Deferred Demonstratives

Emma Borg

In this paper I look at how best to understand deferred demonstratives and pronouns. These are utterances like "that is my favourite author"‚ said whilst pointing at a book, or "she's gone"‚ said whilst pointing at a chair. Despite the surface presence of an expression usually treated as a referring term, some theorists have suggested that these utterances are more akin to descriptive phrases. I critically examine this suggestion, and argue that, on the contrary deferred expressions demand treatment as genuine referring terms. I proffer a positive account of how this can be done and conclude with some reflections about what the case of deferred demonstratives tells us about the scope and limits proper to a semantic theory.