As Charles Fillmore showed, deictic ambiguities abound, but some jokes are based upon them. There's Fillmore's own, "I read War and Peace while she talked to her mother on the phone," and with apologies to Fillmore there is Hannibal Lector's, "I'm having an old friend for dinner." In terms of the dreaded SAT exams, my question is "Pun : Conundrum :: a-joke-based-on-deictic-ambiguity : ______.
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Can you provide a link to a source to explain what deictic puns are? Also, single-word-requests require an example sentence in which the word could be used.– BladorthinTheGreyCommented Sep 8, 2016 at 19:59
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@BladorthinTheGrey: Bob is the man to the left of Mark - where Bob may be to Mark's own left (non-deictic), or to the left from the speaker's point of view (deictic).– FumbleFingersCommented Sep 8, 2016 at 20:06
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@Bla Maybe I don't understand the idea of deictic. The sentence about the phone conversation is from the speaker's viewpoint and so can mean that he read all of War and Peace while she was on the phone. An onlooker might interpret the sentence to mean the speaker was reading War and Peace while she was on the phone. Similarly Lector's statement is from his point of view and so does not mean what you and I would mean by the same sentence. Feel free to fix my question by supplying the correct word for "dealing with the conceptual center" and take off points, but I hope you allow the question.– AirymouseCommented Sep 8, 2016 at 20:27
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@FumbleFingers I thought about using "conceptual" in room of "deictic," but what I have in mind is sharper than that. "We have the finest congress money can buy" is conceptual. But the War-and-Peace joke is not just a concept; it hinges on the way we are forced take the speaker's position.– AirymouseCommented Sep 8, 2016 at 21:00
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deixis (/ˈdaɪksᵻs/)[1] refers to words and phrases, such as “me” or “here”, that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information -- in this case, the identity of the speaker (“me”) and the speaker's location (“here”). Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis– DanCommented Sep 8, 2016 at 21:01
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