Indexicals

Indexicals are expressions whose reference or truth-conditions depend on the context of utterance. They include pronouns such as I and you; demonstratives such as this and that; and temporal or locational terms such as now, here, yesterday, and tomorrow. What an indexical picks out depends on who is speaking, where, and when the sentence is uttered, as well as the speaker’s relation to the referent in context.

Indexicals are central to linguistic deixis. They contrast with ordinary referring expressions whose reference is fixed by lexical meaning or shared knowledge. In a single sentence, I can mean different things by I, depending on which person is speaking and when the sentence is spoken; similarly, here refers to the speaker’s location, now to the time of utterance, and this or that to a proximal or distal object in the surrounding context.

Philosophical analysis of indexicals has produced several influential theories. Saul Kripke emphasized that proper names function like rigid designators, while indexicals reveal context dependence in their reference. David Kaplan distinguished the character of an indexical expression—a function from context to content—from the actual content evaluated in a particular context. In contemporary work, contextualist and dynamic-semantic approaches treat indexical content as inherently sensitive to context, and topics such as de re/de dicto beliefs and cross-linguistic translation are examined to understand how meaning shifts with perspective.

Cross-linguistic and practical work shows that languages vary in how they encode indexical information. Beyond English, languages differ in pronoun systems, demonstratives, and other deictic devices. Studying indexicals illuminates how linguistic meaning embodies speaker perspective and how context shapes reference and inference.