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MONIKA FLUDERNIK Jespersen’s Shifters Reflections on Deixis and Subjectivity in Language Originalbeitrag erschienen in: Klagenfurter Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 15/16 (1989/90), S. [97]-116

KOS 15-16(1989-1990)97-116

Monika FLUDERNIK, Wien

JESPERSEN'S SHIFTERS:

Reflections on Deixis and Subjectivity in Language

The term shifter was first introduced by Otto Jespersen in his Language. Its Nature, Development and origin (1923) and was later taken up by RomanJakobson in his famous essay "Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the RussianVerb" (originally presented as a paper in 1956). 1 Jakobson, whose insights into

the nature of shifters closely correspond to Benveniste's conclusions about thenature of personal pronouns (Benveniste 1977: 195-230), concentrated on thefirst and second person pronoun as an illustration of shifters. This Benvenisteanand Jakobsonean emphasis has had the result of collapsing the categories ofshifter and first/second person pronouns. In a different book, Jespersen usesthe same tend shifting to apply to the change in perspective occasioned by themove from direct to (free) indirect discourse (Jespersen 1924: 292-299), and forsimple semantic reasons this understanding of the term shifter has also come to

flourish.It will therefore be necessary to recall the original linguistic definition of

what is being shifted by shifters, and for this purpose I wish to start out withthe authoritative Dictionnaire encyclopddique des sciences du langage, whichunder the section on reference includes a subsection on deictical pronouns, forwhich Todorov/Ducrot quote Jakobson's term shifters. The definition providedthere identifies as shifters all expressions whose reference can be determinedonly in relation to the partners of conversation (Todorov/Ducrot: 323). Thereferent of I shifts whenever there is a change in the communicative situation,

whenever somebody else starts to speak. Likewise you (the addressee) refers todifferent people in different communicative situations. Todorov/Ducrot go on tomention deictic adverbs of time and place which are one of a pair of expressions,of which the second is non-deictic:

id (= a l'endroit oil se passe le dialogue) vs ahier (= la veille du Jour oil nous parlons) vs la veilleen ce moment (= au moment oil nous parlons) vs A ce moment (323)

According to Todorov/Ducrot's explanations, id, hier and en ce moment refer tothe situation of communication that is common between the interlocutors (i.e. here= "at the place at which the conversation occurs"). It remains unclear whetherTodorov/Ducrot quote the deictic adverbs merely in order to illustrate the notionof deixis, or whether they implicitly subsume these adverbs among shifters. We

Fludernik. Jespersen's Shifters. 98

will have to come back to the fact that their paraphrases in brackets employ onlythe inclusive first person plural pronoun we, but not the I or the you.

Todorov/Ducrot additionally suggest that proper names are used deicticallyas well, because the partner in conversation has to be able to establish theproper reference. Thus if I tell George that John is ill, George has to be familiarwith the fact that John is a common friend of ours, my husband, his brother, aformer colleague of his wife's etc. This is to say, because proper names are notuniversals, knowledge of them cannot be presupposed and they have to be intro-duced as new topics into the conversation. This holds true also, we may want toadd, for temporal and spatial reference which, unless it coincides with thespatiotemporal coordinates of the interlocutors, needs to be specified.

This brief description of Todorov/Ducrot's definition of shifters in theircontext already highlights the fact that any discussion of this phenomenon mustnecessarily involve notions of deixis and reference which, to be sure, are notamong the least controversial in linguistics. Within the framework of this paper itwill be manifestly impossible to provide a well-argued definition of either re-ference (referentiality) or deixis. Nor am I willing to spend half my time rehears-ing various classic definitions that have been provided in the past — with nodiscernible success of ultimate delimitation of these terms. 2 I will thereforerestrict myself to one or two basic observations and come back to the problem ofdefinition towards the end of the article after I have presented some selectedlinguistic evidence in the framework of which — and only in the framework ofwhich — I will then attempt to define reference, deixis, and shifters.

One term alone, demonstrativity, can be disposed of briefly at this earlystage in the argument. For the purposes of this paper we can delimit the notionof demonstraltIvity to that of pointing. Demonstratives would hence be those lexi-cally and morphologically encoded expressions which require a pointing finger toestablish meaning or linguistically substitute for such a visual aid. The emphasis

in this definition is on "lexically and morphologically encoded." Demonstrativepronouns, for instance, are means of providing deixis, and they are used both topoint quite literally to 'things out there' ("Look at that tree over there") and topoint to parts of the discourse itself (e.g. "This paragraph ..."). The latterkind of use is usually called "textual deixis."

Some of the terminological confusion in the area of referentiality seems toderive from the incompatibility between possible fields of enquiry from which the


problem has been tackled. In semiology and semiotics reference is a notion thatrelies on the semiotic triangle and specifies the relationship between the sign (consisting of signifier and signified) on the one hand and its referent on theother. Matters are quite different if one approaches the problem of referencefrom the linguistic — rather than logical-philosophical or literary — point ofview. Linguistics foregrounds the pragmatic notion of successful reference as itis observable to occur in everyday conversation. It therefore becomes necessaryin linguistic terns to distinguish between reference to items that are physicallypresent to interlocutorP, and reference to items that are present only context-ually, to the understanding, mind, or prAci matic knowledge of the speakers.Deixis, which*is a linguistic term, can therefore be identified with reference inso far as linguistics takes the pragmatic use of language within a given conversa-tion as the basis its analyses. This is the equation from which Jakobson's"referential function" derives, and on which Todorov/Ducrot's definition ofshifters as "deictic pronouns' relies.

What follows is an attempt to rethink the notion of shifters on the basis ofa close reading of Jespersen, which will be supplemented by some additional ling-uistic considerations. For the simple reason that it is the notion of shifters thatis here at issue I find myself unable at this stage to provide an even preliminarydefinition of this term, except for the one I have already cited from Todorov/-Ducrot. Accordingly, shifters will, for the nonce, be those linguistic expressionswhose meaning can be established only with reference to the situation of speechin which they occur, and in particular with reference to the partners in con-versation. Only after I have presented Jespersen's examinations and definitions ofthe concept and have critiqued these, will I be in a position to attempt a validdescription of what a shifter might be, and this definition will be a conclusionrather than an introduction to the present reflections. Although Jakobson'sreflections on the term shifter are extremely interesting in themselves, I havedecided to dispense with their presentation in this paper, since they do not addsubstantially to the establishing of linguistic evidence in this matter. Thetypological subtleties that Jakobson's model displays are treated in great detailelsewhere.'

Jespersen launches his discussion of shifters by examining words such asenemy, home, father, or mother, and only then goes on to treat of the personalpronouns as the clearest case of shifters. He does not mention spatial or temporaladverbs.


when Frans played a war-game with Eggert, he could not get it into hishead that he was Eggert's enemy: no, it was only Eggert who was the

enemy. A stronger case still is 'home.' When a child was asked if hisgrandmother had been at home, and answered: "No, grandmother was at

grandfather's," it is clear that for him 'at home' meant merely 'at myhome.' Such words may be called shifters. (Jespersen 1959: 123)

Jespersen's presentation of the concept shifter as in the above quotation, estab-lishes that the referent of the shifter changes according to the'participants in a

speech situation, However, the illustrative examples that he adduces are actuallycases of unsuccessful reference, which are due to linguistic incompetence. WhenFrans and Eggert use the word enemy to designate each other's personal oppon-ent, Frans is unable to comprehend the shifter nature of the enemy: he cannotunderstand that the enemy when pronounced by Eggert might refer to himself.The term enemy with its implicit first person possessive seems to be securelylinked to Frans's individuality and not transferable to another's (Eggert's) sub-jectivity. Besides, Frans is understandably bothered by the symmetrical nature ofthe word's application. "My enemy" is the enemy, the typification of the Other;and hence it is particularly daunting to find that what one had distanced fromoneself as one's not-I suddenly rebounds on oneself to claim to be the I. In fact,Frans not only misses the shifter nature of the word, but also the relationality ofthe term. 4 By identifying the enemy with Eggert, the referent, he makes it im-possible for himself to face that enemy now has a different referent, i.e. himself.It is disappointing that Jespersen does not give us the dialogue between Eggertand Frans in full, that is verbatim: his free indirect discourse transcriptioncamouflages the important detail of whom Frans is addressing (Jespersen? orEggert?) and of whether, if he addressed Eggert, he said "ELI are the enemy,not I," indicating that he had mastered the main category of shifters (i.e. thepersonal pronouns) and was simply baffled by enemy, whose shifter quality hehad not yet comprehended. Because Frans, of course, might also be at the stagewhere he had not yet learned to use personal pronouns at all and was stilladdressing everybody by their proper names, in the third person.

Jespersen's second example is home. The child's reaction again is the same.At home, like the enemy, is taken to be at my home, with an underlying possess-ive. Note, however, that home, unlike the enemy, does NOT presuppose a sym-metrical relationship in which two people are usually each other's enemies. Thegrandmother is a third person, she is not even addressed by the child (asEggert presumably is addressed by Frans), she is not a partner in a dialoguebetween two people - the Jakobsonian prerequisite for applying the term shifter,


since its referent has to be determined in relation to the speech event and theparticipants in it. Indeed, what the child does not realize is not necessarily that

at home is a shifter (we are going to question this in a minute) but that in asentence like "was grandmother at home" at home does NOT function as a shifterand does NOT have an underlying° first/second person possessive, but a third

person possessive.Let us now turn to mother, father, dad, mum, etc. These terms have an

underlying first person possessive when they are employed with zero article and

then function . as shifters.

A: Dad is quite old now.B: Gosh, that reminds me. I've promised to meet Dad at the doctor's at 12,and it's ten to already. See you, Bill.

In A and B Dad is my dad, hence A's dad and then B's dad. Note the awkward-ness of having A and B refer to their fathers within such a short stretch ofdialogue. The most natural thing to say for B would be "My (own) dad has alsobeen poorly recently" or something of the sort. The simple explanation for thisnecessity of disambiguation Lies in the fact that I and you clearly refer to thespeaker/addressee, whereas dad as a third person (in this dialogue) refers to areferent outside the communicative situation. The repetition of the same word dadwould therefore immediately imply sameness of reference - hence the disambiguat-ing "my dad" to clarify the shifter nature of the term.

In reference to the second or the third person, dad (instead of father) canbe used empathetically, but it needs to take an explicit second/third person pos-sessive pronoun. The context will tend to be contrastive.

a. His dad is a big man.b. [My, our) Dad is a big man. or: My dad is a big man.c. ("Your) Dad is a big man. Your dad is a big man.d. (*His] Dad is a big man. His dad is a big man.

The second and the third person possessive pronouns behave in exactly the sameway, a point to which we will return later. Complications arise if these terms areused among siblings or in the family at large. Mum and Dad, father and motherare of course appellations as much as referential designations and can hence cometo share all the characteristics of proper names. Since the underlying possessiveis determined by person (and not number), Tommy can use Dad when talking tohis sister Marlene, implying (our) dad. However, one need not necessarily postu-late the underlying plural possessive because "(my] dad [who happens to beyours as wellr will explain the situation as efficiently. Note also that this is a


case where B's use of Dad as "[my) dad" following close upon A's is perfectlyacceptable:

Tommy: Dad's quite old now.Marlene: Yes. I think Dad should have stopped smoking long ago.

The preferable version, however, Is still a pronominal he for Marlene, which doesnot require underlying Jour) for Tommy's dad because the he can very well beconsidered to refer to the referent and not to the signifier exclusively.' Indeed,A's and B's conversation above could well have been:

A: Dad's quite old now.B: Yes, I met him in town last week and was shocked to see how bony hehad grown.

Crossreferencing therefore appears to identify objects that have been referred torather than replacing identical noun phrases by pronominals: B could not reply,"Yes, I met Dad in town last week." Hence the anaphor has to relate to thereferent of Dad rather than to the signifier. As with shifters in general, the sig-nified of Dad ('SPEAKER's father') can be determined by ADDRESSEE only withina deictic context of the situation of speech, depending on who is the SPEAKERand what he (ADDRESSEE) knows about him.

A further much more serious aspect comes in when one realizes that Dad,as notice the consistent capitalization, is actually used as a proper name in allthese examples. Note that Dad can be employed both in the vocative and inaddressing letters or cards: "To Dad with love." If it is a proper name, is Dadthen still a shifter? Todorov/Ducrot, as we have seen, would answer this ques-tion in the positive. However, their concept of a shifter or deictic pronoun seemsto rely on an understanding of deixis as reference to the common situation ofspeech, that is to say common between both interlocutors. Which is why theydefine bier as "la veille du jour oil nous parlons" and en ce moment "au momentoil nous parlons." (323)

It can certainly be observed in other cases, too, that such proper namescome to be used in situations in which the speaker does not have the status thatwould justify his choice of that word. For instance, it is very common for adultsto use dad or pappy etc. when talking to a (or their own) child to designatethemselves, their husbands, or indeed any child's father, who may be a completestranger to them. Thus the man at the gasoline station may well calm down littleFlorence by saying to her:

Look, dad's over there paying the check.


and mother will explain that

Dad's in the office. He will be back at six.

To my knowledge, capitalization is not absolutely required in these examples. Iwould hold that the use of Dad (Mum etc. ) as in the above is a feature of family

language (as used by adults), and that it uses Dad as a proper name for thechild's father from the child's perspective with whom the speaker empathizes (asone does resorting to child language) in the same way that Aunt Jane maygenerally be called Auntie by the family at large, even by those who are not hernephews or nieces. Aunt Jane will therefore be used as a proper name within thefamily, almost even as a clerical title such as Brother John. It is doubtfulwhether one would claim an underlying possessive here. Such uses of familynames, then, cannot be considered shifters. Which leads us back to the questionof whether proper names are or are not shifters.

As the capitalization in our examples shows, uses of family appellations withunderlying first person possessives are all proper names. Whereas, however, dad(Dad) seems to retain an underlying possessive, some other family appellations(for instance Aunt Jane) do not. The test for this is a stranger's use of theseterms, which would be "your dad," but "Aunt Jane" (* your Aunt Jane) or "youraunt Jane." Note that in the latter case the prosodic pattern qualifies aunt as acommon noun:

Your aunt Jane's quite nice. I didn't like your aunt Ruth that much,though.

The question is certainly very tangled, since family uses of relation nouns asproper names and shifter uses overlap and interact. Jespersen clearly does notdo justice to the complexity of the issues that he raises by his explanatory exam-ples.

Let us now turn to (at) home. Although this phrase is frequently used bySPEAKER to .designate his/her own home and thus employed with an underlyingfirst person possessive, it can equally well be used by SPEAKER to designateADDRESSEE's or a third person's home:

Did you go home (i.e. to your home] after the movie?Sorry, John's left already. He should be home [I. e. at John's home] bynow.

Indeed, home can even change reference within the same speech event (turn-taking), i.e. SPEAKER can use home to designate two different homes in succes-sion, as in Lucy's explanation of the following situation:


Tom: My professor was not at home when I arrived.Lucy:I was not at home when Tom arrived, so he want home

and rang my office.

One conclusion from this is that home is a shifter only when used as [iny] home, and that it also has non-shifter uses. However, even in non-shifter uses,home seems to function as an empathy signal with an underlying co-indexed pos-sessive:

Did you, go hornet?He, should be home, by now.

As in Kuno's empathy scales (Kuno 1987)", the presence of I overrules that ofzata or s/he, and empathy with a third person is possible only in the absence ofa speaker or addressee NP in the vicinity of home. The binding category forhorse seems to be S, since subsidiary clauses or co-ordinate clauses can establishdifferent referents for home, as in both Tora's and Lucy's sentences above. Notealso

Have you already seen my home?John has been at my home twice before.

Here the possessive needs to surface in order to counter the automatic co-indexing that would otherwise be performed by the hearer/reader.

So far we have established dad with an underlying first person possessive— but, arguably, not as a family proper name Dad — for a shifter, and we haveadded [my) home. The enemy, with its definite article, points towards anotherset of shifters and recalls also that in languages other than English the shifterfunction for family members is frequently signalled by a definite article, whereasthe general use requires an explicit possessive. In German, for instance, Dereater corresponds to Dad, with zero-article Vater as an equally acceptable alter-native . 9 A comparable use is made in English of terms such as the boss ([my/-our) boss), and German dialects have the quaint der Alte, die Alte to designateone's (longtime) partner in nmrriage."' This usage is, however, similar to what

(p. 71) have called the "one member of a class assumed"phenomenon: for instance the sun (there being only one sun), the baby (i.e. ourbaby, the one which looms large in the family's consciousness). In fact, whetherthese 'terms surface as shifters or not depends on the context. "The baby's beencrying all night," if uttered by the mother to the father, mirrors the situation ofthe two siblings talking about Dad, because for both interlocutors the baby is[ my, our] baby - whereas the mother talking to her friend Lucy will use the

Fludernik. Jespersen's shifters. 105

baby to refer to her own baby, and Lucy might well employ the baby to desig-

nate her own Tommy. If Jane says,

The boss is in the office.

the boss as used by her co-worker Janet will also reflect the fact that they havea boss in common between them. Indeed, with boss this seems to be the common

case. All of these terms can additionally be used empathetically in third personcontexts. Thus an angry customer can demand 'Where's the boss?' [i.e. your,the employee's boss - note the aptness of Halliday/Hasan's "one of a classassumed" tag), or a description could run like

Lynn was sitting on a bench. The baby [i.e. her baby was beside her inthe carriage .

The same kind of usage can be observed for enemy:

a. We heard on the radio today that Iran and Iraq are ending theirseven years' conflict. Each of these countries has fought the enemy with anextremely high casualty rate.

b. According to the Washington Post General Nadiva has defeated theinvading enemy.

As with home, one could here posit empathy scales, which in the absence of afirst or second person referent allow empathy for a third person referent.

Jespersen's examples of shifters, that is the ones he offers besides thefirst person/second person pronouns I and you, therefore establish something ofa case for words which have an underlying first person possessive (dad etc. ).They suggest, in addition, that some other terms, which are generally usedempathetically and allow underlying first or second person possessives as well, inthe latter case might qualify as shifters. Note, however, that there are noexpressions which have an underlying second person possessive [your] while atthe same time disallowing the first person possessive (my]. By contrast, there doexist terms with exclusive underlying first person possessives, for instance dad.This asymmetry suggests that shifters I and you are peculiar in having a sepa-rate grammatical form, or, alternatively, that the quality of shifterhood reallydepends on the first person, and that you is not a shifter to the same extentthat I is. I will pursue this more fully later.

Fludernik.. Jeapersen's Shifters. 10 6

Let me now turn to adverbs of time and place and to their possible relationto shifters. Adverbs of time and place are usually treated as temporal and spatialdeixis, and in what follows deixis will be used in this general sense, whereas theuse of shifter will be restricted to those items that change their referent when-ever the speaker changes. Adverbials can be regarded as shifters when their re-ferent changes in relation to the situation of communication. If A describes some-thing as being at his left, for B that might well be at B's right (back or front)in the canonical situation of face to face conversation, and so the same symmetri-cal situation as with I/you would obtain. Similarly, here (by me) might designatea place which for the interlocutor might have to be referred to as (over) there(by you), and vice versa. Such uses of here and there, left and right cantherefore be included in the category of shifters.

Todorov/Ducrot also mentioned deictical now (vs. at this t:ime), yesterday(vs. the day before), tomorrow (vs. the next day) etc., without exactly specify-

ing whether they regarded these as shifters or no. In the canonical situation ofcommunication now, yesterday or tomorrow have a common temporal referent forboth interlocutors so that they would not change when speaker B takes over fromA. However, now, Like here, can function as a shifter if it designates the precise

moment of utterance, as in:

A: Now the train is moving.B: And now it's already passed the bridge.

Compare:

Here is your desk. (Moving) And here is your typewriter.

Taking here as a point of departure for the moment, we can distinguishbetween a variety of different uses of such words, only a fraction of which con-form to the shifter use just indicated. Thus here and now can refer to the con-text common between the interlocutors (here = where we are sitting, now = at thetime of this conversation). This expanded concept of here and now can be fur-ther diluted to include the more general spatial and temporal context as in

People are very friendly here.

in which here can be anything from 'this restaurant,' 'this company,' 'this town,''this country' to the globe ('here on earth'). Likewise, now can refer to thevaguest entities such as 'at this stage of our discussion,' or 'in this century,' asin nowadays for 'these days.' From these general expressions of here and nowone can distinguish additionally what might be called displaced reference as in'here on this map.' (Brown/Yule: 53)

Fludernik. Jegipersen's Shifters. 107

,As with here and now properly deictic (or shifter) uses can be establishedalso for demonstrative this (vs. that), namely on those occasions where thisrefers to the sphere of the speaker exclusively: 'this table over here' vs. 'thattable over there where you are.' And like here and now, demonstratives are usedin a variety of contexts which are NOT 'deictic' (i.e. centred on the speechevent) and can be very general. For instance, in "This is gorgeous," this canrefer to a landscape, a sunset, to the job opportunities your interlocutor has justdescribed to you etc. Displaced reference (this mountain (on the map)) alsoexists with demonstratives. And there is of course textual deixis as in 'at thisstage of the discussion,' 'in this paper,' 'this is as much as to say° etc.

As I have already pointed out earlier, the term deixis is usually employedin a sense that goes beyond the shifter category, since it usually includes allgrammatical means of pointing to all kinds of objects and persons. It is only inthe restricted (Benvenistean) sense that we have employed earlier that deixis anddeictic have come to stand for a reference to the immediate situation of discourse,and in particular to terms that center on the addressor or addressee and henceshift reference at turntaking. Therefore the definition of shifters as 'deictic pro-nouns' - as provided by Benveniste as well as Todorov/Ducrot - involves aredefinition of deixis to exclude third person referents, whether persons orobjects.

Such a model departs from the classic understanding of deixis as compris-ing what is generally termed proximal / medial / and distal deixis." In this thespeech situation (including SPEAKER and ADDRESSEE) is covered by medialdeixis, whereas proximal deixis is aligned with the SPEAKER'S sphere, and distaldeixis with the sphere beyond the SPEAKER and ADDRESSEE field. Some langu-ages, such as Japanese, carefully distinguish between these three areas on a

morphological level. In most European languages only a binary system can beencountered with the consequence that proximal deixis can cover both theSPEAKER's sphere and the SPEAKER/ADDRESSEE field, and distal deixis desig-nate the medial (ADDRESSEE) as well, as the distal (third person) positions.

Since interlocutors canonically share their temporal co-ordinates, temporalnow almost exclusively collapses proximal and medial deictical, categories. How-ever, contexts can occur in which speakers are situated at different points intime as well as space, such as at the respective ends of a transatlantic telephoneline. In this case what is 'today' for A may well be 'yesterday' for B. Letterwriting is another case in point. Whereas in telephone conversations now is atleast constant for the situation of communication itself - i.e. SPEAKER andADDRESSEE hear each other simultaneously even if they do not perceive one an-other - letters are even more tricky because the time of encodation and decoda-

Fludernik Jespersen shifters . 108

tion, of production and reception, can be separated by a long timespan, and theself-conscious attempt by the writer to deal with this situation gives rise to majorlinguistic problems. In particular the code of politeness, which constrains one toproject the reader's temporal coordinates, comes into conflict with SPEAKER'Sresponsibilities towards veracity from his own point of view. Parallel ambiguitiesarise when one gives one's face to face interlocutor directions how to move ob-jects in space. Speakers frequently use left and right from ADDRESSEE's per-spective to save ADDRESSEE the trouble of converting directions into his ownspatial coordinates, and point of view in such cases is frequently made explicit:on your right etc.

It is by now the standard account of deixis to assume that proximal, medialand distal deictic positions coincide with the morphologically explicit distinctionbetween first, second and third person." Such a schema, however, causes majormethodological problems. Since Benveniste the first and second person pronouns(and verbal categories) have been put into a class of their own that Is separatedby a gulf from third person reference, which is considered to be impersonal and,by implication, non- Ideictic.'" Such a break between the first/second and thethird persons clearly conflicts with the easy collapsing between medial and distaldeictical positions in most central European languages, all of which, basically,have a binary, rather than tripartite, deictical system.

A tentative solution to this incompatibility may be sought in an attempt toreduce the medial (second person, ADDRESSEE) category to a position commens-urate with its actual functional importance in the linguistic system. Benveniste,and after him Bonfield in her revision of his tenets, have over-emphasized thesignificance of the second person. Benveniste considered the first and the secondpersons to be roughly of equal - and symmetrical - status, but with the firstperson marked by subjectivity: "Language is so organized that it permits eachspeaker to appropriate to himself an entire language by designating himself as I."("Subjectivity in Language"") In her deconstruction of the standard narratologi-cal account of free indirect discourse Bonfield reverses the position of marked-ness and places it on the second person, without the presence of which, sheclaims, no piece of oral discourse can properly be called communication (Ben-veniste's discouxs). This is not the place to argue with Banfield's position, whichneeds to be considered within her own theoretical framework." However, what Iwish to do in the following is to argue for a different approach, in which thebinary oppositions are replaced by scales. Deictic categories in this model couldbe described in terms of an extension of the fundamental category of sub-jectivity, such as it is located in the ego and its hic and nunc. In the following I

Fludernik. Jespersen's ShiftA3rs. 10 9

will attempt to demonstrate how deictic categories allow themselves to be extendedand conflated on a scale arrangement from subjectivity to absolute non-subjectivity (the Other). Beyond this, the specificity of the second personcategory will be at issue, in particular its quality of non-I subjectivity and theway in which it functions as a shifter (i.e. its symmetrical or inverse relation tothe first person), and how these can be assimilated to a concept of gradationaldifferences.

As the above discussion of debris has shown, the prime bedrock categoryof debris is that of the common ground of communication, which is the situation

that Btihler takes as his basic deictic category, the dernonstxatio ad oculos.

within this 'original scene' Btihler locates or distinguishes the addressor, theaddressee and the object or referent which is being talked about. The area of

what establishes the interlocutors' field of vision necessarily includes virtualinterlocutors (i.e. persons that may join in in the dialogue) as well as exclusively

third person entities. This primal scene, then, could be regarded as an extendedarea of subjectivity which can temporarily come to include the you. The pos-sibility of an extension of the first person is demonstrated by the existence ofinclusive and exclusive first person plural pronouns (we) which variously includea second or third person referent into their subjective reference. In exclusiveforms (a) person(s) that is/are outside the present situation of speech are feltby the speaker to be closer to him than ADDRESSEE. Likewise, the extension ofproximal debris into medial positions, by which the common spatio-temporal coor-dinates of the interlocutors are explicitly foregrounded, in this frameworkemerges as a precise parallel to the pronominal behaviour of including ADDRES-SEE in one's area of subjectivity. Inversely, the conflation of medial* and distaldebris might appear to be a manoeuver to relegate the addressee into the area ofnon-subjectivity, the other, the third person realm.

The you, as well as a he/she, if they are present on the scene, however,can never be repressed into exclusively apersonal object positions. They remainpotential speakers and hence potential loci of subjectivity. This is parallelled bythe fact that empathy constraints move from speaker empathy to addressee empa-thy to third person empathy, as we suggested earlier in relation to the enemy,

or home. One can empathize most easily with the speaker (oneself), the next eas-ily with the addressee's point of view, and only third easily with a third personviewpoint in the absence of a first or second person position, and one can empa-thize least with a non-human third person object, unless one confers anthropo-


morphic properties on it, as one tends to do with pets, other animals, cars, oreven favourite plants. 1°

Since the second and the third person are potential expressors of subject-ivity they, between themselves, share a class, as do the medial and distal deicticpositions. This is supported by the fact that the referent of you can changewithin one speaker's discourse, whereas the referent of I by necessity remainsconstant, i.e. the speaker. Additionally, in expressions such as dad, as we haveseen, only the first person possessive can be left implicit and no underlying sec-ond person possessives occur anywhere. This, too, argues for a structural asym-metry of I and you.

A further argument that invalidates the supposition of a symmetrical rela-

tion between the first and second persons can be brought forward by fore-grounding the directionality of speech. All the linguistic functions as well as thespeech acts, such as they were proposed by Searle, center on the speaker. Theaddressee is a passive receiver, whose reaction and consciousness (i.e. his sub-jectivity) can be imagined and anticipated but only as a projection or empathyphenomenon. Thus the conative function (Bilhler's appellative) is designed todescribe the effect one wishes to produce on one's interlocutor whether of anillocutionary or perlocutionary nature. The shift that occurs at turn taking is ashift in roles and communicative function. The speaker has the privilege of expe-riencing his/her subjectivity and of naming the objects of discourse as well as

performing illocutionary and perlocutionary acts that are designed to affecthis/her interlocutor. Since this effect on the listener can be mental rather thanphysical, the position of the addressee, as of a third person - a potentialaddressee and speaker - are linguistic constructs projected by language and notnecessarily filled by the actual presence of 'alien' subjects.

The speaker function, as we said, Is the only one that allows for the ex-pression of subjectivity. This becomes particularly apparent in the joint inabilityof the second and third person pronouns to co-occur with expressive features(except of course in free indirect discourse). "John is tired" or "You are tired"cannot be uttered by anybody except as surmises or assertions on the basis ofJohn's or the addressee's communication about their tiredness. The description offeelings, or generally states of consciousness, of anybody except the speakerhimself, require the existence of an authorial ('omniscient') framework. In dis-course people only use these forms if they have reason to infer the relevantinformation or if they have been told by the subjects themselves.

What holds true for feelings also applies to perceptions and awareness.However, in this case, there are examples of an inverse nature, namely those

Fludernik. Jespersen's Shifters. I l 1

that describe perceptions excluding the expression of subjectivity on the part ofthe person perceived. Such linguistic constructions could be termed 'outwardpoint of view schemata.' Nord Tamir has provided some examples of this type:

*I am lurking in a culvert.He is lurking in a culvert.

n misunderstand you.You misunderstand me.He misunderstands you.

*According to me, prices would skyrocket.According to him, prices would skyrocket.

AU these constructions are incompatible with a first person (speaker's) point ofview, although they become acceptable within a third person viewpoint (wherethey are free indirect discourse or reported speech of some sort). Tamir quotesthe acceptable Max believes that I am lurking in a culvert." Note also that theintroduction of the past tense makes these sentences perfectly acceptable:

I misunderstood you/Jane entirely.

This is possible because present-day I (or, as n.arratologists would say, the"narrating I"") is able to look back on its past experience as an observer of itspast self (the "experiencing I"). However, there is then a definite distancebetween the two Vs and the implication is 'I (then) misunderstood you, i.e. whatI then believed was wrong (I now know)'; or, 'According to what I then said,prices would skyrocket'; 'I now describe to you that I was then lurking in a cul-vert.' Note additionally that some adverbs also help to make sentences of thistype acceptable. Thus,

I evidently misunderstand you.

Implies reflection on the part of the speaker and seems to vouchsafe him aninternal view on himself.2°

Awareness and knowledge or perception tie in with a number of what hasbeen dealt with under the heading of empathy phenomena in recent linguisticstudies. The results in this area have pointed two ways. Some phenomena, suchas the distribution of come and E, point to an emphasis of the SPEAKER/AD-DRESSEE pair over third persons; others, particularly the use of reflexives,indicate that there is a gradual scale along which empathy can develop. The twointeract, however. Thus speech report is a canonical category in which, in theabsence of a speaker or an addressee (i.e. in the absence of a first or secondperson) a third person can acquire subjectivity structures. Thus in,

Fludernlk. Jespersen's Shifters. 112

John told me that he went up to Jane.Jane told me that John had come up to her.Bill told Martin that Jane had come up to him after class.

the use of come and go reflects that of direct discourse, even when the reportingspeech act entirely lacks a first or second person - the necessary condition forthe use of come " Kuno (224-227) explains this by reference to the interactionof empathy structures between regular come and go, and those for come up toand go up to.

In actual fact the use of come is really determined by the perspective ofseeing somebody arrive, and when it occurs with the second person, this percep-tion is transferred to the addressee's point of view - for reasons of politeness, I

suspect. Thus in

Cart come [i.e. to you] tomorrow?

the request is phrased from tho addressee's perspective, who will see thespeaker arrive. Likewise, in

Will. John come to the party?

the implication is that the addressee will be there and will see Je,h.d. arrive, or ofcourse the party will be at the speaker's place, in which case the speaker himself

will or will not see John arrive. This is why

I will come to John's party

is possible only if the addressee will be there as well. The process is verysimilar to preferences for 'enclosed please find' rather than 'I enclose' locutions:one transfers the centre of empathy to one's addressee. This demonstrates thatcome ultimately belongs to those verbs discussed earlier which cannot co-occurwith the first person's point of view in conjunction with first person agency: thespeaker either has to be the perceiver of somebody else's arrival, or do thearriving as observed by somebody else from their point of view. a2

Which brings me to a last observation in this paper, the connection betweentextual shifter debris and topic/focus considerations. Items which are considered"given" (presupposed) information are referred to by the same definite articlethat is also employed quasi-deictically for entities perceivable within the contextof communication and which hence need no introduction. The same of courseapplies to an elements of information that constitute what might be called commonknowledge between the interlocutors. Deictic categories surface as textual sig-nals, indicating the presence of something. In this connection this and that in


their emotive function Is a particularly interesting case in point to which I willnow turn. My contention is that this (these) in their emotional 'new information'use are one more kind of shifters, and that they, too, demonstrate the coreproperty of subjectivity for shifters, a subjectivity that - as Bonfield has soaptly proved - is intrinsically bound up with the speaker position.

a. There's this man I know. And he drives this train, you know.And one day I was watching that train coming over the bridge...

b. And I get up to the top of the hill, and there are these cows juststanding there and looking at me. Them cows can sure drive you crazy,just standing and looking at you as if you was one of them.

In these obviously colloquial examples this (these) are employed to intro-duce new items into the conversation. The demonstrative serves a double func-tion, that of catching the listener's attention - i.e. parallelling the function ofthe indefinite article - and at the same time dispensing with any introduction andpresupposing the existence of the new subject as already given within the con-text of communication, using this in the manner with which one would point tothe chair right In front of one. Since the context unambiguously identifies theitem as new, the use of this constitutes a violation of the Gricean maxim of qual-ity. This violation is used to emphasize the very personal or subjective nature ofthe item. After all, for the speaker who has just recalled the point, the item Ispresent within his 'context of utterance.'

This serves to introduce such emotionally charged elements, whereas - asthe examples illustrate - that substitutes for the definite article, again with animplied emotional, subjective investment, for subsequent mentions of the item.Both this and that function as shifters because these demonstratives can be usedexclusively in reference to the speaker's subjectivity and hence their referentmust needs change when speakers take turns. The addressee, or somebodytaking up after the speaker has done, characteristically has to employ the dis-tancing that: "That friend of yours you just mentioned must be a really toughguy." If one's interlocutor also happens to know the person referred to,however, there would not have been any introduction of this person by way ofemotive this: one would have used a proper name.

I think I have now accumulated a sufficient (necessarily preliminary) num-ber of arguments to document the asymmetry between the first and the secondperson, and I have also adduced some evidence to suggest that deictic categoriesas well as empathy processes operate on a scale model of expansion from therealm of speaker's locus of subjectivity to that of the addressee and of a third


person. This brings me to my final point, the shifters and how they now fit intothis new view of things.

As a preliminary conclusion of our deliberations on shifters and deixis Iwish to emphasize three main points. One concerns the definition of shifter,which was not made entirely clear by Jespersen (nor, indeed, by Jakobson,either). In the course of this paper we have come to adhere to an understandingof shifter as a term applicable solely to those expressions which shift theirreferent at turntaking points in conversation. The examination of various shiftersthat have been proposed by Jespersen and Todorov/Ducrot has established, sec-ondly, that only expressions that center on the speaker, on his/her subjectivity,can be shifted in this sense. As a consequence, many of the shifters that Jes-person cited as examples for the category have turned out to be either noshifters at all (you), or to be shifters only in certain contexts (home, theenemy,dad\Dad, adverbs of time and place). On the other hand ., discovering

that the feature of subjectivity was the essential feature of a shifter has helpedus locate shifters other than I, as for instance the emotional this\that which Idescribed above. Moreover, expressions that behave in an inverse relationship toshifters, since they disallow SPEAKER'S perspective, can now be integrated intothe discussion. This is where our third conclusion comes in. If one recognizesthe special position of subjectivity in relation to second and third person subjectsin language, not only can one discover that language projects an addressee (thenon-I), but one is also able to observe extensions of the originary subjectivity

towards medial and distal areas. This is the special task of deictic processes, inthe frame of which shifters now reveal themselves to be a special case. We arethus able to describe referring or phoric processes as capable of being illustratedon a scale, which ranges from the speaker's ego-hic-nunc deixis of subjectivity(shifter category) to the medial position of the common ground between speakers( 'deixis' in the Benvenistean sense) to the distal position of the third per-son/object category of general reference or phoricity. Phoric or referentialprocesses typically include references to objects or persons outside the situationof discourse as well as anaphoric or cataphoric

The present discussion has also opened new vistas, I hope, for the re-newed examination of the position of subjectivity in language, and it should more-over help to provide an additional angle for the analysis and critique of struc-turalist linguistic concepts and models. What I have presented here is necessarilya preliminary account, if only because I am a literary scholar rather than atrained linguist. Yet this outsider's perspective may, I hope, in the long runprove fruitful to insiders of the field. If shifters have become a much-cited (andlittle understood) term in literary discussions, the present observations may have


demonstrated that, even within linguistics, this seemingly insignificant categoryis situated at a vital position in language, shifting the points between majortracks - those of deixis, reference, and subjectivity.

NOTES

1 In French the technical term is embr_...jaiesur . (Cf. Jakobson's French ver-sion of the article fJakobson (1%3): 176-1961, or Strauch 1974: 42.)

2 For a good overview see Whiteside/Issacharoff (1987), especially 175-208,and of course Lyons (1977: 174-229).See my "Shifters and Debds: Some Reflections on Jakobson, Jesperson, andReference." (forthcoming)

4 The enemy* in this example makes a claim about a referent's relationship toself, neither describing the referent in objective class terms (the cobbler)nor designating the referent's unique specificity as when using a propername (Eggert).

5 I leave it open to discussion whether such underlying first person pro-nouns need to be situated in a semantic or syntactic deep structure.

6 Compare Brown/Yule's remarks on p. 218.7 I owe this suggestion to Dr. Frances White, Corpus Christi, Oxford.8 Kuno establishes a Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy [3.161 (212) for explicit

and Implicit renderings of (also internal) speech. He also discusses empathyscales for picture noun sentences under the heading of "Awareness Condi-tion for Picture Noun Reflexives" [4.11 (179), and treats empathy adjec-tives such as beloved, dear old, and embarrassing [5.91, as well, asempathy reflexives [3.10 and 5.101 and "as for X-self" constructions[3.121, all of which link up with his direct discourse perspective [31.Awareness conditions, particularly in situations of direct discourse, logi-cally imply empathy scales of SPEAKER-ADDRESSEE-THIRD PERSON.

9 Register and diachronic aspects determine the distribution of thesevariants, and I suspect that local preferences exist as well.

10 Compare the English "my old man"/"my old woman" for one's parents, forwhich shifter uses of "the old man" exist.

11 See Fillmore 1971.12 Compare Benveniste 1971, as well as Frei 1944.13 Cp. Benveniste 1971: 199-200 ("Relationships of Person in the Verb").

Benveniste's analysis on this issue is impeccable. The verbal category ofperson in IE can very well be explained as the impersonal: plait 'it rains.;volat avis 'it flies (scil.) the bird.'(200)

14 Benveniste (1971: 226).15 On this question a book-length account is in preparation.16 Note that such privileged objects also tend to acquire names and may be

addressed by their owners, which effectively transfers them into the statusof a potential (second or third person) partner in conversation.

17 Based on Tarnir 414.18 Footnote 12, p. 414.19 "ErzShlendes Ich" (Lanunert 1955). Cf. also e.g. Stanzel (1984) and Prince

(1987).20 The adverbial example was suggested to me by Univ.-Doz. Dr. Herbert

Schendl.21 Cp. Fillmore (1966; 1972)22 Fillmore's discussions of come and go do not elucidate any relation to per-

ception or awareness phenomena but axe based exclusively on speakers'locations. That is to say, Fillmore concentrates on the implications of spa-tial deixis in the use of come and go.

Fludarnik. Jeapersen's Shifters. 116

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Thanks are due to the Fonds zur FOrderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung forawarding me the Erwin-SchrOdinger-Auslandsstipendium during the academic year1987/88 for a project, the windfall of which is being presented here.

jespersen’s shifters - uni-freiburg.de

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