Other Categories

Time

Place

Person

Traditional Categories

Types of Deixis

Definition

Seminar 7. Deixis

Issues Discussed:

1. Definition

2. Types of deixis

3. Anaphoric reference

4. Deictic center

5. Usages of deixis

6. Deixis and indexicality

In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words which have a fixed semantic meaning, but have a denotational meaning that constantly changes depending on time and/or place, are deictic. A word or phrase whose meaning requires this contextual information — for example, English pronouns — is said to be deictic. Deixis is closely related to both indexicality and anaphora, as will be further explained below. Note that this article deals largely with deixis in spoken language, but the same concepts can apply to written language and gestures as well. Also note that though this article is primarily concerned with deixis in English, it is believed to be a feature (to some degree) of all natural languages [9]. The term’s origin is Ancient Greek: δεῖξις, "display, demonstration, or reference", the meaning " point of reference " in contemporary linguistics having been taken over from Chrysippus.

Possibly the most common categories of contextual information referred to by deixis are those of person, place, and time — what Charles J. Fillmore calls the “major grammaticalized types” of deixis [3].

Person deixis concerns itself with the grammatical persons involved in an utterance, both those directly involved (e.g. the speaker, the addressee), not directly involved (e.g. overhearers — those who hear the utterance but who are not directly addressed) and those mentioned in the utterance [7]. In English, this is generally accomplished with pronouns. The following examples demonstrate this:

I am going to the movies.

Would you like to have dinner?

They tried to hurt me, but he came to the rescue.

Place deixis, also known as space deixis, concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person deixis, the locations can be those of the speaker and addressee, or those of persons or objects being referred to. The most salient English examples are the adverbs “here” and “there” and the demonstratives “this” and “that”, though they are far from the only deictic words [3].

Some examples:

I enjoy living in this city.

Here is where we will place the statue.

She was sitting over there.

Unless otherwise specified, place deictic terms are generally understood to be relative to the location of the speaker, as in “ The shop is across the street ”, where “across the street” is understood to mean “across the street from where I am right now” [3]. It is interesting to note that while “here” and “there” are often used to refer to locations near to and far from the speaker, respectively, “there” can also refer to the location of the addressee, if they are not in the same location as the speaker. So, while “ Here is a good spot; it is too sunny over there ” exemplifies the former usage, “How is the weather there?” is an example of the latter [7].

Languages usually show at least a two-way referential distinction in their deictic system: proximal, i.e. near or closer to the speaker, and distal, i.e. far from the speaker and/or closer to the addressee. English exemplifies this with such pairs as this and that, here and there, etc.

In other languages, the distinction is three-way: proximal, i.e. near the speaker, medial, i.e. near the addressee, and distal, i.e. far from both. This is the case in a few Romance languages and in Korean, Japanese, Thai, Filipino and Turkish. The archaic English forms yon and yonder (still preserved in some regional dialects) once represented a distal category which has now been subsumed by the formerly medial "there" [5].

Time deixis concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in an utterance. This includes time adverbs like “now,” “then,” “soon,” and so forth, and also different tenses. A good example is the word tomorrow, which denotes the consecutive next day after every day. The "tomorrow" of a day last year was a different day than the "tomorrow" of a day next week. Time adverbs can be relative to the time when an utterance is made (what Fillmore calls the “encoding time,” or ET) or when the utterance is heard (Fillmore’s “decoding time,” or DT) [3]. While these are frequently the same time, they can differ, as in the case of pre-recorded broadcasts, or letters. For example, if one were to write “It is raining out now, but I hope when you read this it will be sunny”, the ET and DT would be different, with the former deictic term concerning ET and the latter the DT.

Tenses are generally separated into absolute (deictic) and relative tenses. So, for example, simple English past tense is absolute, such as in “He went ”, while the pluperfect is relative to some other deictically specified time, as in “He had gone ”.

Though the traditional categories of deixis are perhaps the most obvious, there are other types of deixis that are similarly pervasive in language use. These categories of deixis were first discussed by Ch. Fillmore and J. Lyons.

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