The Syntax of Speech Acts: Deictic Inversion as an Evidential Strategy in English

Abstract

This paper presents empirical evidence to support the so-called syntactization of discourse, that is, the projection of relevant pragmatic features in the narrow syntax. In particular, it analyses deictic inversion in English, a construction which is used by the speaker to point at a proximal or distal location and bring the addressee’s attention to an entity related to that location (e.g., Here comes the bus). It offers a novel account of this construction, which takes it to be an evidential strategy in a language that does not have standard evidential markers; this evidential status explains its main differences with locative inversion, a construction with which it is pragmatically and structurally related. Deictic inversion therefore receives a natural explanation in a framework that maps syntax with the speech act and introduces in the derivation pragmatic information about the participants in the communicative exchange and about the source of the information for the proposition asserted.