Pointing and Placing

Abstract

Communication is ordinarily anchored to the material world-to actual people, artifacts, rooms, buildings, landscapes, events, processes. One way it gets anchored is through pointing. One day I went into a drugstore, picked out some soap and shampoo, and laid them on the counter for the clerk to ring up (see Clark, 1996). As it happened, the clerk had not seen me put them there, so when she looked for the items to be purchased, I pointed and said, “These two things over here.” I used two expressions, “these two things” and “over here,” that she could not understand without anchoring them to our material surroundings. I created the anchor by pointing at the soap and shampoo, and she acknowledged the action by picking them up.

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