Abstract
Guiding the listener’s attention in a language-external world has been defined as the situational or exophoric function of deictic expressions. Pronominal, adnominal, and adverbial demonstratives characteristically highlight proximity or distance from a deictic centre, but they do not correlate a priori in their structural organisation. There is a discrepancy between the nominal and adverbial systems in certain dialects, which can reveal an enormous amount of variation in their locative adverbial systems. Despite a wealth of research on deixis, there is relatively little literature on deictic adverbial variation in local dialects. This article surveys semantic and pragmatic functions of deictic adverbs in a South-Tyrolean Ladin variety and draws comparisons with a German local vernacular spoken in the nearby Dolomitic valley of Pusteria. The two linguistic varieties under examination belong to different language families, but they share distinctive deictic features, such as complex paradigms of multidimensional adverbs, which are explained in this article with reference to speaker-oriented and ground-oriented deixis. Multidimensional adverbs are closely related to topographical features, which might plausibly explain why different dialects in similar mountainous landscapes have analogous deictic characteristics and tend to be high-path-salient languages.