Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, "Deixis" (Ch2)

An essential feature of the pragmatic approach to studying linguistic phenomena is the treatment of linguistic meaning as "general directions" (Strawson) for use. These general directions are supposed not to require any contextual features for their use (otherwise they wouldn't do any explanatory work[?]). But the general directions do require contextual features for their use, no less than words like "I" and "you". So giving the meaning of "I" as "the speaker of the context of utterance" is in fact no explanation at all. And it is only the conception of language as an autonomous system that makes the meaning of words like "I" and "you" seem problematic and in need of explanation in the first place.