“Come questa pietra”. Forme e funzioni della deissi in Ungaretti

This article deals with the importance attributed by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti to deictics as a way of connecting subjectivity to the spatial and temporal dimension of personal and collective events and to the sphere of memory and imagination. The investigation includes the first three great collections ("L’Allegria", "Sentimento del Tempo", "Il Dolore") and consists of a survey and functional classification of the forms of space-time deixis. A semantic-pragmatic approach is combined with an attention to stylistic, rhetorical and textual choices related to the position of the deictics and their relationships. Differences and shared trends among the books are identified, which contribute to demonstrate how the observation of deixis can help a deeper interpretation of both the dramatic charge and the meditative and finely literary slant of Ungaretti’s poetry.