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.
