Episode 84: Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!

Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you’re pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can’t. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of ways of pointing, and their relative prominence varies across cultures: you can point to something with a finger or two, with your whole hand, with your elbow, your head, your eyes and eyebrows, your lips, and even your words.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about pointing, aka deixis. We talk about how pointing varies across cultures and species: English speakers tend to have a taboo against pointing with the middle finger and to some extent at people, but don’t have the very common cross-cultural taboo against pointing at rainbows. We also talk about the technical term for pointing in a linguistic context, deixis, and how deictic meanings bring together a whole bunch of categories: pronouns in signed and spoken languages, words like here, this, go, and today, and the eternal confusion about which Tuesday is next Tuesday.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

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In this month’s bonus episode, Lauren gets enthusiastic about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork with Dr. Martha Tsutsui Billins, an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at California State University Fresno and creator of the podcast Field Notes, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show!

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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Why don’t apes point?’ - Michael Tomasellso
• 'Dogs’ responsiveness to human pointing gestures’ - K. Soproni, A. Miklósi, J. Topál, V. Csányi
• 'A Comparative Study of the Use of Visual Communicative Signals in Interactions Between Dogs and Humans and Cats and Humans’ - Á. Miklósi, P. Pongrácz, G. Lakatos, J. Topál, V. Csányi.
• 'The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• Discussion of lip pointing in 'Encanto’ on Reddit, including video example
• 'Body-directed gestures: Pointing to the self and beyond’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• 'Even Rainbows Have a Dark Side’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• Etymonline entry for ’*deik-’
• Etymonline entry for 'deixis’
• Wikipedia entry for 'deixis’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns: Little words, big jobs’
• 'Pointing in gesture and sign’ - Kensy Cooperrider & Kate Mesh
• 'How Pointing is Integrated into Language: Evidence From Speakers and Signers’ - K. Cooperrider, J. Fenlon, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
• 'Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing’ - J. Fenlon, K. Cooperrider, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
• 'On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American sign language’ - Laura A. Petitto
• 'Demonstratives and deixis in Tamil and Sinhala’ blog post on Xavieremmanuel.org
• 'Spatial deixis in Iaai (Loyalty Islands)’ - Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre
• 'Deictic categories in three languages of Eastern Indonesia’ - Hein Steinhauer
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all’

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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge’. It’s been lightly edited to reflect the Auslan used in the interview. Watch the bilingual Auslan/English video episode here, and listen to the audio only version here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

L: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Gabrielle Hodge who’s a deaf researcher and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in research relating to d/Deaf people, signed languages, and communication, and has worked with Auslan and British Sign Language (BSL) in Australia and the UK. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about how we bring stories to life. But first, if you’re listening to this episode in the normal Lingthusiasm audio feed or reading the transcript, you are missing out. This episode is in Auslan and English. We’re working with an interpreter, Julie Judd, so you definitely want to see the video version to see the full interview with Gab. You can see the video with captions at youtube.com/lingthusiasm. If you’re already seeing my face, you’re in the right spot! It’s thanks to our patrons that we’re able to do these occasional video episodes. To become a patreon, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Gab, welcome!

Gabrielle: Hi! Hi, everyone.

Gretchen: Thanks so much for joining us.

Gabrielle: Ah, thanks for having me. I would like to, before we start, just acknowledge the Country and where we are at the moment is at La Trobe University Bundoora campus. It’s beautiful Wurundjeri country. I want to pay my respects to Elders past and present.

Gretchen: Thanks for sharing that. My first question is “How did you get into linguistics?”

Gabrielle: Wow! A big question. I think that I began my journey into linguistics when I was at school. Originally, I was very enthusiastic about plants. Things like biology, the life system, how things grow, and how we’re all connected. I thought I might become a nurse. So, I registered in a course, and then I pulled out because there wasn’t any role models. Deaf nurses were not there. I felt that I couldn’t do that and dropped it. In a few years, I went to work, realised as a deaf person seeing a world very differently, it was very different from being in school, being in the big wide world, and communication was very difficult. There were many barriers. I started to get interested in language, communication, speech, and sign. I started to think, “Okay, I want to go into a university course and look at linguistics.” Auslan being my language, I wanted to bring those two together. I enrolled here at La Trobe University way back.

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