refers, broadly, to deictic expressions whose understanding requires some sort of audio-visual information. A simple example is when an object is pointed at and referred to as "this" or "that". However, the category can include other types of information than pointing, such as direction of gaze, tone of voice, and so on. Symbolic usage, by contrast, requires generally only basic spatio-temporal knowledge of the utterance. So, for example I broke this finger. requires being able to see which finger is being held up, whereas I love this city. requires only knowledge of the current location. In a similar vein, I went to this city one time ... is a non-deictic usage of "this", which does not identify anywhere specifically. Rather, it is used as an indefinite article, much the way "a" could be used in its place. Deixis and indexicality The terms deixis and indexicality are frequently used almost interchangeably, and both deal with essentially the same idea of contextually-dependent references. However, the two terms have different histories and traditions. In the past, deixis was associated specifically with spatiotemporal reference, and indexicality was used more broadly. More importantly, each is associated with a different field of study. Deixis is associated with linguistics, and indexicality is associated with philosophy as well as pragmatics. See also Anaphora Deictic field and narration Demonstrative Generic antecedents Metaphysics of presence Observation Present Pro-form Self Notes References Further reading Anderson, Stephen R.; & Keenan, Edward L. (1985). Deixis. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description: Grammatical categories and the lexicon (Vol. 3, pp. 259–308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fillmore, Charles J. (1966). Deictic categories in the semantics of 'come'. Foundations of Language, 2, 219–227. Fillmore, Charles J. (1982). Towards a descriptive framework for spatial deixis. In R. J. Jarvell & W. Klein (Eds.), Speech, place and action: Studies in deixis and related topics (pp. 31–59). London: Wiley. Gaynesford, M. de I: The Meaning of the First Person Term, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. George Grigore, La deixis spatial dans l'arabe parlé à Bagdad, Estudios de dialectologia arabe n.7, Zaragoza, pp 77–90 George Grigore. 2012. „La deixis spatiale dans l’arabe parlé à Bagdad”, Alexandrine Barontini, Christophe Pereira, Ángeles Vicente, Karima Ziamari (ed.), Estudios de dialectología árabe (n.7): Hommage offert à Dominique Caubet . Universidad de Zaragoza. pp: 77-90 Summary. Traut, Gregory P. and Kazzazi, Kerstin. 1996. Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Routledge. London and New