Publisher's Synopsis
Directing attention, especially the establishment of joint attention, represents one of the most important basic communicative functions. For this purpose, the Romance languages possess a particularly fascinating deictic category of expression: pointing act constructions. These include, on the one hand, sentence-valued expressions - besides it. ecco and fr. voici/voila, also kat. vet/veus, heus, sp. he (aqui), pt. eis and rum. iata - and, on the other hand, recent verb-subject constructions (among others, sp. aqui/ahi esta, pt. aqui/ca esta). In addition to analyzing their syntactic and pragmatic properties in contemporary languages, this book provides for the first time a comprehensive historical-comparative study of their forms, functions, and main literary and non-literary usage traditions. The most famous: Ecce homo or Voila un homme.
