Deixis and Spatial Orientation in Route Directions

All natural languages allow reference to places, expression of spatial relations and localization of objects and events. The specific devices which they have developed to that purpose vary considerably. This may also be true for the underlying concept of space (Malotki, 1979), but there are some general features, as well. Two of them are particularly relevant to the question of how human experience is reflected in language structure. First, place reference, or local reference, is typically not obligatory. Its expression or lack thereof is left up to the speaker. Temporal reference, on the other hand, is very often obligatory. It is a built-in feature of many languages. With a a few exceptions, utterances in these languages will be "tensed." Second, all languages exhibit two strategies of local (and often other) reference, one of them rooted in the actual speech situation (deictic reference) and the other one not.