Through too much insistence on the blurring of contextual features, however, one is apt to forget, or at least to minimize, the importance of situation in spoken communication, and the necessity to compensate for its absence in writing: a speaker may at all times refer to what he has, 'hic et nunc', in common with the hearer; the author has nothing in common with the reader but his text, and the fact that they belong to the same linguistic community. It will not do to argue that the author constantly re-creates situation so that he wil use ‘shifters’, words that are understood in situation only, like 'I', 'you', 'here', 'last year', just as easily when he writes as when he talks. The very fact that he has to recreate his situations if he wants to make use of the large part of lexicon suggests that an appreciable part of his activity is devoted to descriptions and presentations from which ‘shifters’ are excluded except when, quite exceptionally, the author (‘I’) adresses his reader (‘you’).
- Martinet (1962), a pag.123-124