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In Dutch inquisitorial courts police records play an important role. In most proceedings, witnesses are not heard again in court but instead a statement based on a question-answer interview at the police is used. Similarly, statements by suspects may take precedence over the oral statement they give in court. The immediacy principle, which requires witnesses’ and experts’ direct presentation of evidence has been weakened since the Supreme Court ruled that hearsay evidence may be used instead. Witnesses are rarely heard again in court and judges, instead, selectively read from their statements. Based on a corpus of 34 criminal trials, three broad linguistic strategies were found that invoke the content of police records: 1) summaries or paraphrases, 2) indirect reports, 3) direct reports. These different forms have different functions and this chapter investigates when, in what narrative and sequential context, and with what kind of information judges use what strategy and how. The chapter shows that referring to the case file is not a neutral activity and that different strategies allow a judge to put information more or less prominently ‘on record’ while constructing a new narrative of what happened.

Every movement of change in this period was borne by two powerful impulses: negative and positive. The negative impulse was shared by all the trends, although it assumed different forms. It can be described in semiotic concepts as the negation of the three deictic axes of the old Jewish existence. Deictics are tools in linguistics that have no lexical meaning of their own but relate the meanings of words and sentences to the coordinates of a specific act of communication. The three basic deictics are here and now, relating the discourse to the speaker, and the place and time of speech. All other deictics are derived from those. For example, “here” and “now” attach the content of the words to the place and time in which they are uttered; but also “then,” “yesterday,” “next year,” or “in the past” relate the content to a point relative to the time of the specific speech act.

Greek lyric avoids the thorough, point-by-point narration characteristic of epic. Sappho engages in anti-narrative, exemplified by Aphrodite's questions in Sappho 1, which—unlike the questions gods ask in Homer, or the questions the Homeric narrator asks—are not answered. The goddess (in the past) asked who (tis) was doing wrong to Sappho, but Sappho's name appears, the name of this girl is not given anymore than is the name of the girl she loves now; even when she provides a name (as in 16), Sappho refuses to be specific, and using deictics without clarifying their referents. The traditional epic narrative conventions are a constant presence in Sappho's lyric, producing the expectation of a plot that her poems refuse to provide.

This chapter addresses the vexed question of the universality of art. Modernism and formalism have defended it while identity politics and multiculturalism have challenged all claims to art’s universality. Neither camp has seen that the real problem is not with the concept of universality but rather with that of representativity. Both camps entertain a fantasy: the belief in the congruence of mandate and address (I address the community I am mandated by, and I am mandated by the community I address). Their difference is that modernism universalizes both mandate and address, whereas identity politics restricts both to a definite group. The defense of universality articulated in this chapter argues that address grounds mandate rather than the other way around, and reinterprets the big words, universality and humanity, in deictics borrowed from ordinary language: “anyone and everyone,” “all of us,” and “you and me.”

This chapter further examines civil servants’ life worlds through reference to a few hundred stories published in a local Indonesian newspaper between June 2003 and January 2004. It argues that we can observe some of the semiotic reflexes of ongoing social, political, and economic change by looking at how media representations about the deviant practices of a handful of local civil servants became reconfigured as a widespread practice via subsequent representations. In particular, it focuses on how imitation, the use of universal select deictics, the erasure of particular selective deictics, and the quotation of authoritative voices enregistered the “mass-mediated chronotopic identity” of the deviant Indonesian civil servant.