Deictic strategies as expression of identity

This contribution investigates the expression of personal deixis, often intertwined with two other aspects of deixis, namely spatial and temporal deixis, in two case-studies. Deictics are those linguistic forms whose interpretation essentially requires reference to some elements of the situation in which they are produced. As far as person reference is concerned, the act of referring to another individual leads us straight to the core of multimodal interaction: it is the first indicator of an individual cultural identity. The case-studies are represented by the utterances of Catalans living in Spain and by the narratives (life stories) of immigrants of different origins in Italy.