Aspects of Deixis in the Language of Children with Autism and Related Childhood Psychoses

Abstract

Focus on language as an instrument of communication has recently char-acterized the study of language and of its development in normal and non-normal populations. When the subject of concern is how sentences actually function in conversation between two or more speakers, the aspect of language known as deixis takes on renewed interest. IT spoken sentences are to be fully communicative, they must provide information that allows the listener to relate the content of the utterance to the rele-vant context; among these contextual factors are person, place, and time. Natural languages universally have mechanisms for indicating these relationships. In the case of person deixis, the speech act must distinguish among the speaker, the person to whom the utterance is addressed, and other person or persons who may be spoken about but who are neither speaker or listener in the speech event under consideration. In English, of course, these distinctions are provided for largely by the system of first, second, and third person pronouns; an illustration appears in (1). Focus on language as an instrument of communication has recently char-acterized the study of language and of its development in normal and non-normal populations. When the subject of concern is how sentences actually function in conversation between two or more speakers, the aspect of language known as deixis takes on renewed interest. IT spoken sentences are to be fully communicative, they must provide information that allows the listener to relate the content of the utterance to the rele-vant context; among these contextual factors are person, place, and time. Natural languages universally have mechanisms for indicating these relationships. In the case of person deixis, the speech act must distinguish among the speaker, the person to whom the utterance is addressed, and other person or persons who may be spoken about but who are neither speaker or listener in the speech event under consideration. In English, of course, these distinctions are provided for largely by the system of first, second, and third person pronouns; an illustration appears in (1). (1) ! left you money for the paper boy. Please give it to him when he