Pointing and reference reconsidered

Abstract

Current semantic theory on indexical expressions claims that demonstratively used indexicals such as this lack a referent-determining meaning but instead rely on an accompanying demonstration act like a pointing gesture. While this view allows to set up a sound logic of demonstratives, the direct-referential role assigned to pointing gestures has never been scrutinized thoroughly in semantics or pragmatics. We investigate the semantics and pragmatics of co-verbal pointing from a foundational perspective combining experiments, statistical investigation, computer simulation and theoretical modeling techniques in a novel manner. We evaluate various referential hypotheses with a corpus of object identification games set up in experiments in which body movement tracking techniques have been extensively used to generate precise pointing measurements. Statistical investigation and computer simulations show that especially distal areas in the pointing domain falsify the semantic direct-referential hypotheses concerning pointing gestures. As an alternative, we propose that reference involving pointing rests on a default inference which we specify using the empirical data. These results raise numerous problems for classical semantics--pragmatics interfaces: we argue for pre-semantic pragmatics in order to account for inferential reference in addition to classical post-semantic Gricean pragmatics.

Grammar Is a System That Characterizes Talk in Interaction

“…Extensive empirical work by Lücking, Pfeiffer, Rieser and colleagues at the University of Bielefeld (Kranstedt et al, 2006; Lücking et al, 2015) using highly sophisticated recording and visualization equipment has demonstrated that pointing gestures seldom if ever function as unique identifiers of a demonstratum, as proposed by Kaplan (1978). In all but the simplest situations, the identification of the demonstratum among the objects in the pointing cone identified by a pointing gesture is a complex reasoning process involving consideration of a number of additional aspects of the Interaction Situation.…”

“…The answers get introduced into the semantics via mechanisms discussed in Lücking et al (2015), whereas the question via domain specific (or alternatively genre–based ) inference (Larsson, 2002; Ginzburg, 2012) 23 .…”

Demonstratives in Spatial Language and Social Interaction: An Interdisciplinary Review

“…Finally, there are a number of psycholinguistic studies that have examined the multimodal use of demonstratives with experimental methods (e.g., Bangerter, 2004 ; Piwek et al, 2008 ; Lücking et al, 2015 ; Cooperrider, 2016 ; Garciá et al, 2017 ). Most of this research is concerned with demonstratives and pointing, but Garciá et al (2017) looked at the interaction between demonstratives and gaze (see also Todisco et al, 2020 and Stukenbrock, this volume).…”

“…Other things being equal, the gestural use of demonstratives is much more frequent for nearby referents than for referents far away (see also Piwek et al, 2008 ). Since far-away referents are often difficult to identify by gesture ( Lücking et al, 2015 ), one might hypothesize that the correlation between distance and pointing is ultimately motivated by the ambiguity of distant pointing. Good evidence for this hypothesis comes from a study by Cooperrider (2016) , who found that speakers extend the gestural use of demonstratives to far-away referents if they are given a laser pointer, making it possible to identify a distant referent that cannot be unambiguously identified by manual gesture.…”

Making sense of human interaction benefits from communicative cues

“…In the context of joint action between two agents, pointing is typically taken by adults (and children) to result in joint attention. Whether used on its own or integrated with speech, it can, however, convey a much wider range of interpretations [13][14][15][16] .…”