When “come” means “get”

On the semantics of directional deictics

Abstract

Similar to locative deictics like here and there, directional deictics like come, go, hither, thither are hard to characterize semantically. Inspired by the seminal work of Charles Fillmore on spatial deixis, the alleged movement-based contrast of come and go has been in the fore of interest for some time. In the present article, it will be shown that this focus has to be widened to include other spatial verbs (and the adverbs/particles), and that the semantic criteria have to be specified more abstractly to encompass non-actual locomotion as well as non-spatial aspects of objective and subjective valuation, and to explain unexpected patterns of (un)acceptabilities. Based on data from different languages (especially taking the peculiarities of German into account), it will be argued that the deictic oppositions can be attributed to attention-based semantic criteria. These specify the perspective of directional deictics as focus on one of the poles of a state change, with the salience of the conceptually instantiated states being determined by criteria of relevance-based or qualitative valuation in the actual context of language production.