (1) daraufhin (1) darunter (1) demnach (1)deswegen (1) hierfür (1) hierzu (1)total: 23 types, 64 tokens

Even more striking than the overall frequency of the German composite deic­tics is their high type count: There are 23 different types of composite deictics present in the German part of the text endings corpus. The fact that some of them are nearly synonymous (e.g., deshalb and deswegen both translate as ‘therefore’) suggests that the high type count partially results from the authors’ desire for lexical variation23. Note that despite their large number, the 23 dif­ferent lexical items listed in Table 9 are but a small extract from the giant in­ventory of German composite deictics, which, according to an estimation by Rehbein (1995: 166), comprises at least 100 such words. Some of the more exotic items such as ohnedies (‘without’ + ‘this’) are analyzed in detail by Eggs (2003).

The qualitative analysis has identified three overlapping functions that the German composite deictics fulfill in the investigated text endings: (1) explic­itly realizing arguments of verbs and deverbal adjectives/nouns, (2) establish­ing textual cohesion, and (3) structuring complex sentences. Note that the functions overlap to a considerable extent, so they are perhaps better viewed as three aspects of the same overarching function, namely the establishment of coreference relations within and across sentences. In the following, the three aspects will be discussed in turn.

2.5.1. Explicit realization of arguments. Many instances of the composite deictics are used to explicitly realize arguments of (de)verbal constituents that would otherwise be inferable from the context. Note that this is almost never done to avoid misunderstandings. Instead, this “explicitating use” of compos­ite deictics seems to be the result of a tacit convention in German which postu­lates: “When in doubt, say it explicitly!” (cf. what has been said above on

1330 V. Becher

bisher and bislang and the references given there; Fabricius­Hansen 2005: 43 postulates a similar principle [“Be precise!”] for the use of connectives in German). Consider the following example:

(37) Was löst natürlicherweise den Nachschub an Surfactant aus und welche molekularen Schritte sind daran beteiligt?‘What normally triggers the supplies of surfactant and which molecular steps are therein involved?’

In (37), the composite deictic daran fills an argument slot of the deverbal adjective beteiligt ‘involved’. Note that the omission of daran would leave a perfectly grammatical and unambiguous sentence. While an English–German translation of the sentence could in principle render daran as therein, in the process, or the like, it would sound much more “natural” in English to dispense with a formal equivalent of daran. The following two occurrences of involved (taken from the full English texts), whose internal argument has to be inferred from the respective context, lend support to this intuition:

(38) Although our experiments showed the central role of NMDA receptors in a variety of learning and memory processes, it is probably not the only molecule involved.

(39) Although the standard picture of galaxy formation is remarkably suc-cessful, researchers are still far from working out all the processes involved.

Another example of explicitation by means of a composite deictic in German follows:

(40) In der theoretischen Analyse [. . .] tauchen formale mathematische Strukturen auf, die man in anderen Untergebieten der Teilchenphysik wiederfindet. Ein relativ einfaches Beispiel hierfür ist die sogenannte Bjorken-Summenregel [. . .].‘In the theoretical analysis, formal mathematical structures appear, which one finds again in other subdomains of particle physics. A rela­tively simple example of this is the Bjorken Sum Rule.’

Again both English and German can do without hierfür (‘here’ + ‘for’) or of this. But while we indeed find many occurrences of the English noun example without a clarifying postmodifier (cf. (41), taken from the full corpus), German seems to prefer the explicit solution.

(41) One especially interesting application of transgenic engineering is the improvement of materials that insects supply to humans. Silk is a prime example.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1331

With their syntactic flexibility and their variability in referential scope, com­posite deictics lend themselves to satisfying the apparent demand for the ex­plicit filling of argument slots in German.

2.5.2. Establishment of textual cohesion. Together with connective ad­verbs, composite deictics are the prime means of establishing textual cohesion in German (Pasch et al. 2003: 555; Redder 2009). (In fact, there is not even a clear boundary between the two word classes, cf. Rüttenauer 1978: 45.) For example, deshalb usually refers to higher­order entities like states of affairs or propositions when used in written text:

(42) Jedes Arzneimittel — selbst wenn es nicht verschreibungspflichtig ist — hat aber langfristig angewandt unerwünschte oder sogar gefährliche Nebenwirkungen. Ein kurzer Blick auf den Beipackzettel genügt. Eine völlig risikolose Chemoprävention, gleich welcher Krankheit, ist deshalb unmöglich.‘But every medication — even if available without prescription — has unwanted or even dangerous side effects in the long run. A glance on the package insert suffices. A completely risk­free chemo prevention, what­ever the disease, is therefore impossible.’

In Example (42), deshalb may therefore be replaced by another connective adverb such as folglich ‘consequently’ without any change in meaning. In con­trast to deshalb, the composite deictics dazu, damit and darüber frequently occur with first­order entities, i.e., objects, as referents:

(43) Diese können für solche Zellen verwendet werden, die im Körper als einzellige Schicht wachsen. Dazu gehören auch die Zellen, welche die Blutgefäße als so genanntes Endothel auskleiden. Damit ließen sich komplexere Gewebe züchten: als erste Lage ein einschichtiges Endothel und darüber ein dreidimensionales Aggregat [. . .].‘These [microcontainers] can be employed with those cells which grow in the body as a single­celled layer. To these also belong the cells which line the blood vessels as so­called endothelium. With these, complex tissues could be grown: as a first layer a single­layered endothelium, and on top of that a three­dimensional aggregate.’

In Example (43), cohesion is achieved in a very straightforward way: In every sentence, the reader is asked anew to focus24 a referent which was introduced in the preceding sentence — which would have quite a confusing or even irri­tating effect on English readers. German readers, however, are perfectly used to this constant (re)focusing, which overtly marks the cohesion of the text and, in the case of (43), helps maintain its strictly linear thematic progression (cf. Daneš 1974).

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The examples in this section can only hint at the crucial role that composite deictics play in the German system of cohesion. Whether with first­order or higher­order entities as referents, composite deictics are one of the most impor­tant tools that German authors use to signal semantic relations between phrases, clauses, complex sentences, and even whole stretches of text.

2.5.3. Structuring of complex sentences. The composite deictics of German may structure complex sentences by functioning as correlates, i.e., “semanti­cally empty symbols” (Dončeva 1982: 221) which fill a slot in the valency of the main verb (see also Pittner 2008: 87–88; Pasch et al. 2003: 559–560). They achieve this by establishing a coreference relation to what belongs in the slot, namely a subordinate clause which has been relegated to the end of the sen­tence, as in the following example:

(44) Wie empfindlich ein nützlicher Test sein müsste, hängt davon ab, wie viele BSE-Erreger nötig sind, um einen Menschen zu infizieren.‘How sensitive a useful test would have to be depends on how many BSE agents are necessary to infect a human.’

The prepositional verb abhängen von ‘to depend on’ takes only nonclausal objects. But this restriction is circumvented in (44) by means of a composite deictic which contains the prepositional part of the verb (­von) along with a deictic (da­ ‘there’) which acts as a substitute for the stipulated object. The deictic process initiated by da- remains active until the reader encounters the sentence­final subordinate clause, which is its only possible antecedent (more precisely: postcedent, cf. Note 3). The deictic thus functions as a device for managing the attention of the reader during the processing of the sentence (cf. Ehlich 1992).

3. Summaryandconclusions

Both hypotheses formulated in Section 1.3 have turned out to be supported by the data. First, although English cannot be called “poor in deixis” (Ehlich 1992), deictic expressions were found to be more frequent in the investigated German text endings than in the English ones. Second, a prime cause for the observed frequency difference seems to be that in German, deictics are much more important for creating textual cohesion than they are in English. Com­posite deictics in particular were found to account for a great deal of the German text endings’ cohesion by regularly instructing the addressee to focus their attention on previously established referents.

The high degree of explicitness customary in German discourse has been identified as another factor which accounts for the relatively high frequency of

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1333

deictic expressions in German. This has been especially visible in composite and (anterior) temporal deictics, which often have the sole function of explic­itly verbalizing meanings that would otherwise be inferable from the context. Perhaps the German norm of explicitness is even the overarching principle here, because the need for explicitness should of course entail a high degree of textual cohesion (which may be defined as the more or less explicit signaling of textual coherence, cf. Bublitz 1998). As a speculative — and, unfortunately, probably not falsifiable — hypothesis, I would like to contend that composite deictics have (almost) died out in English because of the lower degree of ex­plicitness customary in English discourse.

There is also an exception to the rule: the English text endings were found to contain more than twice as many personal deictics (almost exclusively plural speaker deictics) than their German counterparts. Again, this could be traced to previously established differences in English and German discourse norms: while English favors an addressee­oriented, “interactional” style, German dis­course tends to be content­oriented or “transactional” (cf. House 1997, 2006 and above). That this cross­linguacultural difference in communicative style actually accounts for the skewed distribution of speaker deictics across the English and German text endings is evident from the functions that these items have been found to fulfill. The locus of the frequency difference are not the exclusive uses of we and wir (38 vs. 32 occurrences), but their inclusive uses (46 English vs. 7 German occurrences; see Table 4 in Section 2.1) — and these are the ones which, by referring to addressee and author at the same time, are constitutive for the overtly addressee­oriented style which is typical of English and atypical of German discourse. It is also worth noting that personal deictics are distinct from other types of deixis in that they neither contribute to the de­gree of explicitness nor to the cohesion25 of a text.

It should be noted that this study most probably has not identified all factors relevant to the use of deictic expressions in English and German. In particular, due to the scope of the present study, differences in the grammatical systems of the two languages could not be considered in due detail. In his insightful book on typological differences between English and German, Hawkins (1986) draws the — quite audacious — conclusion that the grammatical system of German is inherently more explicit than the one of English. This means that “users of English have, in effect, more work to do in extracting meaning from form”, e.g., because “they must infer semantically relevant material that is not overt in surface.” (1986: 125). Although Hawkins’ generalization is certainly too strong (see e.g., Rohdenburg 1990; Kortmann and Meyer 1992), his obser­vations show that there are domains where the grammatical systems of English and German occupy different places on an explicitness–implicitness scale (cf. also Doherty 1999, 2002). This raises the question to what extent differ­ences in communicative norms are really an adequate explanation for English­

1334 V. Becher

German contrasts in language use. In fact, crosslinguistically different com­municative norms themselves are in need of an explanation. It may well be that some of these norms ultimately go back to typological differences between the two language systems, which would then be the “real” explanation for the ob­served differences in language use. A follow­up study to the present one that focuses on typological differences between English and German would thus promise to be a fruitful endeavor.

The findings of the present study have particularly important implications for language teaching and translation. English students learning German and German students learning English should be made aware that the strategies they employ when conveying their thoughts in their mother tongue do not nec­essarily work as expected in the foreign language. Of course, cautioning native English students against the use of too many inclusive plural speaker deictics in German (and vice versa) is a trivial matter. It will be much more difficult, for example, to sensitize German students to the use of deictics in their English compositions, because a constant (re)focusing of the addressee is not custom­ary in English texts. In fact, chances are that this very article exhibits an over­use of certain deictic expressions, since it has been written by a native speaker of German. The subtle crosslinguistic differences in the use of deictics discov­ered in this study are also relevant to translation. In particular, the results shows that a mere adaption of a raw translation provided by the computer (the prob­lems of which are addressed by e.g., de Andrade Stupiello 2008) cannot do justice to the different ways in which the attention of the addressee is managed in English and German texts.

On the methodological side, the “minicorpus” of text endings used in this study has proven to be a valuable tool for written discourse analysis, and a surprisingly reliable one: where the figures obtained from the text endings cor­pus were small, complementary analyses of the full texts from which the text endings originate were found to confirm the impressions gained from the text endings.

Of course, the usual disclaimers apply to this study: it cannot be taken for granted that the results are generalizable beyond the boundaries of the investi­gated genre, other ways of expressing deixis (e.g., verbal tense) should be taken into account, etc. Above all, a follow­up study should address the use of anaphoric expressions in English and German texts and in particular how it relates to the use of deictics. It is possible that since English seems to make less use of focus shifting (= deixis) than German, it relies more on focus mainte­nance (= anaphora).

Received 29 April 2008 University of HamburgRevised version received 17 January 2010

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1335

Notes

* The research for this article has been carried out within the project Verdecktes Übersetzen — Covert Translation. The project led by Juliane House is part of the Collaborative Research Center on Multilingualism located at the University of Hamburg and funded by the German Research Foundation, whom I thank for their generous support. I am indebted to Kalynda Beal, Hardarik Blühdorn, Konrad Ehlich, Juliane House, Svenja Kranich, and two anony­mous referees for critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. The article has par­ticularly benefited from many inspiring discussions with Hardarik Blühdorn. Correspon­dence address: SFB Mehrsprachigkeit, Teilprojekt K4, Max­Brauer­Allee 60, D­22765 Hamburg, Germany. E­mail: viktor.becher@uni­hamburg.de.

1. Blühdorn (1995: 109) notes that authors following different strands of research often associ­ate radically different concepts with the term deixis despite using the same terminology, thus making productive communication difficult. In the literature, many misunderstandings occur where researchers have wildly different ideas about what deixis is while erroneously think­ing that they are talking about the same thing. The reader is asked to bear in mind that this article is based on a distinct view of deixis (and anaphora) which is neither representative of nor necessarily compatible with other views of deixis. For example, many authors regard the so­called third person pronouns (he, she, it) as deictic (Lyons 1977: 650 calls them “pro­nominal deictics”), while they are treated as nondeictic (but anaphoric) in this article, since they are not associated with a focus shift in the addressee (see Section 1.1 for details). The question of whether to treat third person pronouns as deictic or nondeictic depends on whether one, very broadly speaking, understands deixis as “situation­dependent reference” (which would make them deictic) or — as it is done in this article — adopts a notion of de­ixis as “a specific way of attention­management in discourse” (which would make them nondeictic) (cf. Blühdorn 1995: 133).

2. With we the case is a bit more complicated, as it can also refer to the addressee of the utter­ance (see Section 2.1.1).

3. In the much rarer case of cataphoric coreference, the pronoun in question is coreferent with a linguistic expression in the following discourse, which may thus be called its postcedent.

4. This article exclusively uses the terms anaphoric expression and anaphoric for the lexical items in question in order to avoid confusion with the term anaphor as it is used in Binding Theory (for reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, cf. Chomsky 1981).

5. This example and the following ones are taken from the corpus described in Section 1.2 un­less stated otherwise.

6. Under certain circumstances third person pronouns may occur without an antecedent expres­sion (Yule 1982; Sanford et al. 1983; see Gundel et al. 2002 for corpus findings). There are cases, for example, where the referent of the pronoun can be inferred from the prior dis­course (cf. Prince 1981: 236).

7. However, deixis and gesture are not the same. Sidnell (2005) rightly stresses that their con­tributions to communication are “often rather complementary than isomorphic” (cf. also Diewald 1991: 20–25).

8. Here and throughout the article, the term focus means the psychological concept (not the linguistic, i.e., information­structural one; cf. e.g., Garrod and Sanford (1982); Grosz and Sidner (1986); Gundel et al. (1993); Grosz et al. (1995); Arnold (2008).

9. In classifying referents of deictic expressions, I draw on the ontological classification of entities proposed by Lyons (1977: 442–446) and refined by Dik (1997: Ch. 12) and Blühdorn (2003: 16–19, 2008). Simplifying somewhat, the classification distinguishes between first­order entities (objects) and higher­order entities (states of affairs, propositions and pragmatic

1336 V. Becher

options). More fine­grained distinctions will not be necessary for the purpose of this article. Deictics may refer to both first­order and higher­order entities.

10. Similar results were obtained in a psychological follow­up study by Bosch et al. (2007) and in corpus­linguistic as well as psycholinguistic studies on English (Byron et al. 2008) and other languages such as French (Demol 2007) or Dutch (Comrie 1997; Kaiser and Trueswell 2004).

11. One could argue that the factors governing the choice of deictics vs. anaphorics are purely syntactic, an explanation in terms of focus of attention thus being unnecessary. However, in a reanalysis of the results by Bosch et al. (2003, 2007), Bosch and Umbach (2007) show that it is not the syntactic function of the antecedent (subject vs. nonsubject) but the discourse status of its referent (topic vs. nontopic) that really determines the choice of referring expres­sion: anaphorics prefer subjects as antecedents because subjects tend to encode discourse topics, i.e., referents that are repeatedly mentioned throughout the discourse and should thus be in the addressee’s focus of attention. Conversely, deictics prefer referents that are not discourse­topical and thus in need of focusing. What is more, many studies suggest that several other linguistic and nonlinguistic factors such as prior beliefs of the addressee (cf. Gundel et al. 2003: 287–293) have an influence on the choice of referring expression (see Kaiser 2006 and Arnold 2008 for research overviews stressing this point). These observa­tions strongly argue for the cognitive explanation put forward in this article.

12. See e.g., Byrnes (1986), Clyne (1987), Kotthoff (1989), Luchtenberg (1994), Fabricius­Hansen (2000), Böttger and Probst (2001), Baumgarten and Probst (2004), House (2006) and Becher et al. (2009). Some relevant contrasts will be mentioned below.

13. Only “exclusive deictics” (Blühdorn 1993: 47), i.e., expressions whose original and only function is deictic reference, were counted. “Paradeictic” expressions (Ehlich 1992: 226) such as last October and cases of fossilized or “dead” deixis (e.g., also, which originally consisted of ‘all’ and the quality deictic ‘so’ [Oxford English Dictionary 1989]) were ex­cluded from the analysis.

14. As the figures for spatial deictics are too small to allow meaningful conclusions, they will not be dealt with.

15. The other personal deictics will not be treated, as they appear clustered in few texts and thus cannot be deemed representative. (For example, all 5 occurrences of you, your are confined to a single sentence.)

16. Combinations like this year were counted as temporal deictics, cf. Table 8 in Section 2.4. 17. The full texts comprise approx. 100,000 words per language. 18. Something along the lines of: ‘according to current knowledge’ +> ‘only according to cur­

rent knowledge’. 19. The only occurrence of then not cited in this section is used as a contrastive discourse marker

(cf. Schiffrin 1992: 780–781). This use of then, which seems to be rather rare in written text, cannot be treated here due to the limited scope of the present study.

20. Most composite deictics contain a spatial deictic like English there or German da, which, however, often fulfills object­deictic functions (cf. Pasch et al. 2003: 10; Pittner 2008: 83).

21. There are some variations of this prototypical structure (cf. Pasch et al. 2003: 563; Pittner 2008: 76,), which need not concern us here.

22. The original meaning of the word (‘for that’) has survived in the (nearly extinct) adverb therefor.

23. Lexical variation seems to be an important locus of English­German language contrast. House (1997) reports on findings which suggest that in contrast to English, German dis­course prefers ad hoc formulations to verbal routines. And (tentative) corpus analyses pre­sented by Steiner (2008) and González­Díaz and Kranich (2009) indicate that German texts of different genres tend to have higher type­token ratios than comparable English texts.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1337

These findings suggest that German has stronger stylistic constraints on lexical repetition than English.

24. Note that the author has chosen to use (composite) deictics although anaphorics would have been possible as well. For example, damit could be replaced by mit ihnen ‘with them’ to the effect that no focusing would take place.

25. Personal deictics can engender cohesion as a side effect. They are usually repeated across sentences and thus create lexical cohesion, which, however, has nothing to do with their deictic nature.

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