Indexicality or deixis is defined by Ochs (1988: 9) as “the property of a sign as an indicator of some aspect of the situational context in which the sign is being used.”31 These indexes exemplify a structure which becomes “conventionally associated with particular situational dimensions such that when that structure is used, the form invokes these situational dimensions” (Ochs 1996: 411). Within linguistics, the most heavily mined area of study has involved categories which Silverstein (1976: 30) refers to as referential indexes. Referential indexes are words which contribute to the referential speech event, such as personal, spatial, and temporal deictics: who is speaking and what is his relationship to other persons; where is the speaker located and what is the spatial relationship to the referred object; and when is the utterance produced and what is the temporal relationship to the referred moment? The temporal nú and núna, which anchor the coded message to the utterance time,32 are thus clearly referential.
Deictic fields are conceptualized as domains and zones. The domains, on the one hand, include personal, spatial, and temporal deixis. A zone, on the other hand, is “a portion of the deictic field based on a single participant or configuration of participants” (Hanks 1996: 242). Thus, deictics, such as I, here, and now, belong to the proximal zone, the sphere of the speaker, while she, there, and then belong to the distal zone.
Deictic domains that routinely co-occur in specific forms often form socially constructed frameworks of knowledge which Fillmore (1978: 165) refers to as frames.
Each lexical item belonging to such a frame indexes a portion of the conceptual whole
30 This is also known as calendric time (Levinson 1983:73; Fillmore 1997 [1971]: 49).
31 For more discussion of the semantics and pragmatics of deixis see, for instance, Bühler (1934), Fillmore (1997 [1971]), Lyons (1977), Levinson (1983), and Hanks (1996).
32 Utterance time refers to the time of coding and decoding, i.e., the time when an utterance is produced by a speaker and received by a co-participant.
(Fillmore 1978: 165; Hanks 1996: 243). The personal pronouns are an example of a single deictic frame; These pronouns conceptualize the participants in a conversation and other people who are being talked about. In a similar fashion, the temporal deictics nú(na) and þá form a deictic frame in Icelandic in which nú(na) belongs to the proximal zone: an unspecified stretch of time which includes the ongoing moment.
Þá, by comparison, refers to an unspecified time in the past or in the future which does not include the ongoing moment. Figure 3.1 is my illustration of the relationship between nú(na) and þá:
þá nú(na) þá
‘then’ ‘now’ ‘then’
<--- --->
DISTAL ZONE PROXIMAL ZONE DISTAL ZONE
Figure 3.1: Nú(na) and þá on the proximal and distal axis
On the timeline in the figure, nú and núna are placed in the middle, in the proximal zone, while þá refers to the distal zone, to a time in the past or in the future. Nú forms the origo 33 and the distal deictic þá is defined in relation to it (Hanks 1996).
Hanks (1996: 241) has pointed out that deictic frames have sometimes been described as “calques of objective placement in space and time.” A usage-based account of deictics must recognize that the contexts which provide for the understanding of deictics are socio-cultural in nature, and, therefore, non-static and constantly subject to negotiation (ibid.). The deictic field is thus “not an objective grid, but a social experimental one” (ibid.: 266), where the actual meaning of the deictic is negotiated and settled upon in interaction.
Fillmore (1997 [1971]: 68) defines the main function of the temporal proximal deictic category which includes words such as the English now and Icelandic nú(na) as “that of identifying a particular time as coinciding with, being close to, or being contained in the same larger time unit as, the moment of speech, or the coding time.”34
33 The origo is also known as the indexical ground (Lyons 1977) or deictic centre (Fillmore 1997 [1971].
34 Coding time is the time when the utterance is produced (Fillmore 1997 [1971]: 67).
Schiffrin (1987: 228) refers to this function as reference time, which she defines as
“the deictic relationship between a proposition and its speaking time.”
Fillmore’s definition reflects the indistinct nature of the temporal origo, which can refer to longer as well as shorter units and coincide with or occur close to the specified moment. In Fillmore’s (1997 [1971]: 68) example, “John lives in Chicago now,” now refers to a long unit which coincides with the utterance time. The utterance “I want you to turn the corner … right … now,” on the other hand, refers to a very brief moment which occurs close to the specified moment (ibid.). It can thus be said that now has a dynamic meaning potential35 and has the ability to express short moments as well as longer periods.
Fillmore points out that this ambiguity often causes speakers to specify the time frame with adverbs, such as right now, if something is happening in the near future, or just now, if something has just happened (see also Table 6.5). Fillmore (1997 [1971]:
48) refers to the longer units as time periods and the shorter ones as time points. Time periods are essentially defined by time points, or, more precisely, by beginning and ending points. Time periods can be compared with each other; one time period can be longer or shorter than another.
In addition to indexing a temporal relation between a proposition and its utterance time, the English now can also refer to a discourse internal time, i.e., it may index “the temporal relationships between utterances in a discourse” (Schiffrin 1987: 229).
Following Schiffrin (1987), such temporal relationship is referred to as discourse time.
Speech is produced in real time. Thus, each time nú is uttered, the origo is anchored in a “new” moment. This means that the origo is a dynamic phenomena which is constantly shifting. Fillmore’s (1997 [1971]: 68) example, “now you see it, now you don’t,” shows the origo shifting with the progress of time. In addition to this constant renewing, ‘now’ can also be decentered or transpositioned (cf. Hanks 1990;
Haviland 1996). The most obvious example of transpositioning is the use of deictics in direct quotation. In utterances such as hún var bara: “Nú er hingað og ekki lengra”
‘She was just: “NÚ that’s it!”’ the origo is transpositioned from the speaker’s perspective to the perspective of the person who is being quoted. The use of nú in judicial texts may be viewed as the result of a similar mechanism, one in which the temporal origo is transposed to a potential situation (cf. section 2.2.3).
35 The notion of meaning potential is based on the idea that all expressions acquire their meaning in context. Instead of treating expressions as having a stable, unchangeable meaning, they should be viewed as vague, open, and negotiable (Rommetveit 1988, Linell 1998: 199; Allwood 2003; cf. also Silverstein 1976: 51 on referential primes).
The existence of two different forms for indexing the present moment is by no means unique to Icelandic. Some other languages have two, or even more, options.
Grenoble (1998: 99–104) shows that although Russian has two words for ‘now,’
sejčas and teper’, these two words are not synonyms, and they are not interchangeable in all environments. Instead, he identifies two functions for sejčas and two for teper’.
On the one hand, he describes sejčas as referring to a) a stretch of time coinciding or including the reference point as it is established in the discourse, or b) referring to a point in time which is adjacent to the temporal reference point, as it is established in the discourse: Sejčas on zanjat ‘He’s busy now’ (Grenoble 1998: 100–1). Teper’, on the other hand, c) indicates a given period implicitly related to what took place before the given period or d) is used as a conjunction when something is completed, and it is desirable to go on to something else. In c), the situation brought up is connected with a previous situation: Ona ran’še vsegda vrala i teper’ sovret ‘She has always lied in the past and she will lie now,’ but, in d), there is some kind of transition involved:
Issledovanie moe zakončeno; teper’ mne ostaetsja poblagodarit’ tex, kto mne tak mnogo pomog ‘My research is finished; now I need to thank those who helped me so much.’
In this study, I am arguing that the Icelandic nú and núna have a similar division of labour as sejčas and teper’, and that it is this functional difference which makes it possible for nú to develop its function as a non-referential index.