Monday, September 24, 2007

When "here" is "there"

As a follow-up to my previous post here, it seems to be rather interesting that the blogosphere's use of hyper-linked "here" is closer to the natural language use of "there", as a pointer to a distant referent. The referent is NOT in fact "here", but somewhere else. It is true that one must go through the link (which is, in essence, 'closer') to get to the distant referent, but the referent of "here" is not here, it's there.

In terms of usage, it's closer to Monty Hall's classic use of 'here' when he stood next to door number 3 and said "your new car might be through here!" (nothing good EVER was behind door number 3!).

I'm going to name this Let's-Make-A-Deal Deixis ... or Monty's Deixis ... or Door-Number Three Deixis ... Shoot! I may need to start an internet poll!

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TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...