The topic that I have chosen to talk about – the relationship between deixis and anaphora – turns out to be even more appropriate than I had hoped. Dr Bullowa, Dr Widdowson and Professor Halliday have all touched upon either deixis or anaphora, or both, in their contributions to the Symposium; and they have all made points to which I can refer in the development of the thesis that I am presenting.

I will argue that deixis is both ontogenetically and logically prior to anaphora. By this I mean that the deictic use of pronouns and other such expressions precedes their anaphoric use in the earliest stages of language acquisition and, furthermore, that anaphora, as a grammatical and semantic process, is inexplicable except in terms of its having originated in deixis. That deixis precedes, and is in some sense more basic than anaphora, is something that the previous speakers would probably concede immediately. But it is not at all uncommon for linguists to describe the meaning of pronouns, as far as possible, in terms of anaphora and to treat that part of the use of pronouns which is irreducibly deictic as a theoretical embarrassment that is best forgotten. It is certainly the case that generative grammarians have been inclined, until recently at least, to underestimate the role played by deixis in the interpretation of utterances; and the very term ‘pronominalization’, which figures so prominently in works on generative grammar, is loaded in favour of the view that pronouns are, first and foremost, substitutes for nouns (or nominals).