Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“But although it is pointless to divide its vocabulary into nominals and verbals, epistemologically speaking, it seems reasonable to classify all ostensives functionally as nominals. For example, stampede is a verb as well as a noun, but until such time as the verbal form becomes a true predicate and takes on a tense relating linguistic time to that of the real world, Stampede! would be simply, like a fire or a wolf, a thing/event to be reacted to. The intentional structures of elementary language, the ostensive and the imperative that emerges from it, do not possess the “third-person” stability of the declarative’s mapping of the world, but as the Wolf! example demonstrated, reflect the tension between the different standpoints of speaker and hearer. It is this tension that will lead, through the dialectic of desire and paradox, to the mature form of the declarative. The Intentional Structure of the Ostensive The ease with which we construct complex declarative sentences inspires in us the illusion that such sentences reveal “transparently,” as Sartre described prose in opposition to poetry, the order of things, or more precisely that of “phenomena.” In contrast, the ostensive, which asserts no propositional truth, appears to grammarians as less an objective model than a “defective” expedient inspired by practical necessity. It will take more than the deconstruction of the discourse of Western metaphysics to make a dent in the stubborn logocentricity of this perspective.”

— Eric Gans, The New Origin of Language Part 4: Linguistics of the Ostensive · Saturday, March 11th, 2017 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment