Demonstratives

Linguistic and Logical Characterization

Demonstratives are context-dependent expressions that function to pick out objects, places, or times, typically relative to a speaker or perceptual situation. In English, the core demonstrative forms are “this,” “that,” “these,” and “those.” They are part of a broader class of deictic expressions whose interpretation relies on features of the context of utterance.

Traditionally in grammar, demonstratives are divided into proximal (e.g., “this,” “these,” indicating relative closeness to the speaker) and distal (e.g., “that,” “those,” indicating relative distance). Many languages exhibit richer systems, with multiple levels of distance (e.g., near speaker, near hearer, far from both) and additional distinctions such as visibility or elevation.

Logically and semantically, demonstratives raise questions about:

• Reference: What makes a particular object the referent of “this” in a given context?
• Meaning vs. use: How much of their behavior is encoded in linguistic meaning, and how much is determined by non-linguistic factors such as gesture or speaker intention?
• Truth-conditions: How do demonstratives contribute to the propositions expressed by sentences in which they appear?

In formal semantics, demonstratives are often modeled as expressions whose reference function takes as input a context (including speaker, time, location, attentional focus) and yields an object. They stand at the intersection of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, since how they attach to noun phrases and how they are interpreted cannot be understood without appeal to extra-linguistic context.

Demonstratives in Analytic Philosophy

Analytic philosophy of language has treated demonstratives as a crucial test case for theories of meaning and reference.

Early work, influenced by Bertrand Russell, tended to assimilate demonstratives to descriptions grounded in perception. On this view, “that man” might be analyzed as something like “the man I am now seeing and pointing at.” Reference is secured through descriptive content associated with the hearer’s and speaker’s perceptual situation.

This approach was challenged by direct-reference theorists. David Kaplan’s influential framework, developed especially in “Demonstratives” and “Afterthoughts,” treats demonstratives and other indexicals as directly referential. For Kaplan, an expression has:

• Character: a rule that maps contexts to contents (for instance, “I” always refers to the speaker of the context).
• Content: in the case of demonstratives, a particular object (the referent) in the given context.

Demonstratives thus do not contribute descriptive conditions but instead directly contribute their referent to the proposition expressed. Their meaning is partly fixed by conventional linguistic rules (e.g., that “this” picks something relatively near the speaker) and partly by the context in which they are used.

John Perry extended this line by emphasizing “essential indexicals”—expressions like “I,” “here,” and “now,” and by extension many uses of “this” and “that,” which cannot be eliminated from a faithful account of certain thoughts and actions. For example, the realization “That is dangerous” when accompanied by a pointing gesture may play an ineliminable role in guiding immediate behavior.

These debates made demonstratives central to broader controversies over:

• The nature of propositions (whether they are structured, contain objects, or are purely descriptive).
• The role of cognitive perspective in semantics (how first-person or situational modes of presentation enter into meaning).
• The boundary between semantics and pragmatics (how much of demonstrative reference is encoded versus inferred).

Context, Intention, and Deixis

Demonstratives illustrate how language is anchored in concrete situations. Their interpretation normally depends on:

• Spatial context: where the speaker and hearer are located.
• Temporal context: when the utterance occurs.
• Perceptual salience: what is visually or otherwise perceptually prominent.
• Speaker’s intentions: which object the speaker intends to highlight.
• Gestures and posture: especially pointing, gaze direction, or body orientation.

Deixis is the general phenomenon of context-dependent reference based on such parameters. Demonstratives are often classified as exophoric when used to refer to things in the shared environment (“Put that on the table”), and endophoric when they refer within discourse itself (“In that argument, we saw…”).

Philosophers and linguists disagree about the relative priority of intentions and overt cues (e.g., pointing). Some intention-centered views hold that the referent of “that” is the object the speaker intends to pick out, with gestures serving as evidence for that intention. Competing views emphasize public, observable features: the referent is determined by the object best fitting publicly detectable criteria (like direction of pointing, proximity, and prior discourse).

The Kaplanian framework encodes some of these dependencies into the context parameter, but there is ongoing debate about how finely context must be specified: does it include attentional states, fine-grained visual fields, or only coarse features like speaker and time?

Contemporary Debates and Applications

Current work on demonstratives lies at a crossroads between philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Key debates include:

• Descriptivist vs. direct-reference accounts: Some theorists maintain that demonstratives carry hidden descriptive content (e.g., “that [visibly red] object”), while direct-reference theorists argue they simply contribute objects, with descriptive features entering only pragmatically.
• Relativism and context-shift: When someone reports an earlier utterance using a demonstrative (“At that time, she said ‘that is dangerous’”), questions arise about how referents are tracked across changing contexts.
• Cross-linguistic variation: Languages with rich demonstrative systems challenge simplistic two-way (this/that) models and suggest that demonstratives may encode complex cognitive and social perspectives (e.g., alignment with speaker vs. hearer, elevation, visibility, or familiarity).

In cognitive science, demonstratives are used to study joint attention, pointing, and early language acquisition. Children’s mastery of “this” and “that” is often taken as evidence about how they understand other minds and shared space.

In formal semantics and pragmatics, demonstratives remain central to models of:

• Context-dependence and indexicality.
• Common ground and discourse representation.
• The interaction between gesture and speech.

Across these domains, demonstratives serve as a paradigm case for the more general philosophical problem of how language hooks onto the world through situated, embodied agents. They exemplify how meaning is not only a matter of abstract symbols but also of agents pointing, looking, and acting in shared environments.