In American Sign Language (ASL) a certain kind of anaphora is found by assigning things in the discourse to physical locations around the speaker.
For example, if you say "my brother's new house" and gesture to a point off to your right, you've now assigned that referent to that location. Then you can gesture to that location again to use it like a pronoun, referring to your brother's new house without naming it again. Then you might say "the piano that fell on my car" and gesture to your left, and now you can gesture to that location to talk about the piano.
What are the proper terms for referring to this sort of concept?
- the process of assigning a thing to a location (assignment? reference? indexing?)
- the thing that is assigned (referent?)
- the location that refers to the thing (pronoun? anaphor?)
I'm looking for the broadly-applicable terms, not ones that might only be used for ASL.