Differences in the use of deictic expressions

in English and German texts*

VIKTOR BECHER

Abstract
The article presents a contrastive analysis of the use of English and German
deictic expressions. Its focus is on the communicative role of these items, i.e.,
the way in which they are used by authors to communicate effectively with their
readers. The analysis tries to combine a qualitative (discourse analytic) and a
quantitative (corpus linguistic) perspective by making use of a small corpus
containing the endings of 32 English and 32 German texts from the genre popular science. All deictic expressions present in the corpus were manually identified, counted and analyzed according to the function(s) they fulfill in their
respective context. The results suggest that deictic expressions are more frequent in German than in English texts. Two (related) reasons seem to account
for this finding: first, deictics figure more prominently in the German system of
textual cohesion. Second, they were in many instances found to serve as an
(optional) instrument for maximizing explicitness, a communicative strategy
which is customary in German but not in English discourse.
1. Introduction
The present article compares the use of deictic expressions in English and Ger
man texts from a pragmatic perspective. It aims to address the different ways
in which deictic expressions are employed by English and German authors in
order to convey their ideas, interact with their readers and create textual cohe
sion. It will be shown that there are considerable differences in the English and
German uses of deictic expressions, which are due not only to differences be
tween the two language systems, but also to the (tacit) norms and conventions
which govern their use.
The current state of research does not permit a satisfactory definition of
theconcept of deixis. Anderson and Keenan (1985) adopt the standard usage
in considering as deictics those linguistic elements whose interpretation in
Linguistics 484 (2010), 13091342
DOI 10.1515/LING.2010.042

00243949/10/00481309
Walter de Gruyter

1310 V. Becher
simple sentences makes essential reference to properties of the extralinguistic
context of the utterance in which they occur (p. 259). When we go beyond the
simple sentence, however, we find that this common sense definition no
longer holds, because in actual written texts, most deictics do not refer to the
extralinguistic context (which for the most part is not shared between author
and reader and thus cannot be referred to), but to the context built up by the text
itself (Ehlich 2007). How about reference to properties of the linguistic and
extralinguistic context, then? The problem with such a definition as well as
with similar definitions which try to cover deictic reference in text is that it
blurs the boundary between deixis and a related phenomenon, anaphora. The
following section, which reviews some important steps towards a theory of
deixis, will thus be concerned with this important boundary.
The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we will discuss
Konrad Ehlichs approach towards a theory of deixis, which pays close at
tention to the different nature of deixis and anaphora and may thus serve as
a useful guide for investigating the use of deictic expressions in text. After
Sections 1.2 and 1.3 have introduced the data and hypothesis of the present
study, the results will be presented and discussed in Section 2. The final section
(Section 3), contains a short summary of the findings as well as some general
conclusions.
1.1. Towards a theory of deixis: distinguishing deixis from anaphora
This section presents Konrad Ehlichs (approach towards a) theory of deixis.
The theory is rooted within the research tradition of Functional Pragmatics (see
Redder 2008 and Rehbein and Kameyama 2006 for recent overviews). This
research tradition views language as a sociohistorically developed action
form (Redder 2008: 136) that a speaker may use to effect changes in the
hearers knowledge. Ehlichs theory of deixis was chosen as a basis for the
study presented in this article rather than another approach to coreference or
deixis (see below for references) because it pays special attention to the differ
ence between deictic and anaphoric expressions in terms of the cognitive proc
esses they trigger. It will be argued that this difference is crucial for the proper
description of the use of deictics in written discourse. Since the focus of this
paper lies on the contrastive study that it presents, this introductory section
cando no more than outline the theoretical approach and present the termi
nology1 to be used, thus largely avoiding comparisons with other approaches
to coreference (e.g., Ariel 1990, 2001; Gundel et al. 1993; Grosz et al. 1995;
Arnold 2008) and deixis (see e.g., Herbermann 1988; Blhdorn 1995; Diewald
1991; Levinson 2004; and Sidnell 2005 for critical overviews of research on
deixis).

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1311

The traditional paradigm of personal pronouns is a ragbag of two fundamen
tally different groups of expressions (cf. e.g., Lyons 1977: 638639 and the
extensive discussion in Ehlich 1979). The so-called first and second person
pronouns are prototypical members of the Zeigfeld der Sprache (=deictic field
of language; Bhler [1934]), as they refer to the speaker (I, we 2) and to the ad
dressee ( you) of the respective speech situation, i.e., to entities of extralinguis
tic reality. They may be termed deictic expressions, or deictics (<Gr. deiknynai
to show, point out).
The so-called third person pronouns (he/she/it, they), on the other hand, do
not directly refer to the real world. Rather, they presuppose the existence of an
antecedent, i.e., an expression in the preceding discourse3 with the same refer
ent, with which they can thus be said to be coreferential (Halliday and Hasan
1976: 34). Accordingly, these expressions may be adequately termed anaphoric expressions, or anaphorics (<Gr. anapherein to carry back)4. In (1),
for example, all three occurrences of it (in the last case taking the possessive
form its) are coreferent with the antecedent noun phrase society.
(1)Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children.5
As the example shows, we can say that anaphoric expressions like it indi
rectly refer to the world, i.e., through their antecedent (cf. Lyons 1977: 660).
It thus turns out that the term pronoun is only suitable to describe anaphorics,
which (in most cases6) actually stand for, i.e., instead of (pro), a noun, or
rather a noun phrase (cf. Lyons 1977: 636637 on the infelicity of the term
pronoun). Deictics, on the other hand, are attention-managing devices (Ehlich
1992; a similar point is made by Diessel 2006) that may directly refer to extra
linguistic entities. They are the linguistic correlates of attention-directing ges
tures such as the pointing of a finger (You!)7. Whether through language or
through gesture, the directing of the addressees attention takes place in a dem
onstration space which has its origo, i.e., its center, in the here, I and now
of the respective speech situation (Bhler 1934). Following Ehlich (1982), we
may say that while the function of deictics is to establish a new attention focus
in the addressee (by directing their attention to an element of extralinguistic
reality), the function of anaphorics is to maintain, i.e., to carry on, an existing
focus8. That is, deictic and anaphoric expressions trigger different cognitive
processes, which we will call deixis and anaphora.
So far, the difference between deictics and anaphorics is clear-cut. The con
fusion begins when we take the so-called demonstrative pronouns (this/these,
that/those) into account, which we will call object deictics (following Diewald
1991: 228230). These may not only directly refer to the extralinguistic world
(Look at that!); it appears that they, like anaphorics, can also refer indi
rectly, as in the following examples.

1312 V. Becher
(2)To prevent the cataplectic attacks of narcolepsy, physicians can prescribe
agents that increase the availability of norepinephrine in the brain. These
include monoamine oxidase inhibitors [...].
(3)Applied to insects, transgenic technology can offer biologists new ways
to investigate, control and exploit these creatures [...].
In (2) and (3), the deictic these is obviously coreferent with preceding lin
guistic expressions, its antecedents being agents that increase [...] in (2) and
insects in (3). The only difference between the two uses of these is that in (3),
its referent is pre-categorized as creatures. In principle, the deictic could be
replaced by an anaphoric in both cases (they and them, respectively). Occur
rences of this/these like those above are usually called anaphoric uses of
deictics. Such terminology, however, is problematic, as it implies that the
deictic in this case triggers a focus-maintaining (i.e., anaphoric) instead of a
focus-establishing/focus-shifting (i.e., deictic) cognitive process in the ad
dressee. If this were true, deictics could always be replaced by anaphorics. But
as the following example shows, that is not the case.
(4)The outflows from the sun and its stellar contemporaries blew away the
leftover gas and dust that threaded the space between them. This weakened the gravitational glue that bound them together [...].
In (4), no antecedent expression of this can be identified. The deictic seems to
have the whole preceding sentence as its antecedent. It thus cannot be said to
maintain an existing attention focus the meaning of the whole sentence
would have to be focused. The deictic rather establishes a new attention focus
by shifting the addressees attention to the state of affairs expressed in the pre
ceding sentence (cf. Consten et al. 2007; Consten and Knees 2008). This is
why the substitution of an anaphoric (it) for the deictic would have a confusing
effect on the reader, to say the least. It is thus not surprising that anaphoric
reference to higher-order entities9 such as states of affairs or propositions is
rare (Webber 1991; Hegarty et al. 2001), while deictic reference to these enti
ties is so common that it can be said to have a central function in creating
textual cohesion (Consten et al. 2007: 83). We should also note that once a
higher-order entity has been referred to by means of a deictic like this, further
reference to this entity may be made with an anaphoric (2007: 95): cf. It also
weakened... as a possible continuation of (4). This observation too is pre
dicted by Ehlichs theory: once the addressees focus has been shifted to a
referent, the referent becomes accessible to (focus-maintaining) anaphorics.
The previous example has shown that, due to their focus-shifting nature,
deictics work better in coreferring with complex antecedents than anaphorics.
The following (constructed) example shows that in coreference with concrete

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1313

antecedents the two types of referential expressions also show a clear division
of labor:
(5)[Modern computers]i can perform [different tasks]k. Theyi / #k /
These # i / k...
(a) # Theyk include mathematical calculations, text processing...
(b) Thesek include mathematical calculations, text processing...
(c) Theyi can solve mathematical equations, process textual data...
(d) # Thesei can solve mathematical equations, process textual data...
The first sentence in (5) introduces two referents, modern computers and different tasks. When we continue the sentence with a coreferential expression,
the anaphoric they tends to be coreferent with the subject of the sentence
(modern computers), while the deictic these tends to corefer with its object
(different tasks) (cf. the provided subscripts). Sentences (5a) through (5d),
which present possible continuations of (5), illustrate this. In these sentences
the meaning of the predicate (include... vs. solve...) forces the coreferential
expression to corefer with either the subject or the object of the preceding sen
tence. It turns out that when the wrong coreferential expression is chosen,
the utterance is pragmatically awkward (marked with #).
The discussion of Example (5) suggests that deictics and anaphorics are in a
quasi-complementary distribution (cf. Byron et al. 2008 for English; Bosch
and Umbach 2007 for German), quasi meaning that there are cases where
both kinds of coreferring expressions may be used in a semantically and prag
matically appropriate sentence (cf. the discussion of (2) and (3) above). This
conclusion is supported by the findings of Bosch et al. (2003). In their study of
a corpus tagged for coreference relations, they found that deictics more fre
quently refer to non-nominative constituents than anaphorics, which, in turn,
more frequently occur with nominative antecedents. They interpret these re
sults as evidence for the Subject Hypothesis, which postulates that personal
pronouns prefer subject antecedents while demonstratives prefer nonsubject
antecedents10. This is exactly what we observed in Example (5) and what one
should expect from the difference between anaphora and deixis as it has been
outlined above, since it can be plausibly assumed that entities introduced in
syntactically prominent positions are more likely to be brought into focus of
attention than ones introduced in a less prominent position. (Gundel et al.
2003: 297)11
I have argued that it is misleading to describe the function of coreferential
deictics in written discourse as anaphoric, since deictics are associated with
a distinct cognitive process, namely the shifting of the addressees attention
focus. It is plausible to assume that the focus-shifting function of coreferring
deictics has developed from their function of directing the addressees atten
tion to objects of the (extralinguistic) speech situation (cf. Lyons 1977: 670;

1314 V. Becher
Diewald 1991: 110111). But how exactly are the coreferential use and the
extralinguistic use of deictic expressions related? To answer this question, let
us draw a more accurate picture of deictic coreference in discourse that makes
explicit its connection to extralinguistic deixis:
During discourse, be it spoken or written, the knowledge of the addressee is updated by
each utterance. This enables the author of a written text to reconstruct the running
knowledge of the addressee, which may then serve as a target of deictic expressions
(Blhdorn 1993, 1995), i.e., as a demonstration space in its own right: text space (Eh
lich [1983: 89]; cf. Lyons [1977: 670] notion of a universe-of-discourse). From this
perspective, coreferential deixis is not qualitatively different from deixis in (real) space
or time, only the demonstration space is different (Ehlich 2007: 41). What both corefer
ential deictics and real deictics have in common is that they instruct the addressee to
focus their attention on a referent already represented in or yet to be introduced into
their knowledge (cf. Ehlich 1982 and Blhdorn 1993: 45). As for the cognitive process
underlying deictic coreference, in many cases we should expect a refocusing rather than
a focusing, assuming that an initial focusing of the addressee has already taken place
(e.g., when the item referred to was introduced into the discourse).

In this section, I have stressed the differences between deictic and anaphoric
expressions. Still, we should bear in mind that authors have considerable lee
way in deciding whether it is necessary or desirable to employ a deictic rather
than e.g., an anaphoric. This becomes particularly evident when we recall ex
amples such as (2) and (3), where different types of referring expressions
would do the job. In general, the choice of referring expressions in written
discourse has been shown to be crucially dependent on the communicative in
tention of the writer (Moya Guijarro 2006) and on the assumptions she makes
about the knowledge of the addressee (Arnold 2008). From this perspective
deictic expressions may be seen as one particular way of achieving addressee
orientation (cf. Bttger and Probst 2001). Now a host of contrastive studies12
has shown that English and German texts rely on quite different strategies of
addressee orientation. English and German authors make quite different glo
bal assumptions about the addressee, which are an important factor influenc
ing the production of referring expressions (Arnold 2008). So it makes sense to
ask which role(s) deictic expressions qua attention-managing devices play in
the different strategies of addressee orientation operative in the English and
German language communities. This is the purpose of the study to be pre
sented in the following.
1.2. Data and scope of study
Differences in the use of deictic expressions in English and German are rarely
mentioned (but see Canavan 1972 and von Stutterheim 1997). The aim of the

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1315

present study is to obtain a first impression of possible differences in the use of
deictics in English and German texts. To achieve this, a mixed quantitativequalitative approach was chosen: 32 random German texts and 32 random
English texts were singled out for analysis. To ensure maximum comparability,
all texts are of the same genre (popular science) and from the same time period
(19782002). As it would not be feasible to manually analyze all occurrences
of deictics in all 64 texts, only the last 10 orthographical sentences of each text
were extracted to form a minicorpus of text endings. The structure of the
corpus is outlined in Table 1.
Table 1. Structure of the corpus of text endings
English

German

32 text endings
320 sentences
6213 words
39585 characters

32 text endings
320 sentences
5457 words
41388 characters

It is no coincidence that the endings of the texts were chosen as a basis for the
corpus to be compiled rather than their beginnings or middle parts. First of all,
it was found that the text beginnings contain only few object deictics, since the
introductory parts of popular science texts seem to be mainly concerned with
introducing new referents rather than with referring to previously introduced
ones. The middle parts of the texts, on the other hand, were judged to be quite
heterogeneous (and therefore unsuitable for the compilation of a small-scale
corpus), since they feature a variety of different discourse types such as short
narratives or direct speech. In contrast, the text endings were found to be quite
homogenous; they generally feature a short outlook that highlights the rele
vance of the topic of the article to the reader or to society as a whole (cf. Sec
tion 2.1.1 and the examples provided there).
The reader is reminded, however, that text endings are not necessarily repre
sentative of the genre as a whole not to mention the many other genres of
English and German. Research has shown that the use of referring expressions
in general (Fox 1987, Moya Guijarro 2006) and of deictics in particular
(Diewald 1991) is dependent on genre (but see Toole 1996, who argues that the
same cognitive mechanisms are operative regardless of the genre at hand).
Further study is needed to assess how far the use of deictic expressions in the
investigated texts is influenced by genre-internal conventions (as opposed to
crosslinguistically different communicative conventions). One possible way of
doing this would be to repeat the study presented here using texts from other
genres.

1316 V. Becher
Methodologically, the small-scale corpus used for the present study com
bines the best of two worlds, as it enables a qualitative analysis of all occurring
deictic expressions in context while still being representative enough to allow
for a quantitative perspective on the data. However, statistical significance was
not computed in order to highlight the tentative character of the quantitative
findings. It is not the prime goal of this study to deliver reliable quantitative
results (the investigated corpus would be too small for that anyway) but rather
to provide directions for further research by identifying items which seem
worthwhile for detailed contrastive investigations on the basis of larger cor
pora (e.g., English then vs. German dann, cf. Section 2.4).
1.3. Hypotheses
Ehlich suggests that the high degree of complexity in German scientific texts
(cf. Fabricius-Hansen 2000) implies the use of a large variety of deictic ex
pressions being used for text organizing deictic procedures (Ehlich 1992:
224) and that English seems to have chosen different strategies for represent
ing complexity and abstractness in scientific texts. So English seems to be poor
in deixis, German rich, and French even richer (p. 225). Ehlichs suggestions
led to the formulation of the following two hypotheses for the present study:
1.The investigated German text endings make more frequent use of deic
tic expressions than their English counterparts.
2.The reason for the frequency difference is a stronger reliance in German
on deictics for the establishment of textual cohesion.
The hypotheses build upon each other: while the first hypothesis postulates a
certain quantitative result, the second one makes a claim about its qualitative
explanation.
2. Results
The deictic expressions13 identified in the corpus are listed in Table 2. The clas
sification underlying the table is deliberately heterogeneous: quality deixis is
really a subclass of object deixis (see Section 2.3); and composite deictics
might as well be distributed among the other classes. However, this would
conceal an interesting finding: while composite deictics are an important re
source for German popular science authors, their use is almost nonexistent in
the English text endings (64 occurrences in the German text endings vs. a sin
gle occurrence in the English ones). In contrast, English popular science au
thors seem to put much more emphasis on personal deixis than their German
colleagues. Departing from these preliminary insights, the categories of deictic
expressions listed in Table 2 will be discussed in the following sections14.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1317

Table 2. Types of deictics and frequency of occurrence in the corpus
English
personal
object
quality
temporal
spatial
composite
total

German

98
56
43
27
5
1

42
71
39
39
4
64

230

259

2.1. Personal deixis

Personal deictics are of considerable interest for functional approaches to
(popular) scientific texts because they may reveal writers perceptions of their
own role in research and their relationship with expected readers as well as the
scientific-academic community (Kuo 1999: 121). The initial finding that per
sonal deictics are much more common in the English than in the German text
endings (98 vs. 42 occurrences, cf. Table 2) is consistent with the findings of
House (1997, 2006). Summarizing her own and the empirical studies of others
on EnglishGerman differences in communicative style (see Note 12 for refer
ences), she concludes that, inter alia, English discourse is generally character
ized by an orientation towards persons (interactional), while German dis
course tends to be content-oriented (transactional). As will be seen below,
these different style preferences of English and German are indeed the most
likely cause of the observed frequency difference.
Table 3, which lists the personal deictics found in the corpus, shows that
almost exclusively plural speaker deictics (first person) were encountered15,
i.e., English we, us, our and the corresponding German wir, uns, unser (which
will be subsumed under their dictionary forms we and wir in the following;
this practice will be adopted for all deictics discussed in the remainder of this
article).
Table 3. Personal deictics in the corpus
English

German

we, us, our (90)

you, your (5)
I, my (3)

wir, uns, unser (39)

ich, mein (3)

total:

total:

98

42

1318 V. Becher
The deictics were categorized according to referent type, where a broad dis
tinction can be made between reader-exclusive and reader-inclusive uses (cf.
Harwood 2005). The results of this first classification can be seen in Table 4.
Table 4. Inclusive and exclusive uses of English we and German wir
English

German

inclusive
exclusive
unclear
in direct speech

46 (51%)
38 (42%)
5 (6%)
1 (1%)

7 (18%)
32 (82%)
0
0

total

90 (100%)

39 (100%)

The table suggests that the frequency difference between the English and the
German text endings is due to the abundance of reader-inclusive uses of we in
the English texts. These will be given a closer look in the following section.
(The 5 occurrences of we with unclear referents and the single occurrence in
direct speech will not be dealt with.)
2.1.1. Inclusive we/wir. Interestingly, the referent of almost all encoun
tered uses of inclusive we is as extensive as society (Examples (6) and (7)) or
even humankind (Examples (8) and (9)). That is, almost all occurrences of we
in the corpus can be classified as rhetorical we (Quirk et al. 1985: Section
6.18).
(6)Today, as we live longer, exercise less, eat too much and smoke, many of
us suffer from inflammations dark side [...].
(7)We must also become more proactive in addressing the state of our
waterways, instead of reacting to each fish kill as if it were a limited,
isolated crisis.
(8)But because we visualize numbers as complex shapes, write them down
and perform other such functions, we process digits in a monumentally
awkward and inefficient way.
(9)We are still some 80,000 years from the peak of the next ice age, so our
first chance for an answer is far in the future.
The term rhetorical is quite a fitting label for the uses of inclusive we found
in the corpus. By using the deictic, authors seem to pursue the rhetoric goal of
highlighting the relevance of their claims and findings not only to humankind
in general, but particularly to the reader of the article, who is included in the
global reference of inclusive we. The deictic thus serves authors as an impor

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1319

tant means of achieving an addressee-oriented style. Tang and Suganthi (1999:
27) go as far as to claim that inclusive we, far from giving the reader informa
tion about the writer, effectively reduces the writer to a non-entity. The few
uses of inclusive wir in the German text endings are used in a similar way:
(10)Auf diese Weise lernen Physiker mehr ber die fundamentale Struktur
unserer Welt [...].
In this way, physicists learn more about the fundamental structure of
our world.
(11)Die Dunkelheit des Nachthimmels berichtet uns also von der zeitlichen
Endlichkeit des Kosmos [...].
The darkness of the night sky thus tells us of the temporal finiteness of
the cosmos.
(12)Was knnen wir also tun, um der BSE-Krise ein Ende zu bereiten?
So what can we do to put an end to the BSE crisis?
In light of these examples, it is evident that the difference in the use of inclu
sive we and wir is solely a quantitative one. In the German text endings, inclu
sive wir is used for the same communicative purposes as inclusive we in their
English counterparts. However, the considerably less frequent use of inclusive
wir suggests that German authors are more reluctant to use the personal deictic
to project a reader into the text (cf. Thompson 2001) in order to highlight the
relevance of the presented material. This reluctance can be seen as a result of
the content-oriented communicative style of the German linguaculture.
2.1.2. Exclusive we/wir. The analyzed reader-exclusive uses of we/wir
serve a very different function. In the corpus, authors use exclusive we/wir to
refer to themselves and their research team (see (13), (14) and (16)) or to the
whole scientific community (see (15)) in order to provide information about
their methods (see (13)), to draw a conclusion from their findings (see (14)) or
to give an evaluation of the prospects (see (15)) and limits (see (16)) of their
research:
(13)Zum Beispiel werden derzeit von uns schon Mikrocontainer mit glattem
perforiertem Boden genutzt.
For example, at present we are already using micro containers with a
smooth, perforated base.
(14)Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure
that child abuse does not happen in the first place [...].
(15)But every risk factor that we are able to identify takes away some of the
mystery.

1320 V. Becher
(16)Auch die Ergebnisse unserer Versuche in der Klimakammer liefern nur
Ausknfte ber einzelne Faktoren.
The results of our experiments in the climate chamber also only pro
vide information about single factors.
As the choice of examples already implies, no qualitative difference be
tween the English and German uses of exclusive we/wir could be identified.
Quantitatively they also do not differ much.
The short contrastive analysis of English and German plural speaker deictics
provided in this section could only sketch some of the most important differ
ences. For a more detailed contrastive analysis of we and wir in popular sci
ence texts, see Baumgarten (2008).
2.2. Object deictics
Within the category of (noncomposite) object deictics, only the standard
demonstratives are represented in the corpus, namely English this, that and
German dies this, das that. Rare (and slightly archaic) deictics like e.g.,
German jenes were not encountered. Table 5 presents a summary of the lexical
items found in the corpus16.
Table 5. Object deictics in the corpus
English

German

this (42)
that (14)

dies (53)
das (18)

total:

total:

56

71

The term object deixis should be taken in its broadest sense, because in English
as well as in German only approximately a quarter of all object deictics in the
corpus actually refer to (concrete or abstract) objects as it is the case in the fol
lowing example.
(17)[D]er Himmel glimmt im Licht des kosmischen Hintergrunds.
Wenngleich wir groe Fortschritte dabei gemacht haben, diesen Hintergrund zu erklren, bleibt noch viel zu tun.
The sky glows in the light of the cosmic background. Although we have
made great progress in explaining this background, much remains to be
done.
In Example (17), diesen Hintergrund this background refers to the aforemen
tioned cosmic background (additional examples of object deictics with actual

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1321

objects as referents are (2) and (3) above). In the remaining three quarters of all
cases, the deictic focuses a higher-order entity in the addressees running
knowledge (cf. Section 1.1):
(18)Sowohl VLIW-Prozessoren als auch der Netzwerkprozessor haben Befehlsstze, die zu den heute gngigen nicht kompatibel sind. Um diesen
Nachteil zu umgehen [...]
Both VLIW processors and the network processor have instruction sets
that are not compatible with the ones common today. In order to avoid
this disadvantage [...]
In (18), dies is used to refer to a state of affairs mentioned previously (for an
other example of this type see (4) in Section 1.1). The author uses the pre
modifier variant of this in order to retrospectively categorize the state of affairs
referred to as a disadvantage (cf. Consten and Knees 2008), thus tagging the
prior discourse as the description of a problem, to which a possible solution is
subsequently presented. The deictic thus contributes to the establishment of the
discourse pattern ProblemSolution as it has been described by various authors
(e.g., Jordan 1984; Mann and Thompson 1988; Hoey 1994, 2001). Deictic ex
pressions regularly serve as cue words signaling a variety of discourse pat
terns (cf. Grosz and Sidner 1986).
As the presented examples indicate, object deictics serve as an important
means of establishing textual cohesion. A quantitatively visible correlate of
this is that, as Table 6 shows, most of the analyzed object deictics refer to a
referent mentioned in a previous sentence (as opposed to a referent mentioned
in the same sentence).
Table 6. Sentence-external vs. sentence-internal coreference with object deictics
English

German

external
internal

43 (77%)
13 (23%)

57 (80%)
14 (20%)

total

56 (100%)

71 (100%)

Interestingly, this tendency seems to be stronger in German than in English. In

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

1322 V. Becher
2.3. Quality deictics
The quality deictics found in the corpus are listed in Table 7.
Table 7. Quality deictics in the corpus
English

German

soa (8)
such as (13)
so that, so...that (3)
such+NP (17)
so-called (1), thus (1)

so (10)
so...wie (7)
so dass, sodass (7)
solches+NP (8)
derartig (1)
so genanntes (5), sozusagen (1)

total:

total:

43

39

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

The term quality deixis (Ehlich 1987: aspect deixis; Herbermann 1988:
modal deixis) has been coined by Blhdorn (1993) to describe the deictic
character of German expressions like so and solches. While object deictics re
fer to objects themselves, German so and solches selectively refer to certain
qualities of objects (Ehlich 1987; Blhdorn 2003: 2228; Umbach and Ebert
forthcoming). It turns out that this analysis is also valid for English so and such.
In (19), for example, so refers to the quantity of the listed areas of physics.
(19)The concept of negative energy touches on many areas of physics: gravitation, quantum theory, thermodynamics. The interweaving of so many
different parts of physics illustrates the tight logical structure of the
laws of nature.
If the author had wanted to focus the aforementioned objects per se, he could
have written these different parts of physics. The quality deictic so, however,
creates an additional effect of emphasis: while these would just focus gravitation, quantum theory, thermodynamics, the specific function of so, modifying
the quantifier many, is to establish a new attention focus on one of their qual
ities, namely their number.
Quality deictics, particularly such and solches such can also focus several
qualities at once. In (20), for example, solchen focuses certain qualities of the
treatments presented in the preceding sentences.
(20)[Different ways of treating injuries are presented.] Mit solchen Verfahren
und Mitteln ist auch ein Abheilen von Operationswunden zu erreichen
[...].
With such methods and agents, a healing of surgery wounds is also
possible.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1323

The addressee has to infer from the context which qualities of the presented
medical treatments are relevant to the healing of surgery wounds (and thus
those that are being referred to). In Example (21), such even focuses all men
tioned qualities of the spins in question.
(21)For example, 150-femtosecond laser pulses have been used to tilt coherent electron spins, demonstrating that such spins can, in principle, be
manipulated thousands of times before their coherence is lost.
The consequence of such wholesale focusing is that both German solches
and English such may often be replaced by the corresponding object deictic
(diesen in (20) and these in (21)) with hardly any change in meaning. The
meaning difference between this and uses of such as in Example (21) is that the
former favors an identity reading while the latter favors a similarity reading.
It is interesting to observe how the etymologically related quality deictics of
English and German have developed different (yet still related) meanings. For
example, the English collocation such as is used to introduce examples:
(22)The observational surveys under way, such as the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey, will enormously improve the data on both nearby and distant
galaxies.
A comparable construction (*so/solche wie) is not available in German, where
nondeictic expressions such as wie zum Beispiel as for example are typically
used for this purpose. But then, German uses so...wie, a construction very
similar to such as, to draw comparisons:
(23)Wird es eines Tages knstliche Hnde geben, die so gut wie die natrlichen sind?
Will there one day be artificial hands which are as good as the natural
ones?
Here it is the other way round: German uses a deictic where English would
make use of a nondeictic expression (as...as).
We have seen that although English such as and German so...wie serve
different purposes in discourse, they have one thing in common: both construc
tions rely on a quality deictic for coreference with the prepositional phrase that
introduces the example or object of comparison. That the deictic is still alive
in such as (as opposed to fossilized deictics like also, cf. Note 13) becomes
apparent in the fact that this seemingly fixed expression can be taken apart.
Cf. Example (24), where such fulfills the same function as in (22), although
thedeictic now modifies a noun (diverse conditions), thus providing special
emphasis.
(24)[...] treating such diverse conditions as stroke, paralysis and Alzheimers disease.

1324 V. Becher
Another example of different developmental pathways in English and German
are uses of so establishing cohesion across clauses or sentences (cf. Gast and
Knig 2008). In both languages, so may be used to refer to higher-order enti
ties. Cf. the following example from the English part of the corpus.
(25)Some of it may have been driven away by the outflows; if so, the jets may
have served to limit the suns final mass.
Here, the object whose qualities are focused by so seems to be the proposi
tion expressed by the preceding sentence. (Note, however, that the epistemic
operator may is not in the scope of so.) Such uses of so have probably been the
starting point for the emergence of so as a causal connective in English (see
(26)) and as a verificative connective in German (see (27)).
(26)We are still some 80,000 years from the peak of the next ice age, so our
first chance for an answer is far in the future.
(27)Die numerische Simulation ist nicht nur deutlich billiger als das Experiment, sondern hufig auch aussagekrftiger. So ist es im Experiment sehr schwierig, Tropfenkollisionen gleichzeitig von verschiedenen
Seiten zu beobachten.
Numerical simulations are not only considerably cheaper than experi
ments, but often also more meaningful. As a matter of fact, in experi
ments it is very hard to observe drop collisions from different sides at
the same time.
Although it is by no means clear how the verificative relation (Halliday and
Matthiessen 2004) may be properly defined, the term describes the argumenta
tive function of so in (27) quite well. However, the verificative connective as a
matter of fact (see gloss) seems to be too strong a translation. The close but
semantically vague connection that German so imposes on its two conjuncts
has no direct equivalent in English; it can only be paraphrased as something
along the lines of in accordance to what has been said before.
Much more could (and needs to) be written about the mostly uncharted ter
ritory of English and German quality deictics. For the moment, suffice it to say
that:
1.English so/such and German so/solches have retained their deictic
force. Even collocations like such as still rely on the pointing per
formed by the contained quality deictic.
2.Although the quality deictics of English and German have followed dif
ferent trajectories of semantic development, both fulfill a very similar
function in discourse, namely the establishment of semantic relations
within and across clauses as well as sentences.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1325

2.4. Temporal deictics
The temporal deictic expressions found in the corpus are listed in Table 8.
Table 8. Temporal deictics in the corpus
English

Germana

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

bisher (7), bislang (4)

jetzt (2), nun (3), heute (5), derzeit (4),
dieses Jahr (1)
dann (10), bald (3)

total:

total:

27

39

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

A first glance at the table already reveals a difference between the English and
German data sets: the German text endings contain more temporal deictics to
express anteriority than the English ones (11 occurrences of bisher and bislang
[both meaning so far, until now] vs. 1 occurrence of so far). A frequency
count in the full texts from which the corpus of text endings was compiled
confirms this result: 104 occurrences of bisher and bislang vs. 16 occurrences
of so far (until now and up to now: 1 occurrence each)17.
Why is this type of temporal deictic so much more common in the German
texts than in the English ones? Consider the following two examples of the
German temporal deictics in question, bisher and bislang.
(28)Auf diese Weise hoffen die Forscher, das bislang hohe Rckfallrisiko
von Patientinnen mit Eierstockkrebs zu verringern.
In this way, researchers hope to reduce the relapse risk of patients with
ovarian cancer, which has been high so far.
(29)Nach derzeitigem Kenntnisstand konserviert ein Schutzmantel aus
Kunstharz die Stcke bisher am besten.
According to current knowledge, a protective coating of synthetic resin
so far conserves the pieces best.
Examples (28) and (29) are intended to illustrate the observation that the use of
the deictics bisher and bislang in the corpus would make a somewhat redun
dant impression on most Anglophone readers; the glosses provided in italics
sound even more awkward than in the previously cited material. In both cases,
the meaning of the deictic is easily inferable from the context. When in (28) the
reader is told that researchers want to reduce the relapse risk of cancer patients,
she will understand that the risk has only been and will only continue to be

1326 V. Becher
high until the researchers succeed in their efforts. And in Example (29) a quan
tity implicature18 (cf. Levinson 1983: Ch. 3) suggests that the described protec
tive coating only works best according to current knowledge which, as the
reader will know, is subject to constant change. In both cases, a felicitous trans
lation to English can only be achieved when the temporal deictic is omitted
altogether:
(28)In this way, researchers hope to reduce the high relapse risk of patients
with ovarian cancer.
(29)According to current knowledge, a protective coating of synthetic resin
conserves the pieces best.
The upshot is that bisher and bislang, by encoding meanings which would
otherwise be inferable from the context, are used by German authors to in
crease the explicitness of their texts. This result is consistent with findings
from several studies which suggest that German discourse tends towards a
greater degree of explicitness than English discourse (see e.g., Stein [1979]
and House [2004a], [2004b]; for a summary of earlier studies see House [1997:
8895]).
A second difference between English and German lies in the diverging use
of then and dann then. While the two deictics are almost identical in mean
ing, it seems that they are put to very different uses by English and German
popular science authors. In the English text endings, then is chiefly19 used to
express temporal relations:
(30)Conventional structural biology is based on purifying a molecule, coaxing it to grow into crystals and then bombarding the sample with x-rays.
(31)A laser pulse excited a puddle of coherently precessing electrons, much
as in the lifetime experiments, but then a lateral electric field dragged
the electrons through the crystal.
(32)If humankind is still here in 2050 and still capable of doing SETI
searches, it means that our technology has not yet been our own undoing
a hopeful sign for life generally. By then we may begin considering
the active transmission of a signal for someone else to find [...].
In Examples (30) and (31), then is used to make clear that the temporal relation
between the described actions or events is a sequential one; and in Example
(32), then refers to an earlier mentioned point in time (we could say that the
deictic is coreferential with the expression in 2050) (cf. Schiffrin 1992). In
contrast, only two occurrences of dann in the German text endings are used to
express temporality. In the eight other cases, dann refers to a hypothetical state
of affairs, as in the following examples.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1327

(33)Im zweiten Fall knnte die erhhte Temperatur bestimmte Immunfunktionen verstrken, also die Antigenitt verbessern; das Immunsystem
wrde dann den Kampf gegen den Krebs aufnehmen beziehungsweise
ihn verstrkt fhren.
In the second case, the heightened temperature could strengthen certain
immune functions and thus improve antigenity; the immune system
would in this case enter combat against the cancer or intensify it.
(34)[...] sodass die Dunstpartikel unter bestimmten Umstnden vielleicht
die Atmosphre eben doch aufheizen, statt sie abzukhlen. Dann wrde
der Arctic Haze den Treibhauseffekt in der Nordpolarregion sogar
verstrken.
...so that the vapor particles under certain conditions perhaps do heat
up the atmosphere instead of cooling it down. In this case the Arctic
haze would even intensify the greenhouse effect in the northern polar
region.
In both examples, we could say that a hypothetical state of affairs is set up
as a mental space (cf. Fauconnier 1985) in the cognition of the addressee
(cf. Dancygier and Sweetser 1997 on English if...then). In (33), the non
factuality of the state of affairs is marked by the subjunctive and in (34) by the
adverb vielleicht perhaps (cf. Fauconnier 2007: 371372). Subsequently, the
state of affairs is referred to by the temporal deictic dann. It is characteristic of
such uses of dann that they may be replaced by in diesem Fall in this case or
similar (deictic) paraphrases which make explicit that reference is not being
made to a point in time but to an imagined state of affairs (cf. the English
glosses).
Again the result was confirmed by a complementary analysis of the full texts
from which the text endings corpus was extracted. The analysis identified oc
currences of English then which were similarly used to refer to hypothetical
states of affairs. But while in German popular science texts it seems to be cus
tomary to gradually set up complex hypothetical states of affairs which are
later referred to by means of dann, hypothetical then is rare in the full English
texts and confined to the conditional construction if...then.

2.5. Composite deictics

The composite deictics (a translation of Rehbeins [1995] term zusammengesetzte Verweiswrter) of English and German are more or less frozen com
pounds of a deictic20 and a preposition21. In most cases, the two components
still fulfill their original function:

1328 V. Becher
The deictic instructs the addressee to direct his attention to a referent
retrievable from the extralinguistic context or from his knowledge.
The preposition (syntactically) anchors the focused referent in the con
taining clause and (semantically) relates it to the clauses meaning.
(Rehbein 1995, similarly Braunmller 1985 and Pasch et al. 2003: 911, 557
562)
However, there are also composite deictics which are fossilized, i.e., whose
components have not retained their original function. Instead, these words
have grammaticalized e.g., into connective adverbs (e.g., therefore22) or sub
ordinating conjunctions (e.g., German indem, originally in+that). In English,
this tendency seems to be much stronger than in German. The following exam
ple (adapted from Waner 2004: 380; capitals indicate stress) is representative:
(35)[A discovers B smoking]
(a) Deshalb gehst Du immer auf den Balkon!
(b) * Therefore you are always going on the balcony!
(c) Thats why you are always going on the balcony!
As Example (35) shows, deshalb therefore may be used to refer to a state of
affairs present in the situational, i.e., extralinguistic context (Bs smoking) (cf.
Pasch et al. 2003: 34). This is only possible because speakers of German still
analyze des- as a deictic (although -halb no longer exists as an independent
preposition in German; see Rehbein 1995 for a detailed analysis of deshalb).
In English, however, therefore has lost its ability to directly refer to extra
linguistic entities and is thus confined to its use as a connective.
The partial loss of their deictic force seems to be one reason for the English
composite deictics decline. Words like therewith, hereby and hitherto have
become increasingly rare, archaic, and confined to formal registers. Example
(36) shows the only occurrence of a composite deictic in the investigated
corpus.
(36)Heating also slows the descent of gas toward the center of the galaxy
and thereby reduces its tendency to transfer angular momentum to the
dark matter [...].
It is quite evident that thereby has not completely lost its deictic quality, as it is
still able to focus elements of the addressees running knowledge. In (36),
there- seems to refer to the state of affairs described in the preceding clause
(Heating slows the descent of gas...), while -by establishes a relation of in
strumentality with the clause containing the composite deictic. The example
also gives a first impression of the composite deictics versatility in establish
ing cohesive relations in texts. But despite their potential, composite deictics
are a rare sight in contemporary English.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1329

In contrast, the composite deictics of German are still thriving; damit (da
there+mit with) has even undergone a notable increase in frequency in
popular scientific texts from 1978 to 2002 (Becher 2009). Table 9 lists the
German composite deictics present in the corpus along with their respective
frequencies.
Table 9. Composite deictics in the German text endings
damit (11)
darber (4)
somit (3)
deshalb (2)
danach (1)
deswegen (1)
total:

dabei (7)
daher (3)
auerdem (2)
trotzdem (2)
daraufhin (1)
hierfr (1)

dazu (6)
daran (3)
daraus (2)
zudem (2)
darunter (1)
hierzu (1)

dafr (4)
darin (3)
davon (2)
dadurch (1)
demnach (1)

23 types, 64 tokens

Even more striking than the overall frequency of the German composite deic
tics is their high type count: There are 23 different types of composite deictics
present in the German part of the text endings corpus. The fact that some of
them are nearly synonymous (e.g., deshalb and deswegen both translate as
therefore) suggests that the high type count partially results from the authors
desire for lexical variation23. Note that despite their large number, the 23 dif
ferent lexical items listed in Table 9 are but a small extract from the giant in
ventory of German composite deictics, which, according to an estimation by
Rehbein (1995: 166), comprises at least 100 such words. Some of the more
exotic items such as ohnedies (without+this) are analyzed in detail by
Eggs (2003).
The qualitative analysis has identified three overlapping functions that the
German composite deictics fulfill in the investigated text endings: (1) explic
itly realizing arguments of verbs and deverbal adjectives/nouns, (2) establish
ing textual cohesion, and (3) structuring complex sentences. Note that the
functions overlap to a considerable extent, so they are perhaps better viewed as
three aspects of the same overarching function, namely the establishment of
coreference relations within and across sentences. In the following, the three
aspects will be discussed in turn.
2.5.1. Explicit realization of arguments. Many instances of the composite
deictics are used to explicitly realize arguments of (de)verbal constituents that
would otherwise be inferable from the context. Note that this is almost never
done to avoid misunderstandings. Instead, this explicitating use of compos
ite deictics seems to be the result of a tacit convention in German which postu
lates: When in doubt, say it explicitly! (cf. what has been said above on

1330 V. Becher
bisher and bislang and the references given there; Fabricius-Hansen 2005: 43
postulates a similar principle [Be precise!] for the use of connectives in
German). Consider the following example:
(37)Was lst natrlicherweise den Nachschub an Surfactant aus und welche
molekularen Schritte sind daran beteiligt?
What normally triggers the supplies of surfactant and which molecular
steps are therein involved?
In (37), the composite deictic daran fills an argument slot of the deverbal
adjective beteiligt involved. Note that the omission of daran would leave a
perfectly grammatical and unambiguous sentence. While an EnglishGerman
translation of the sentence could in principle render daran as therein, in the
process, or the like, it would sound much more natural in English to dispense
with a formal equivalent of daran. The following two occurrences of involved
(taken from the full English texts), whose internal argument has to be inferred
from the respective context, lend support to this intuition:
(38)Although our experiments showed the central role of NMDA receptors
in a variety of learning and memory processes, it is probably not the
only molecule involved.
(39)Although the standard picture of galaxy formation is remarkably successful, researchers are still far from working out all the processes
involved.
Another example of explicitation by means of a composite deictic in German
follows:
(40)In der theoretischen Analyse [...] tauchen formale mathematische
Strukturen auf, die man in anderen Untergebieten der Teilchenphysik
wiederfindet. Ein relativ einfaches Beispiel hierfr ist die sogenannte
Bjorken-Summenregel [...].
In the theoretical analysis, formal mathematical structures appear,
which one finds again in other subdomains of particle physics. A rela
tively simple example of this is the Bjorken Sum Rule.
Again both English and German can do without hierfr (here+for) or of
this. But while we indeed find many occurrences of the English noun example
without a clarifying postmodifier (cf. (41), taken from the full corpus), German
seems to prefer the explicit solution.
(41)One especially interesting application of transgenic engineering is the
improvement of materials that insects supply to humans. Silk is a prime
example.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1331

With their syntactic flexibility and their variability in referential scope, com
posite deictics lend themselves to satisfying the apparent demand for the ex
plicit filling of argument slots in German.
2.5.2. Establishment of textual cohesion. Together with connective ad
verbs, composite deictics are the prime means of establishing textual cohesion
in German (Pasch et al. 2003: 555; Redder 2009). (In fact, there is not even a
clear boundary between the two word classes, cf. Rttenauer 1978: 45.) For
example, deshalb usually refers to higher-order entities like states of affairs or
propositions when used in written text:
(42)Jedes Arzneimittel selbst wenn es nicht verschreibungspflichtig ist
hat aber langfristig angewandt unerwnschte oder sogar gefhrliche
Nebenwirkungen. Ein kurzer Blick auf den Beipackzettel gengt. Eine
vllig risikolose Chemoprvention, gleich welcher Krankheit, ist
deshalb unmglich.
But every medication even if available without prescription has
unwanted or even dangerous side effects in the long run. A glance on the
package insert suffices. A completely risk-free chemo prevention, what
ever the disease, is therefore impossible.
In Example (42), deshalb may therefore be replaced by another connective
adverb such as folglich consequently without any change in meaning. In con
trast to deshalb, the composite deictics dazu, damit and darber frequently
occur with first-order entities, i.e., objects, as referents:
(43)Diese knnen fr solche Zellen verwendet werden, die im Krper als
einzellige Schicht wachsen. Dazu gehren auch die Zellen, welche die
Blutgefe als so genanntes Endothel auskleiden. Damit lieen sich
komplexere Gewebe zchten: als erste Lage ein einschichtiges Endothel
und darber ein dreidimensionales Aggregat [...].
These [microcontainers] can be employed with those cells which grow
in the body as a single-celled layer. To these also belong the cells which
line the blood vessels as so-called endothelium. With these, complex
tissues could be grown: as a first layer a single-layered endothelium, and
on top of that a three-dimensional aggregate.
In Example (43), cohesion is achieved in a very straightforward way: In every
sentence, the reader is asked anew to focus24 a referent which was introduced
in the preceding sentence which would have quite a confusing or even irri
tating effect on English readers. German readers, however, are perfectly used
to this constant (re)focusing, which overtly marks the cohesion of the text and,
in the case of (43), helps maintain its strictly linear thematic progression (cf.
Dane 1974).

1332 V. Becher
The examples in this section can only hint at the crucial role that composite
deictics play in the German system of cohesion. Whether with first-order or
higher-order entities as referents, composite deictics are one of the most impor
tant tools that German authors use to signal semantic relations between phrases,
clauses, complex sentences, and even whole stretches of text.
2.5.3. Structuring of complex sentences. The composite deictics of German
may structure complex sentences by functioning as correlates, i.e., semanti
cally empty symbols (Doneva 1982: 221) which fill a slot in the valency of
the main verb (see also Pittner 2008: 8788; Pasch et al. 2003: 559560). They
achieve this by establishing a coreference relation to what belongs in the slot,
namely a subordinate clause which has been relegated to the end of the sen
tence, as in the following example:
(44)Wie empfindlich ein ntzlicher Test sein msste, hngt davon ab, wie
viele BSE-Erreger ntig sind, um einen Menschen zu infizieren.
How sensitive a useful test would have to be depends on how many
BSE agents are necessary to infect a human.
The prepositional verb abhngen von to depend on takes only nonclausal
objects. But this restriction is circumvented in (44) by means of a composite
deictic which contains the prepositional part of the verb (-von) along with a
deictic (da- there) which acts as a substitute for the stipulated object. The
deictic process initiated by da- remains active until the reader encounters the
sentence-final subordinate clause, which is its only possible antecedent (more
precisely: postcedent, cf. Note 3). The deictic thus functions as a device for
managing the attention of the reader during the processing of the sentence (cf.
Ehlich 1992).
3. Summary and conclusions
Both hypotheses formulated in Section 1.3 have turned out to be supported by
the data. First, although English cannot be called poor in deixis (Ehlich
1992), deictic expressions were found to be more frequent in the investigated
German text endings than in the English ones. Second, a prime cause for the
observed frequency difference seems to be that in German, deictics are much
more important for creating textual cohesion than they are in English. Com
posite deictics in particular were found to account for a great deal of the
German text endings cohesion by regularly instructing the addressee to focus
their attention on previously established referents.
The high degree of explicitness customary in German discourse has been
identified as another factor which accounts for the relatively high frequency of

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1333

deictic expressions in German. This has been especially visible in composite
and (anterior) temporal deictics, which often have the sole function of explic
itly verbalizing meanings that would otherwise be inferable from the context.
Perhaps the German norm of explicitness is even the overarching principle
here, because the need for explicitness should of course entail a high degree of
textual cohesion (which may be defined as the more or less explicit signaling
of textual coherence, cf. Bublitz 1998). As a speculative and, unfortunately,
probably not falsifiable hypothesis, I would like to contend that composite
deictics have (almost) died out in English because of the lower degree of ex
plicitness customary in English discourse.
There is also an exception to the rule: the English text endings were found to
contain more than twice as many personal deictics (almost exclusively plural
speaker deictics) than their German counterparts. Again, this could be traced to
previously established differences in English and German discourse norms:
while English favors an addressee-oriented, interactional style, German dis
course tends to be content-oriented or transactional (cf. House 1997, 2006
and above). That this cross-linguacultural difference in communicative style
actually accounts for the skewed distribution of speaker deictics across the
English and German text endings is evident from the functions that these items
have been found to fulfill. The locus of the frequency difference are not the
exclusive uses of we and wir (38 vs. 32 occurrences), but their inclusive uses
(46 English vs. 7 German occurrences; see Table 4 in Section 2.1) and these
are the ones which, by referring to addressee and author at the same time, are
constitutive for the overtly addressee-oriented style which is typical of English
and atypical of German discourse. It is also worth noting that personal deictics
are distinct from other types of deixis in that they neither contribute to the de
gree of explicitness nor to the cohesion25 of a text.
It should be noted that this study most probably has not identified all factors
relevant to the use of deictic expressions in English and German. In particular,
due to the scope of the present study, differences in the grammatical systems of
the two languages could not be considered in due detail. In his insightful book
on typological differences between English and German, Hawkins (1986)
draws the quite audacious conclusion that the grammatical system of
German is inherently more explicit than the one of English. This means that
users of English have, in effect, more work to do in extracting meaning from
form, e.g., because they must infer semantically relevant material that is not
overt in surface. (1986: 125). Although Hawkins generalization is certainly
too strong (see e.g., Rohdenburg 1990; Kortmann and Meyer 1992), his obser
vations show that there are domains where the grammatical systems of English
and German occupy different places on an explicitnessimplicitness scale
(cf.also Doherty 1999, 2002). This raises the question to what extent differ
ences in communicative norms are really an adequate explanation for English-

1334 V. Becher
German contrasts in language use. In fact, crosslinguistically different com
municative norms themselves are in need of an explanation. It may well be that
some of these norms ultimately go back to typological differences between the
two language systems, which would then be the real explanation for the ob
served differences in language use. A follow-up study to the present one that
focuses on typological differences between English and German would thus
promise to be a fruitful endeavor.
The findings of the present study have particularly important implications
for language teaching and translation. English students learning German and
German students learning English should be made aware that the strategies
they employ when conveying their thoughts in their mother tongue do not nec
essarily work as expected in the foreign language. Of course, cautioning native
English students against the use of too many inclusive plural speaker deictics
in German (and vice versa) is a trivial matter. It will be much more difficult, for
example, to sensitize German students to the use of deictics in their English
compositions, because a constant (re)focusing of the addressee is not custom
ary in English texts. In fact, chances are that this very article exhibits an over
use of certain deictic expressions, since it has been written by a native speaker
of German. The subtle crosslinguistic differences in the use of deictics discov
ered in this study are also relevant to translation. In particular, the results shows
that a mere adaption of a raw translation provided by the computer (the prob
lems of which are addressed by e.g., de Andrade Stupiello 2008) cannot do
justice to the different ways in which the attention of the addressee is managed
in English and German texts.
On the methodological side, the minicorpus of text endings used in this
study has proven to be a valuable tool for written discourse analysis, and a
surprisingly reliable one: where the figures obtained from the text endings cor
pus were small, complementary analyses of the full texts from which the text
endings originate were found to confirm the impressions gained from the text
endings.
Of course, the usual disclaimers apply to this study: it cannot be taken for
granted that the results are generalizable beyond the boundaries of the investi
gated genre, other ways of expressing deixis (e.g., verbal tense) should be
taken into account, etc. Above all, a follow-up study should address the use of
anaphoric expressions in English and German texts and in particular how it
relates to the use of deictics. It is possible that since English seems to make less
use of focus shifting (=deixis) than German, it relies more on focus mainte
nance (=anaphora).
Received 29 April 2008
Revised version received 17 January 2010

University of Hamburg

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1335

Notes
* The research for this article has been carried out within the project Verdecktes bersetzen
Covert Translation. The project led by Juliane House is part of the Collaborative Research
Center on Multilingualism located at the University of Hamburg and funded by the German
Research Foundation, whom I thank for their generous support. I am indebted to Kalynda
Beal, Hardarik Blhdorn, Konrad Ehlich, Juliane House, Svenja Kranich, and two anony
mous referees for critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. The article has par
ticularly benefited from many inspiring discussions with Hardarik Blhdorn. Correspon
dence address: SFB Mehrsprachigkeit, Teilprojekt K4, Max-Brauer-Allee 60, D-22765
Hamburg, Germany. E-mail: viktor.becher@uni-hamburg.de.
1. Blhdorn (1995: 109) notes that authors following different strands of research often associ
ate radically different concepts with the term deixis despite using the same terminology, thus
making productive communication difficult. In the literature, many misunderstandings occur
where researchers have wildly different ideas about what deixis is while erroneously think
ing that they are talking about the same thing. The reader is asked to bear in mind that this
article is based on a distinct view of deixis (and anaphora) which is neither representative of
nor necessarily compatible with other views of deixis. For example, many authors regard the
so-called third person pronouns (he, she, it) as deictic (Lyons 1977: 650 calls them pro
nominal deictics), while they are treated as nondeictic (but anaphoric) in this article, since
they are not associated with a focus shift in the addressee (see Section 1.1 for details). The
question of whether to treat third person pronouns as deictic or nondeictic depends on
whether one, very broadly speaking, understands deixis as situation-dependent reference
(which would make them deictic) or as it is done in this article adopts a notion of de
ixis as a specific way of attention-management in discourse (which would make them
nondeictic) (cf. Blhdorn 1995: 133).
2. With we the case is a bit more complicated, as it can also refer to the addressee of the utter
ance (see Section 2.1.1).
3. In the much rarer case of cataphoric coreference, the pronoun in question is coreferent with
a linguistic expression in the following discourse, which may thus be called its postcedent.
4. This article exclusively uses the terms anaphoric expression and anaphoric for the lexical
items in question in order to avoid confusion with the term anaphor as it is used in Binding
Theory (for reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, cf. Chomsky 1981).
5. This example and the following ones are taken from the corpus described in Section 1.2 un
less stated otherwise.
6. Under certain circumstances third person pronouns may occur without an antecedent expres
sion (Yule 1982; Sanford et al. 1983; see Gundel et al. 2002 for corpus findings). There are
cases, for example, where the referent of the pronoun can be inferred from the prior dis
course (cf. Prince 1981: 236).
7. However, deixis and gesture are not the same. Sidnell (2005) rightly stresses that their con
tributions to communication are often rather complementary than isomorphic (cf. also
Diewald 1991: 2025).
8. Here and throughout the article, the term focus means the psychological concept (not the
linguistic, i.e., information-structural one; cf. e.g., Garrod and Sanford (1982); Grosz and
Sidner (1986); Gundel et al. (1993); Grosz et al. (1995); Arnold (2008).
9. In classifying referents of deictic expressions, I draw on the ontological classification of
entities proposed by Lyons (1977: 442446) and refined by Dik (1997: Ch. 12) and Blhdorn
(2003: 1619, 2008). Simplifying somewhat, the classification distinguishes between firstorder entities (objects) and higher-order entities (states of affairs, propositions and pragmatic

1336 V. Becher

10.

11.

12.
13.

14.
15.
6.
1
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.

options). More fine-grained distinctions will not be necessary for the purpose of this article.
Deictics may refer to both first-order and higher-order entities.
Similar results were obtained in a psychological follow-up study by Bosch et al. (2007) and
in corpus-linguistic as well as psycholinguistic studies on English (Byron et al. 2008) and
other languages such as French (Demol 2007) or Dutch (Comrie 1997; Kaiser and Trueswell
2004).
One could argue that the factors governing the choice of deictics vs. anaphorics are purely
syntactic, an explanation in terms of focus of attention thus being unnecessary. However, in
a reanalysis of the results by Bosch et al. (2003, 2007), Bosch and Umbach (2007) show that
it is not the syntactic function of the antecedent (subject vs. nonsubject) but the discourse
status of its referent (topic vs. nontopic) that really determines the choice of referring expres
sion: anaphorics prefer subjects as antecedents because subjects tend to encode discourse
topics, i.e., referents that are repeatedly mentioned throughout the discourse and should thus
be in the addressees focus of attention. Conversely, deictics prefer referents that are not
discourse-topical and thus in need of focusing. What is more, many studies suggest that
several other linguistic and nonlinguistic factors such as prior beliefs of the addressee (cf.
Gundel et al. 2003: 287293) have an influence on the choice of referring expression (see
Kaiser 2006 and Arnold 2008 for research overviews stressing this point). These observa
tions strongly argue for the cognitive explanation put forward in this article.
See e.g., Byrnes (1986), Clyne (1987), Kotthoff (1989), Luchtenberg (1994), FabriciusHansen (2000), Bttger and Probst (2001), Baumgarten and Probst (2004), House (2006)
and Becher et al. (2009). Some relevant contrasts will be mentioned below.
Only exclusive deictics (Blhdorn 1993: 47), i.e., expressions whose original and only
function is deictic reference, were counted. Paradeictic expressions (Ehlich 1992: 226)
such as last October and cases of fossilized or dead deixis (e.g., also, which originally
consisted of all and the quality deictic so [Oxford English Dictionary 1989]) were ex
cluded from the analysis.
As the figures for spatial deictics are too small to allow meaningful conclusions, they will
not be dealt with.
The other personal deictics will not be treated, as they appear clustered in few texts and thus
cannot be deemed representative. (For example, all 5 occurrences of you, your are confined
to a single sentence.)
Combinations like this year were counted as temporal deictics, cf. Table 8 in Section 2.4.
The full texts comprise approx. 100,000 words per language.
Something along the lines of: according to current knowledge +> only according to cur
rent knowledge.
The only occurrence of then not cited in this section is used as a contrastive discourse marker
(cf. Schiffrin 1992: 780781). This use of then, which seems to be rather rare in written text,
cannot be treated here due to the limited scope of the present study.
Most composite deictics contain a spatial deictic like English there or German da, which,
however, often fulfills object-deictic functions (cf. Pasch et al. 2003: 10; Pittner 2008: 83).
There are some variations of this prototypical structure (cf. Pasch et al. 2003: 563; Pittner
2008: 76,), which need not concern us here.
The original meaning of the word (for that) has survived in the (nearly extinct) adverb
therefor.
Lexical variation seems to be an important locus of English-German language contrast.
House (1997) reports on findings which suggest that in contrast to English, German dis
course prefers ad hoc formulations to verbal routines. And (tentative) corpus analyses pre
sented by Steiner (2008) and Gonzlez-Daz and Kranich (2009) indicate that German texts
of different genres tend to have higher type-token ratios than comparable English texts.

Use of deictic expressions in English and German texts 1337

These findings suggest that German has stronger stylistic constraints on lexical repetition
than English.
24. Note that the author has chosen to use (composite) deictics although anaphorics would have
been possible as well. For example, damit could be replaced by mit ihnen with them to the
effect that no focusing would take place.
5. Personal deictics can engender cohesion as a side effect. They are usually repeated across
2
sentences and thus create lexical cohesion, which, however, has nothing to do with their
deictic nature.

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