Lectures on Deixis

This volume presents Charles Fillmore's view of the scope of linguistic description, insofar as the field of linguistics touches on questions of the meanings of sentences. Fillmore takes the subject matter of linguistics, in its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic sub-divisions, to include the full catalog of knowledge that the speakers of a language can be said to possess about the structure of the sentences in their language, and their knowledge about the appropriate use of these sentences. The special explanatory task of linguistics, Fillmore argues, is to discover the principles that underlie such knowledge. He chooses to study the range of information which the speakers of a language possess about the sentences in their language by thoroughly examining one simple English sentence.