The distinction between deixis and anaphora and its application to the forms of grammatical person in Spanish

Abstract

This paper attempts a redefinition of the relation between ‘deixis’ and ‘discourse anaphora’ by paying special attention to the Spanish person system. Whereas deixis is part of the content of certain units that encode particular features of an idealized communicative situation, discourse anaphora is a reference relation. In Spanish, the distinction between first and second person forms versus those of the third person does not lie in the former being deictic and the latter anaphoric, as is often claimed, but in the nondeictic nature of the latter.