Deixis is a technical
term (from Greek) for pointing or indicating, and has prototypical or focal
exemplars the the use of demonstratives, first and second person pronouns,
tense, specific time and place adverbs like now and here, and variety of other
grammatical features tied directly to the circumstances of utterance. It concerns
the way in which languages encode or grammatical features of the context of
utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the
interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance. Thus, the pronoun ‘this’ does not name or refer to any particular
entity on all occasion of use; rather it is a variable or place holder for some
particular entity given by the context.
Deixis belongs
within the domain of pragmatics, because it directly concerns the relationship
between the structure of languages and the contexts in which they are used.
Because pragmatics concerns the aspect of meaning and language structure that
cannot be captured in a truth-conditional semantics, the grammatical category
of deixis will probably be found to straddle the semantics/pragmatics border.
Philosophical Approches
The topic of
deixis, or as philosophers usually prefer, indexical
expresssions (or just indexicals),
may be useful approached by considering how truth-conditional semantics dels
with certain natural language expressions.
However, none
of these philosophical approcehes does justice to the complexity and variety of
the deictic expressions taht occur in natural language, and we should now turn
to consider linguistic approaches and findings.
Descriptive Approaches
The
traditional categories of deixis are person, place and time. Person deixis
concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event in wich the
utterance in question is delivered: the category first person is the
grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself, second person the
encoding of the speaker’s reference to one or more addressees, and the third
person of encoding of reference to persons and entities which are neither
speaker nor addressees of the utterance in question.
Social deixis concerns
the encoding of social distinction that are relative to participant-roles,
particularly aspects of the social relationship holding between speaker and
addressee or speaker and some referent.
Here is the
more example of person deixis, time deixis, place deixis, discource deixis, and
social deixis.
Person Deixis
Person deixis
is reflected directly in the grammatical categories of person, it may be argued
that we need to develop an independent pragmatic framework of possible
participant-role, so that we can then see how, and to what extent, these roles
are grammaticalized in different language.
Time Deixis
Time deixis
concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at
which utterance was spoken. For example: now and then, yesterday and this year.
Place Deixis
Place or space
deixis concerns the specification of locations relative to anchore points in
the speech events. The importance of locational specifications in general can be
gauged from the fact that there seem to be two basic ways of refering to
objects – by describing or naming them on the one hand, and by locating them on
the other (Lyons, 1977a:648).
Discourse
Deixis
It concerns
the use of expressions within some utterance to refer to some portion of the
discourse that contains that utterance (including the utterance itself).
Social Deixis
Social deixis is
reference to the social characteristics of, or distinctions between, the participants
or referents in a speech event. The distinction, found in many Indo-European languages,
between familiar and polite second person pronouns is an expression of social deixis.
Absolute deixis reference to some characteristic of referent (especially a person)
a part from any relative ranking of referents. Relational deixis is deictic reference
to social relationship between the speaker and an addressee, bystander or other
referent in the extralinguistic context.
Reference:
Levinson, S.C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP
Questions:
1.
What
is the differences between discourse deixis and reference?
2.
Why
indexical expressions is included in pragmatic?
