Evidence of a two-way contrast in Mexican Spanish spatial deixis

Abstract

This study provides evidence for a binary contrast in the deictic system of Mexican Spanish. The analysis is based on experimental data on how native speakers interpret the adverbial demonstratives aquí/acá/ahí/allí/allá in a 3D virtual reality video game. The tests crossed the variables of distance, person, and anaphora. The results revealed that (i) when contrasting degrees of distance and anaphoric reference, ahí primarily has an anaphoric function, while aquí/acá/allí/allá primarily have a deictic function; (ii) acá/aquí designate proximal distances and the domain of the speaker; (iii) ahí designates the domain of the hearer in a person-oriented deixis; and (iv) the meaning of allí and allá cannot be explained by the deictic parameters of distance and person.

Keywords:

• Deixis
• adverbial demonstratives
• ahí
• Mexican Spanish

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT, Mexico) for helping fund this project. These interesting people also helped make it happen: Ditte Boeg Thomsen and Jan Heegård Petersen, who have a contagious curiosity about deixis and the patience to teach what they know about text organization; the reviewers, who gave insightful comments and suggestions to the paper; my husband Benjamin Blocksom, who helped me with English; Jonathan Blocksom, who introduced me to the Oculus Rift four years ago; the “DGTIC/UNAM team” – Carmen, Martín, Brenda, and Victor Hugo, who transposed a thought of mine to the 3D virtual world; Ricardo Mendez, who did the game voice-overs; Aurelio Velazquez, who brought the equipment to Mexico; and Ricardo Maldonado, who is a constant source of inspiration. 

Notes

¹ Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México [Sociolinguistic Corpus of Mexico City] (Lastra and Martín Butragueño 2011).

² Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual [Current Spanish Reference Corpus] (Real Academia Española 2008-).

³ For examples of classic studies see: Man and Tree & Space Games (Levinson et al. 1992) and A cross-linguistic questionnaire on ‘demonstratives’ (Pederson and Wilkins 1996).

⁴ The videogame was produced at the National Autonomous University of Mexico through a collaboration between the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas and the Dirección General de Cómputo y de Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación. The software was installed on a computer equipped with an NVIDIA GTX 970 GPU, an Intel i5–4590 processor, 8 Gb + RAM of memory, using Windows 10 as the operating system and was coupled with an Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 headset and an Xbox 360 joystick for Windows.