Fludernik Jespersens Shifters

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Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universitt Freiburg

MONIKAFLUDERNIK

Jespersens Shifters

Reflections on Deixis and Subjectivity in Language

Originalbeitrag erschienen in:Klagenfurter Beitrge zur Sprachwissenschaft 15/16 (1989/90), S. [97]-116


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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 Roman

Jakobson in his famous essay "Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian

Verb" (originally presented as a paper in 1956).

Jakobson, whose insights into

the nature of shifters closely correspond to Benveniste's conclusions about the

nature of personal pronouns (Benveniste 1977: 195-230), concentrated on the

first and second person pronoun

as

an illustration of shifters. This Benvenistean

and Jakobsonean emphasis has had the result of collapsing the categories of

shifter and first/second person pronouns. In a different book, Jespersen uses

the same tend shifting to apply to the change in perspective occasioned by the

move from direct to (free) indirect discourse (Jespersen 1924: 292-299), and for

simple 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 with

the authoritative Dictionnaire encyclopddique des sciences du langage, which

under the section on reference includes a subsection on deictical pronouns, for

which Todorov/Ducrot quote Jakobson's term shifters. The definition provided

there identifies as shifters all expressions whose reference can be determined

only in relation to the partners of conversation (Todorov/Ducrot: 323). The

referent of I

shifts

whenever there is a change in the communicative situation,

whenever somebody else starts to speak. Likewise you (the addressee) refers to

different people in different communicative situations. Todorov/Ducrot go on to

mention 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

a

hier (= la veille du Jour oil nous parlons)

vs la veille

en 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 to

the situation of communication that

is

common between the interlocutors (i.e. here

= "at the place at which the conversation occurs"). It remains unclear whether

Todorov/Ducrot quote the deictic adverbs merely in order to illustrate the notion

of deixis, or whether they implicitly subsume these adverbs among shifters. We


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Fludernik. Jespersen's Shifters.

98

will have to come back to the fact that their paraphrases in brackets employ only

the inclusive first person plural pronoun we, but not the I or the you.

Todorov/Ducrot additionally suggest that proper names are used deictically

as well,

because the partner in conversation has to be able to establish the

proper reference. Thus if I tell George that John is ill, George has to be familiar

with the fact that John

is

a common friend of ours, my husband, his brother, a

former colleague of his wife's etc. This is to say, because proper

names are

not

universals, 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 to

add, for temporal and spatial reference which, unless it coincides with the

spatiotemporal coordinates of the interlocutors, needs to be specified.

This brief description of Todorov/Ducrot's definition of shifters in their

context already highlights the fact that any discussion of this phenomenon must

necessarily involve notions of deixis and reference which, to be sure, are not

among the least controversial in linguistics. Within the framework of this paper it

will 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 no

discernible success of ultimate delimitation of these terms.

2

I will therefore

restrict myself to one or two basic observations and

come

back to the problem of

definition towards the end of the article after I have presented some selected

linguistic evidence in the framework of which and only in the framework of

which I will then attempt to define reference, deixis, and shifters.

One term alone, demonstrativity, can be disposed of briefly at this early

stage in the argument. For the purposes of this paper we can delimit the notion

of demonstraltIvity to that of pointing. Demonstratives would hence be those lexi-

cally and morphologically encoded expressions which require a pointing finger to

establish meaning or linguistically substitute for such a visual aid. The emphasis

in this

definition is

on "lexically and morphologically encoded." Demonstrative

pronouns, for instance, are means of providing deixis, and they are used both to

point quite literally to 'things out there' ("Look at that tree over there") and to

point to parts of the discourse itself (e.g. "This paragraph ..."). The latter

kind of use is usually called "textual deixis."

Some of the terminological confusion in the area of referentiality seems to

derive from the incompatibility between possible fields of enquiry from which the


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Fludernik.

Jespersen's

Shifters.

99

problem has been tackled. In semiology and semiotics reference is a notion that

relies on the semiotic triangle and specifies the relationship between the sign

(consisting of signifier and signified) on the one hand and

its

referent on the

other. Matters are quite different if one approaches the problem of reference

from the linguistic rather than logical-philosophical or literary point of

view. Linguistics foregrounds the pragmatic notion of successful reference as it

is observable to occur in everyday conversation. It therefore becomes necessary

in linguistic terns to distinguish between reference to items that are physically

present to interlocutorP, and reference to items that are present only context-

ually, to the understanding, mind, or prAc

i

matic knowledge of the speakers.

Deixis, which*is a linguistic term, can therefore be identified with reference in

so 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 of

shifters as "deictic pronouns' relies.

What follows is

an attempt to rethink the notion of shifters on the basis of

a 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 that

is

here at

issue

I find myself unable at this stage to provide an even preliminary

definition of this term, except for the one I have already cited from Todorov/-

Ducrot. Accordingly, shifters will, for the nonce, be those linguistic expressions

whose meaning can be established only with reference to the situation of speech

in which they occur, and in particular with reference to the partners in con-

versation. Only after I have presented Jespersen's examinations and definitions of

the concept and have critiqued these, will I be in

a

position to attempt a valid

description of what a shifter might be, and this definition will be a conclusion

rather than an introduction to the present reflections. Although Jakobson's

reflections on the term shifter are extremely interesting in

themselves,

I have

decided to dispense with their presentation in this paper, since they do not add

substantially to the establishing of linguistic evidence in this matter. The

typological subtleties that

Jakobson's model

displays are treated in great detail

elsewhere.'

Jespersen launches his discussion of shifters by examining words such as

enemy, home, father, or mother, and only then goes on to treat of the personal

pronouns as the clearest case of shifters. He does not mention spatial or temporal

adverbs.


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Fludernik. Jespersen's Shifters. 100

when Frans played a war-game with Eggert, he could not get it into his

head 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 his

grandmother had been at home, and answered: "No, grandmother

was at

grandfather's," it

is

clear that for him 'at home' meant merely 'at my

home.' 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

speech situation, However, the illustrative examples that he adduces are actually

cases of unsuccessful reference, which are due to linguistic incompetence. When

Frans 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 cannot

understand that the enemy when pronounced by Eggert might refer to himself.

The term enemy with its implicit first person possessive seems to be securely

linked to Frans's individuality and not transferable to another's (Eggert's) sub-

jectivity. Besides, Frans is understandably bothered by the symmetrical nature of

the 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 from

oneself 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 of

the term.

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 Eggert

and Frans in full, that

is

verbatim: his free indirect discourse transcription

camouflages the important detail of whom Frans

is addressing (Jespersen? or

Eggert?) 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. the

personal pronouns) and was simply baffled by enemy, whose shifter quality he

had not yet comprehended. Because Frans, of course, might also be at the stage

where he had not yet learned to use personal pronouns at all and was still

addressing 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. The

grandmother

isa third person, she

is

not even addressed by the child (as

Eggert

presumably

is

addressed by Frans), she is not a partner in a dialogue

between two people - the Jakobsonian prerequisite for applying the term shifter,


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since its referent has to be determined in relation to the speech event and the

participants 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 a

sentence like "was grandmother at home" at home does NOT function as a shifter

and 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 of

dialogue. The most natural thing to say for B would be "My (own) dad has also

been poorly recently" or something of the sort. The simple explanation for this

necessity of disambiguation Lies in the fact that I and you clearly refer to the

speaker/addressee, whereas dad

as a

third person (in this dialogue) refers to a

referent outside the communicative situation. The repetition of the same word dad

would 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) can

be 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 same

way, a point to which we will return later. Complications arise if these terms are

used among siblings or in the family at large. Mum and Dad, father and mother

are of course appellations

as much

as

referential designations and can hence come

to share all the characteristics of proper names. Since the underlying possessive

is

determined by person (and not number), Tommy can use Dad when talking to

his sister Marlene, implying (our) dad. However, one need not necessarily postu-

late the underlying plural possessive because "(my] dad [who happens to be

yours as wellr will explain the situation as efficiently. Note also that this

is a


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

acceptable:

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 does

not require underlying Jour) for Tommy's dad because the he can very well be

considered 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 he

had grown .

Crossreferencing therefore appears to identify objects that have

been

referred to

rather 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 the

referent 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 within

a deictic context of the situation of

speech,

depending on who

is

the SPEAKER

and 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 all

these examples. Note that Dad can be employed both in the vocative and in

addressing letters or cards: "To Dad with love." If it is a proper name, is Dad

then 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 seems

to rely on an understanding of deixis as reference to the common situation of

speech, that

is

to say common between both interlocutors. Which

is

why they

define bier as "la veille du jour oil nous parlons" and en ce moment "au moment

oil nous parlons." (323)

It can certainly be observed in other cases, too, that such proper names

come to be used in situations in which the speaker does not have the status that

would justify his choice of that word. For instance, it is very common for adults

to use dad or pappy etc. when talking to a (or their own) child to designate

themselves, their husbands, or indeed any child's father, who may be a complete

stranger to them. Thus the man at the gasoline station may well calm down little

Florence by saying to her:

Look, dad's over there paying the check.


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103

and mother will explain that

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

To my knowledge, capitalization

isnot absolutely required in these examples. I

would 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 the

child's father from the child's perspective with whom the speaker empathizes (as

one does resorting to child language) in the same way that

Aunt Jane may

generally be called Auntie

by the family at large, even by those who are not her

nephews or nieces.

Aunt Jane will therefore be used as a proper name within the

family, almost even

as a

clerical title such as

Brother John.

It is doubtful

whether one would claim an underlying possessive here. Such uses of family

names, then, cannot be considered shifters. Which leads us back to the question

of whether proper names are or are not shifters.

As the capitalization in our examples shows, uses of family appellations with

underlying 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 these

terms, which would be

"your

dad," but

"Aunt Jane"

(* your Aunt Jane) or "your

aunt Jane."

Note that in the latter case the prosodic pattern qualifies aunt as a

common n oun:

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 as

proper names and shifter uses overlap and interact. Jespersen clearly does not

do 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

by

SPEAKER

to .designate

his/her own home and thus employed with an underlying

first person

possessive,

it can equally well be used by SPEAKER to designate

ADDRESSEE'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] by

now.

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:


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104

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 of

zata or s/he, and empathy with a third person is possible only in the absence of

a speaker or

addressee NP

in the vicinity of home. The binding category for

horse seems to be S, since subsidiary clauses or co-ordinate clauses can establish

different referents for home, as in both Tora's and Lucy's sentences above. Note

also

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 have

added [my) home. The enemy,

with its definite article, points towards another

set of shifters and recalls also that in languages other than English the shifter

function for family members is frequently signalled by a definite article, whereas

the general use requires an explicit possessive. In German, for instance, Der

eater 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 designate

one'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. our

baby, the one which looms large in the family's consciousness). In fact, whether

these 'terms surface as shifters or not depends on the context. "The baby's been

crying all night," if uttered

by

the mother to the father,

mirrors the situation of

the 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


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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 have

a boss in common between them. Indeed, with boss this

seems

to be the comm on

case. All of these terms can additionally be used empathetically in third person

contexts. 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 class

assumed" tag), or a description could run like

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

the carriage .

The same kind of usage can be observed for enemy:

a.

We heard on the radio today that Iran and Iraq are ending their

seven years' conflict. Each of these countries has fought the enemy with an

extremely high casualty rate.

b.

According to the Washington Post General Nadiva has defeated the

invading enemy.

As with home, one could here posit empathy scales, which in the absence of a

first or second person referent allow empathy for a third person referent.

Jespersen's examples of shifters, that

is

the ones he offers besides the

first person/second person pronouns I and you, therefore establish something of

a case for words which have an underlying first person possessive (dad etc. ).

They suggest, in addition, that some other terms, which are generally used

empathetically and allow underlying first or second person possessives as well, in

the latter case might qualify as shifters. Note, however, that there are no

expressions which have an underlying second person possessive [your] while at

the same time disallowing the first person possessive (my]. By contrast, there do

exist 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 really

depends on the first person, and that you is not a shifter to the same extent

that I is. I will pursue this more fully later.


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Fludernik.. Jeapersen's Shifters.

1 6

Let me now turn to adverbs of time and place and to their possible relation

to shifters. Adverbs of time and place are usually treated as temporal and spatial

deixis, and in what follows deixis will be used in this general sense, whereas the

use 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 designate

a 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 can

therefore 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 of

communication now, yesterday or tomorrow have a common temporal referent for

both interlocutors so that they would not change when speaker B takes over from

A. 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 distinguish

between 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 the

time 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 the

vaguest entities such

as at

this stage of our discussion,' or 'in this century,' as

in nowadays for 'these days.' From these general expressions of here and now

one can distinguish additionally what might be called displaced reference as in

'here on this map.' (Brown/Yule: 53)


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Fludernik. Jegipersen's Shifters.

107

As with here and now properly deictic (or shifter) uses can be established

also for demonstrative this (vs. that), namely on those occasions where this

refers to the sphere of the speaker exclusively: 'this table over here'

vs.

that

table over there where you are.' And like here and now, demonstratives are used

in a variety of contexts which are NOT 'deictic' (i.e. centred on the speech

event) and can be very general. For instance, in "This

is

gorgeous," this can

refer to a landscape, a sunset, to the job opportunities your interlocutor has just

described to you etc. Displaced reference (this mountain (on the map)) also

exists with demonstratives. And there is of course textual deixis

as

in 'at this

stage 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 employed

in a sense that goes beyond

the shifter category, since it usually includes all

grammatical means of pointing to all kinds of objects and persons. It is only in

the restricted (Benvenistean) sense that we have employed earlier that deixis and

deictic 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 hence

shift reference at turntaking. Therefore the definition of shifters as 'deictic pro-

nouns' - as provided by Benveniste as well as Todorov/Ducrot - involves a

redefinition of deixis to exclude third person referents, whether persons or

objects.

Such a model departs from the classic understanding of deixis

as compris-

ing what is generally termed proximal / medial / and distal deixis." In this the

speech situation (including

SPEAKER and ADDRESSEE)

is

covered by medial

deixis, whereas proximal deixis

is aligned with the SPEAKER'S sphere, and distal

deixis 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 be

encountered with the consequence that proximal deixis can cover both the

SPEAKER'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, temporal

now almost exclusively collapses proximal and medial deictical, categories. How-

ever, contexts can occur in which speakers are situated at different points in

time as well

as

space, such

as at

the respective ends of a transatlantic telephone

line. In this case what is 'today' for

A

may well be 'yesterday' for B. Letter

writing is another case in point. Whereas in telephone conversations now

is

at

least constant for the situation of communication itself - i.e. SPEAKER and

ADDRESSEE 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-


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Fludernik Jespersen shifters . 108

tion, of production and reception, can be separated by

a

long timespan, and the

self-conscious attempt by the writer to deal with this situation gives rise to major

linguistic problems. In particular the code of politeness, which constrains one to

project the reader's temporal coordinates, comes into conflict with SPEAKER'S

responsibilities towards veracity from

his own

point of view. Parallel ambiguities

arise 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 own

spatial 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 medial

and distal deictic positions coincide with the morphologically explicit distinction

between first, second and third person." Such a schema, however, causes major

methodological problems. Since Benveniste the first and second person pronouns

(and verbal categories) have been put into a

class

of their own that

Is

separated

by a gulf from third person reference, which is considered to be

impersonal and,

by implication, non-

I

deictic.'" Such a break between the first/second and the

third persons clearly conflicts with the easy collapsing between medial and distal

deictical 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 to

reduce 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 the

significance of the second person. Benveniste considered the first and the second

persons to be roughly of equal - and symmetrical - status, but with the first

person marked by subjectivity: "Language is so organized that it permits each

speaker 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, she

claims, 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, which

needs to be

considered within her own theoretical framework." However, what I

wish to do in the following is to argue for a different approach, in which the

binary oppositions are replaced by scales. Deictic categories in this model could

be 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


14/21

Fludernik. Jespersen's ShiftA3rs. 10 9

will attempt to demonstrate how deictic categories allow themselves to be extended

and conflated on a scale arrangement from subjectivity to absolute non-

subjectivity (the Other). Beyond this, the specificity of the second person

category will be at issue, in particular its quality of non-I subjectivity and the

way in which it functions as a shifter (i.e. its symmetrical or inverse relation to

the first person), and how these can be assimilated to a concept of gradational

differences.

As the above discussion of debris has shown, the prime bedrock category

of 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, the

addressee and the object or referent which

is

being talked about. The area of

what establishes the interlocutors' field of vision necessarily includes virtual

interlocutors (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 extended

area 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 of

inclusive and exclusive first person plural pronouns (we) which variously include

a second or third person referent into their subjective reference. In exclusive

forms (a) person(s) that is/are outside the present situation of speech are felt

by the speaker to be closer to him than ADDRESSEE. Likewise, the extension of

proximal debris into medial positions, by which the common spatio-temporal coor-

dinates of the interlocutors are explicitly foregrounded, in this framework

emerges

as a

precise parallel to the pronominal behaviour of including ADDRES-

SEE in one's area of subjectivity. Inversely, the conflation of medial*

and distal

debris might appear to be a manoeuver to relegate the addressee into the area of

non-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 remain

potential speakers and hence potential loci of subjectivity. This is parallelled by

the 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 person

viewpoint 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-


15/21


110

morphic properties on it, as one tends to do with pets, other animals, cars, or

even 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 deictic

positions. This

is

supported by the fact that the referent of you can change

within one speaker's discourse, whereas the referent of I by necessity remains

constant, i.e. the speaker. Additionally, in expressions such as dad, as we have

seen, 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 the

speech acts, such as they were proposed by Searle, center on the speaker. The

addressee is a passive receiver, whose reaction and consciousness (i.e. his sub-

jectivity) can be imagined and anticipated but only as a projection or empathy

phenomenon. Thus the conative function (Bilhler's appellative) is designed to

describe the effect one wishes to produce on one's interlocutor whether of

an

illocutionary or perlocutionary nature. The shift that occurs at turn taking is a

shift 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

a s

performing illocutionary and perlocutionary acts that are designed to affect

his/her interlocutor. Since this effect on the listener can be mental rather than

physical, the position of the addressee,

as

of a third person - a potential

addressee and speaker - are linguistic constructs projected by language and not

necessarily 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 inability

of 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 of

John's or the addressee's communication about their tiredness. The description of

feelings, or generally states of consciousness, of anybody except the speaker

himself, require the existence of an authorial ('omniscient') framework. In dis-

course people only use these forms if they have reason to infer the relevant

information 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


16/21


I l 1

that describe perceptions excluding the expression of subjectivity on the part of

the person perceived. Such linguistic constructions could be termed 'outward

point 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 yo u.

You m isunderstand 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 of

view, although they become acceptable within a third person viewpoint (where

they are free indirect discourse or reported speech of some sort). Tamir quotes

the acceptable

Max believes that I am lurking in a culvert.

Note also that the

introduction 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 its

past

self

(the "experiencing I"). However, there

is

then a definite distance

between the two Vs and the implication is 'I (then) misunderstood you, i.e. what

I

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 this

type acceptable. Thus,

I evidently misunderstand you.

Implies reflection on the part of the speaker and seems to vouchsafe him an

internal view on himself.2

Awareness and knowledge or perception tie in with a number of what has

been dealt with under the heading of empathy phenomena in recent linguistic

studies. The results in this area have pointed two ways. Some phenomena, such

as 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 two

interact, however. Thus speech report

is

a canonical category in which, in the

absence of a speaker or an addressee (i.e. in the absence of a first or second

person) a third person can acquire subjectivity structures. Thus in,


17/21

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 reporting

speech act entirely lacks a first or second person - the necessary condition for

the use of come " Kuno (224-227) explains this by reference to the interaction

of empathy structures between regular come and go, and those for come up to

and go up to.

In actual fact the use of come

is

really determined by the perspective of

seeing 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

s

phrased from tho addressee's perspective, who will see the

speaker arrive. Likewise, in

Will. John com e to the party?

the implication is that the addressee will be there and will

see Jeh d

arrive, or of

course the party will be at the speaker's place, in which case the speaker himself

will or will not

see

John arrive. This

iswhy

I will come to John's party

s

possible only if the addressee will be there as well. The process

svery

similar to preferences for 'enclosed please find' rather than 'I enclose' locutions:

one transfers the centre of empathy to one's addressee. This demonstrates that

come ultimately belongs to those verbs discussed earlier which cannot co-occur

with the first person's point of view in conjunction with first person agency: the

speaker either has to be the perceiver of somebody else's arrival, or do the

arriving as observed by somebody else from their point of view. a2

Which brings me to a last

observation in this paper, the connection between

textual shifter debris and topic/focus considerations. Items which are considered

"given" (presupposed) information are referred to by the same definite article

that is also employed quasi-deictically for entities perceivable within the context

of communication and which hence need no introduction. The same of course

applies to an elements of information that constitute what might be called common

knowledge between the interlocutors. Deictic categories surface as textual sig-

nals, indicating the presence of something. In this connection this and that in


18/21


their emotive function

Is

a particularly interesting case in point to which I will

now 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 core

property of subjectivity for shifters, a subjectivity that - as Bonfield has so

aptly 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 just

standing 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 of

the indefinite article - and at the same time dispensing with any introduction and

presupposing 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 to

the chair right In front of one. Since the context unambiguously identifies the

item

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 of

the item. After all, for the speaker who has just recalled the point, the item Is

present within his 'context of utterance.'

This serves to introduce such emotionally charged elements, whereas - as

the examples illustrate - that substitutes for the definite article, again with an

implied emotional, subjective investment, for subsequent mentions of the item.

Both this and that function as shifters because these demonstratives can be used

exclusively in reference to the speaker's subjectivity and hence their referent

must needs change when speakers take turns. The addressee, or somebody

taking 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 tough

guy." 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 of

emotive 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 second

person, and I have also adduced some evidence to suggest that deictic categories

as well as empathy processes operate on a scale model of expansion from the

realm of speaker's locus of subjectivity to that of the addressee and of a third


19/21


114

person. This brings me to my final point, the shifters and how they now fit into

this new view of things.

As a preliminary conclusion of our deliberations on shifters and deixis I

wish 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 understanding

of shifter as a term applicable solely to those expressions which shift their

referent at turntaking points in conversation. The examination of various shifters

that 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 no

shifters at all (you), or to be shifters only in certain contexts (home, the

enemy,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 helped

us locate shifters other than I, as for instance the emotional this\that which I

described above. Moreover, expressions that behave in an inverse relationship to

shifters, since they disallow SPEAKER'S perspective, can now be integrated into

the discussion. This is where our third conclusion

comes in. If one recognizes

the special position of subjectivity in relation to second and third person subjects

in language, not only can one discover that language projects an addressee (the

non-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, in

the frame of which shifters now reveal themselves to be a special case. We are

thus able to describe referring or phoric processes as capable of being illustrated

on 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 referential

processes typically include references to objects or persons outside the situation

of 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 necessarily

a preliminary account, if only because I am a literary scholar rather than a

trained linguist. Yet this outsider's perspective may, I hope, in the long run

prove fruitful to insiders of the field. If shifters have become

a much-cited (and

little understood) term in literary discussions, the present observations may have


20/21


demonstrated that, even within linguistics, this seemingly insignificant category

is situated at a vital position in language, shifting the points between major

tracks - those of deixis, reference, and subjectivity.

NOTES

In French the technical term

is

embr

j i sr . (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, and

Reference." (forthcoming)

4

The enemy* in this example makes a claim about a referent's relationship to

self, neither describing the referent in objective

class

terms the cobbler)

nor designating the referent's unique specificity as when using a proper

name (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 empathy

scales 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,

as

empathy 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 these

variants, and I suspect that local preferences exist as well.

1

Compare the English "my old man"/"my old woman" for one's parents, for

which shifter

uses

of "the old man" exist.

1 1

See

Fillmore 197 1.

1 2

Compare Benveniste 1971, as well

as

Frei 194 4.

1 3

Cp. Benveniste 1971: 199-200 ("Relationships of Person in the Verb").

Benveniste's analysis on this issue

is

impeccable. The verbal category of

person in IE can very well be explained as the impersonal: plait 'it rains.;

volat avis 'it flies (scil.)

the bird.'(200)

1 4

Benveniste (1971: 226).

1 5

On this question a book-length account

is

in preparation.

1 6

Note that such privileged objects also tend to acquire names and may be

addressed by their owners, which effectively transfers them into the status

of a potential (second or third person) partner in conversation.

1 7

Based on T arnir 4 14 .

1 8

Footnote 12, p.

4 1 4 .

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.

2 1

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

s

to say Fillmore concentrates on the implications of spa-

tial deixis in the use of come and go.


21/21

Fludarnik. Jeapersen's Shifters.

116

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Thanks are due to

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awarding me the Er

w

in-SchrOdinger-Auslandsstipendium during the academic year

1987/88 for a project, the

windfall of which is being

presented here.

Documents

Fludernik Jespersens Shifters