This chapter gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

The purpose of this book is twofold. On one hand it intends to provide a survey and analysis of the colonate in the Roman Empire from the legal point of view, embedded as much as necessary in the social and economic context of Roman society. On the other hand, it is meant to show how to approach the sources in a case like this and, in general, how to work with the codes of Theodosius and Justinian, in a way that does justice to the place of the texts in the whole of these codifications, that is, taking account of their function within a codification. The individual texts have their value as historical sources, yet one must be aware how they have come to us, in which context and to which purpose they were selected and edited, or else their historical value might diminish or even disappear.