Deixis

Essentially deixis concerns the ways in which language encode or grammaticalize 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. The facts of deixis should act as a constant reminder to theoretical linguists of the simple but immensely important fact that natural languages are primarily designed, so to speak, for use in face to face interaction, and thus there are limits to the extent to which they can be analyzed without taking this into account (Lyson, 1977a: 589ff).

Deixis is the phenomenon of encoding contextual information by means of lexical items of grammatical distinctions that provide this information only when paired with this context. In other words, it means lexicalizing or grammaticalizing contextual information that is making it into obligatory grammatical or lexical distinctions. They give instructions to the addressee that context has to be consulted in order to grasp the meaning of the utterance. In all languages there are many words and expressions whose reference rely entirely on the situational context of the utterance and can only be understood in light of these circumstances. This aspect of pragmatics is called deixis.
First and second person pronouns such as; my, mine, you, your, yours, we, ours, and us are always deictic because their reference is entirely dependent on context. You must know who the speaker and listener are in order to interpret them. 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.

Type of deixis:

1.      Person deixis

Person deixis encodes the role of participants in the speech event, such as speaker, addressee, and other entities. Person deixis is encoded in pronouns: ‘I’ for the speaker, ‘you’ for the addressee, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘we’, ‘they’, for others. Pronoun system different from language to language: different information is grammaticalized.  Person deixis can be grasped only when we understand the roles of the speaker, source of the utterance, recipient, the target of the utterance, and hearers who are not addressees or targets. Only then can we successfully replace the pronoun and adjectives as in the examples of (a) by those in (b) or (c) in processing the utterance.

Example: I am going to the movies.

  Would you like to have dinner?

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

2.      Place deixis

Place deixis, also known as space deixis, concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person deixis, the locations may be either 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” - although those are far from being the only deictic words.

Some examples:

I enjoy living in this city.

Here is where we will place the statue.

She was sitting over there.

3.      Time deixis

Time, or temporal, 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 from 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). While these are frequently the same time, they can differ, as in the case of prerecorded broadcasts or correspondence. For example, if one were to write.

It is raining 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”.

4.      Discourse deixis

Discourse deixis encodes reference to portion of discourse. Discourse deixis is not  one of the basic deictic categories. By means of this device we can rever to portions of discourse, as in ‘in the last paragraph’, ‘this story’, sentence-initial ‘therefore’, ‘in conclusion’, ‘anyway’, ‘all in all’, where the reference is relative to the utterance.

Discourse deixis is deictic reference to a portion of a discourse relative to the speaker’s current “location” in the discourse. Example, the use of this to refer to a story one is about to tell in:

 I bet you haven’t heard this story.  

5.      Social deixis

Social deixis encodes social relationships and other social distinctions. Social deixis concerns social relationships between participants, their status and relations to the topic of discourse. Relationships that are relevant in their type of deixis include these between the speaker and the addressee, between other participants, the speaker and the object spoken about and soon. Devices used for the purpose of this deixis include varying forms of address, pronouns of politeness, kinship terms and honorifics, in particular addressee and referent honorifics.  

Social deixis is the use of different deicitics to express social distinctions. An example is difference between formal and polite pro-forms. Relational social deixis is where the form of word used indicates the relative social status of the addressor and the addressee. For example, one pro-form might be used to address those of higher social rank, another to address those of less or social rank, another to address those of the same social rank. By contrast, absolute social deixis indicates a social standing irrespective of the social standing of the speaker. Thus, village chiefs might always be addressed by a special pro-form, regardless of whether it is someone below them, above them or at the same level of the social hierarchy who is doing the addressing.

From the five types of deixis above, some linguists (Charles Fillmore, Stephen Levinson), in Jaszczolt, analyze all five types of deixis as instances of the same phenomenon. But discourse and social deixis seem to differ from the three basic categories of person, place and time deixis . They grammaticalize or lexicalize certain distinctions relative to context, but may not need context for interpreting them.

The general conclusion must be the most aspects of discourse deixis, and perhaps all aspects of social deixis, lie beyond the scope of truth-conditional semantics. Deixis is therefore not reducible in its entity, and perhaps hardly at all, to matters of truth-conditional semantics.

Reference

Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. (pg. 54-94)

Questions.

1. What is the definition of Diexis?

2. What are the types of Diexis?

Answers.

1.    Deixis is the phenomenon of encoding contextual information by means of lexical items of grammatical distinctions that provide this information only when paired with this context. In other words, it means lexicalizing or grammaticalizing contextual information that is making it into obligatory grammatical or lexical distinctions.

2.    Person deixis, place diexis, time diexis, discourse diexis and social diexis.