The Summary of Deixis

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?