Indicare, rappresentare e dislocare. La Deixis am Phantasma di Karl Bühler e i modi del Discorso Riportato

Abstract

‘Deixis am phantasma’ or imagination-oriented deixis is a mode of reference, originally described by Karl Bühler, that directly brings into play one of the distinctive properties of human language, namely the unlimited capacity to dislocate in space and time the referents and situations that are the object of discourse. Since representing and reporting other people's speech is a discourse situation in which speakers must represent, transpose and dislocate referents, situations, and other people's words, reported speech is a very suitable area in which to observe this particular type of deixis. In this paper, after briefly restating the main points of Bühler's theory of language, i.e., the two-field theory and the different modes of reference within the deictic field, I discuss the three different types of imagination-oriented deixis (as identified by Bühler). I then try to point out what I consider to be their systematic correlations with the two main deictic modes of reporting speech (direct vs. indirect), while, conversely, noting the unsystematic correlations with that intermediate or hybrid form of reporting that is free indirect speech.