Deixis in notariellen Urkunden? Eine Klärung

In this paper we will question the deictic character of expressions that are conventionally used in notarial deeds and that, like ,I‘, ,here‘ and ,now‘, are deictic expressions par excellence marking the personal, spatial and temporal deixis. After dealing with linguistic theories of deixis and clarifying the relevant concepts, we will carry out an analysis of two corpora of German and Italian real estate sales contracts of the present and of the recent past. We will point out that while the expressions of the spatial deixis are exclusively used as anaphors, those of the personal and the temporal deixis are in fact also used anaphorically, since the peculiarities of the communication situation and the interaction of orality and literacy don’t allow a purely deictic use of these expressions. Furthermore, we will show that the competing expressions too are related to the peculiarities of the communication situation and that they manifest changes in the conventions towards a stronger accentuation of literacy.