The chapter explores viewpoint across various topics and genres of political discourse. Viewpoint is defined as a pervasive property of language and conceptualisation which is exhibited across a broad range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. The chapter starts by looking at deixis and deictic shifts in media discourses of immigration and political protests. The ideological role of viewpoints evoked by transitive versus reciprocal verbs is also considered in the context of media coverage of political protests. Subjective versus objective construal is further analysed as a viewpoint phenomenon and the role of objective construals in official communication around Covid-19 is highlighted. Viewpoint as an inherent feature in the mental spaces networks configured in response to modal and conditional constructions are considered in the context of Brexit discourse. Finally, conducted within the framework of discourse space theory, an analysis is given of distance and proximity (relative to a deictically specified viewpoint) in the discourse of the far-right organisation Britain First.

The third chapter of this guide to improving your BSL focuses predominantly on use of the signing space around the body, and pays particular attention to improving your use of pointing, perspective and collocation. Section 3.1 provides detailed explanation of the way that interlocutors make reference to many different things during a conversation and explains that this act of referencing (or pointing) in this way is called ‘deixis’. Several types of deixis are illustrated, along with following discussion of how correct use of perspective and collocation are important. The following section, 3.2, provides examples of common errors made in relation to pronominal and temporal deixis and how to correct them. This includes explanation of the typical perspective and collocation errors that are made when learners overuse the signing space. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 provide exercises that a BSL learner can do to improve use of pointing and to enhance awareness of the perspectives that are evoked when the signing space is used correctly.

This chapter gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

This chapter is based on the proposition that translation is about the extension of one language by another, not about the provision of a replacement text; translation is not about interpretation but about inhabitation. The chapter critically reviews different perspectives on interpretation, particularly those supplied by the diachronic and synchronic, by universality and totality, by the signifier and the signified. Our meanings are always just beyond us, in intentions to mean. The chapter goes on to consider the status of je/I in speech and the nature of linguistic performance. It ends with a short reflection on translation’s perturbational effects on language.

This chapter reviews the role played by linguistic evidence from the Romance languages in shaping contemporary semantic research. The discussion focuses on a selection of phenomena that have important ramifications for the form–meaning mapping (presupposition, anaphora, (in)definiteness, deixis, tense, negation). For each phenomenon some particularly remarkable cases are discussed, for which research into Romance languages has substantially contributed to theoretical models and analytical advances in the field of semantics. At the same time, a number of outstanding issues are singled out, for which Romance data may prove decisive in future research. From the non-exhaustive overview provided in this chapter, two conclusions emerge most clearly. First, Romance linguistics has proven to be very influential for semantic research thanks to the wide display of microvariation within the Romance family, which represents an ideal testing ground for theories of the form–meaning interface. Second, the diachronic depth that can be reached in examining Romance data is instrumental in opening up new perspectives for research into the historical development of semantic categories.

The introduction discusses the relationship between grammatical tense and the conceptualisation of time. It then presents an overview of the argument of each of the book's chapters. A discussion follows of aspects of Mental Spaces Theory, with special attention paid to the concepts of the 'ground' and of 'representation'. Points of the Classical Greek tense and aspect system are discussed.

The use of the present tense to refer to past events may depend on two conceptual scenarios. First, the speaker may be mentally displaced to the past. Second, the speaker may pretend that the past events are currently accessible in the form of a representation. This 'representation' scenario is generally the most economic conceptual explanation for the use of the present tense to refer past events. Examples are discussed to illustrate the argument: passages from the novels of Alexandre Dumas and from Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's schooldays; narratives accompanying security camera footage; a narrative by a character in an episode of Seinfeld; and passages from Thucydides. In all these cases the use of the present tense to refer to past events can be made sense of in terms of a conceptual representation scenario, where the difference lies in the exact nature of the representation. The more concrete the representation, the stronger the tendency for the speaker to use the present tense to designate the described events.

This chapter considers the unobtrusive words, the conjunctions, and the grammar of Victorian realist prose, drawing on examples from Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope. The styles of Victorian realist fiction are shown to lodge within their very grammar a psychology of style; they register in the turns and returns of their sentences, in their ‘forms of retardation, inference, and backwards-reappraisal’, thinking and reflection from within the midst of narrated experience.

Mai Zaki demonstrates an applied linguistic approach to corpus analysis in a relatively new direction in translation studies which uses parallel corpora for the evaluation of translated texts. The chapter treats specifically the representation of deixis in texts translated from English to Arabic, demonstrating that beyond a simple transfer of lexis between languages, expressing deixis must convey speaker (or writer) worldview, conceptions of distance from the deictic centre and any semantic, syntactic, or even cultural constraints operating on expressions of spatial, temporal, and intra-textual reference. Translators most often (about half the time) tend to maintain thematic attention to the entity referred to in the physical environment and in the preceding text. However, in a significant number of instances (about 20 per cent each in the sample), they either shift the deixis to the opposite end of the distance spectrum (ذلك / تلك ‘that’ instead of هذا / هذه ‘this’) or they insert a demonstrative into the target text where none is present in the source text. Translators’ maintenance of the same deictic projections as those of the authors is a common strategy, but it is not the only one.