Deixis

Deixis and Distance

“The more two speakers have in common, the less language they’ll need to use to identify familiar things”

Deixis

• Deixis means “pointing via language”. Any linguistic form used to do this “pointing” is called a deictic expression. Words like here, there, this, that, now and then, as well as most pronouns, such as I, we, you, he, her and them are deictic expressions.

What is Deixis• Deixis is an important field of

language study in its own right - and very important for learners of second languages. But it has some relevance to analysis of conversation and pragmatics because it directly concerns the relationship between the structure of languages and the context in which they are used.It is often and best described as “verbal pointing”, that is to say pointing by means of language. The linguistic forms of this pointing are called deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic words; they are also sometimes called indexicals.

What is indexicals

• In linguistics and in philosophy of language, an indexical behavior or utterance symbolically points to (or indicates) some state of affairs. For example, I refers to whoever is speaking; now refers to the time at which that word is uttered; and here refers to the place of utterance.

Deictic expressions include such lexemes (words) as:

• Personal or possessive pronouns (I/you/mine/yours),

• Demonstrative pronouns (this/that),

• (Spatial/temporal) adverbs (here/there/now),

• Personal or possessive adjectives (my/your),

• Demonstrative adjectives (this/that),

• Articles (the).

Deixis is reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the context of the utterance, such as

• who is speaking

• the time or place of speaking

• the gestures of the speaker

• the current location in the discourse

• The topic of the discourse

Deictic centre: the time of the utterance’s time; the place of the utterance’s place, the person just giving the utterance.

“Near speaker” — “away from speaker”

︱ ︱ Proximal distal ︱ ︱This, here, now that, there, then

• Proximal expressions are generally interpreted in relation to the speaker's location or deictic centre. For example now is taken to mean some point or period in time that matches the time of the speaker's utterance. When we read, “Now Barabbas was a thief.” we do not take the statement to mean the same as “Barabbas was now a thief” (i.e. he had become a thief, having not been so before). Rather we read it as,“I'm telling you now, that Barabbas was (not now but at the time in the past when these events happened) a thief”.

Deixis:

• In verbal communication however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context.

(1) You’ll have to bring that back tomorrow, because they aren’t here now.

• Out of context, we cannot understand this sentence because it contains a number of expressions such as you, that, tomorrow, they, here and now which depend for their interpretation on the immediate physical context in which they were uttered.

News narratives show many examples of deixis:

Example 1 - from a CBS Evening News broadcast.1. The Americans arrested three suspects, but they made many

more enemies here,2. when the soldiers shot back at the gunmen hiding in these

houses

“Here” and “these” are two deictic words.These lines are a voice-over accompanying videofootage of the village in which the attack occurred.Listeners (viewer and anchor) know that “here” doesnot mean in their own living room, although that is thepoint from which the television sound is emanating, butthat “here” refers to a location proximal to the speaker. In the same manner, “these houses” is understood torefer to the houses in the video footage.

Examples:

1. I’ll be back in an hour. Because we don’t know when it was written,

we cannot know when the writer will return.

2. suppose we find a bottle in the sea, and inside it a message which reads:

3. Meet me here a week from now with a stick about this big

We do not know who to meet, where or when to meet him or her, or how big a stick to bring.

More examples….• Suppose Harry just wanted to say the

following sentense,the power was suddenly off:

• Listen, I’m not disagreeing with you but with you and not about this but about this.

• In the darkness, we cannot get any deictic information, after hearing the sentence, we cannot understand what is said.

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.

Primary and Secondary Deixis

• Reference to the context surrounding an utterance is often referred to as primary deixis, exophoric deixis, or simply deixis.

• Contextual use of deictic expressions is known as secondary deixis, textual deixis or endophoric deixis. Such expressions can refer either backwards or forwards to other elements in a text. Endophora is a term that means an expression which refers to something, i.e. in the same text.

• For example, let's say we are given: "I saw Sally yesterday. She was lying on the beach". Here "she" is an endophoric expression because it refers to something already mentioned in the text, i.e. "Sally".

• By contrast, "She was lying on the beach," if it appeared by itself, has an exophoric expression; "she" refers to something that the reader is not told about. That is to say, there is not enough information in the text to independently determine to whom "she" refers. It can refer to someone the speaker assumes his audience has prior knowledge of or it can refer to a person he is showing to his listeners. Without further information, in other words, there is no way of knowing the exact meaning of an exophoric term.

(1) A: Can I borrow your dictionary?B: Yean, it’s on the table.

• Here, word it refers back to the word dictionary. The previous word dictionary is called the antecedent , and the second word it is called the anaphor or anaphoric expression.

Deictic expressions fall into three categories

• (1) Person deixis: Any expression used to point to a person: me, you, him and them.

• (2) Time deixis: words used to point to a time: now, then, tonight, last week and this year…

• (3) Space/spatial/place deixis: words used to point to a location: here, there and yonder

• Two other types are added by some linguists:

1. Discourse deixis: any expression used to refer to earlier or forthcoming segments of the discourse: in the previous/next paragraph, or Have you heard this joke?

2. Social deixis: honorifics (forms to show respect such as Professor Ali)

Personal deixis

• English does not use personal deixis to indicate relative social status in the same way that other languages do (such as those with TV pronoun systems). But the pronoun “we” has a potential for ambiguity, i.e. between exclusive we (excludes the hearer) and the hearer-including (inclusive) we.

PERSON DEIXIS HONORIFICS

• Person deixis operates on a basic three part division, the speaker (I), the addressee (you) and other(s) (he, she, it).

• in many languages these deictic expressions are elaborated with markers of social status Yule (1996) . Expressions which indicate higher status are described as honorifics (social deixis).

• For example, in French and Romanian there are two different forms that encode a social contrast within person deixis, ‘tu’ (tu) and ‘vous’(dumneavoastra). This is known as T/V distinction.

PERSON DEIXIS• Using a third person form, where a second person

would be possible, is one way of communicating distance. This can also be done for humorous or ironic purposes, as in:

‘Would his highness like some coffee?’• The distance associated with third person forms is also

used to make potential accusations less direct, as in:Somebody didn’t clean up after himself.• There is also a potential ambiguity in the use in English

of the first person plural. There is an exclusive we (speaker plus others, excluding addressee) and inclusive we (speaker and addressee included), as in the following possible reply to the accusation:

We clean up after ourselves around here.

DEICTIC PROJECTION

• Deictic projection= speakers being able to project themselves into other locations, time or shift person reference. Eg. via dramatic performances, when using direct speech to represent the person, location and feelings of someone else.

E.g.: I was looking at this little puppy in a cage with such a sad look on its face. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m so unhappy here, will you set me free?’ (taken from Yule, 1996:13)

• All indexical expressions refer to certain world conditions, either subjective or objective in nature. The following story, borrowed from Levinson 1983:68) is meant to illustrate the importance of having the right point of view, and how one can anticipate the way people will construe the world in terms of their point of view.

A Hebrew teacher, discovering that he had left his comfortable slippers back in the house, sent a student after them with a note for his wife.The note read: “Send me your slippers with this boy”. When the student asked why he had written ‘your’ slippers, the teacher answered: ‘Yold!(Fool) If I wrote ‘my’ slippers, she would read ‘my slippers’ and would send her slippers. What could I do with her slippers? So I wrote ‘your’ slippers, she’ll read ‘your’ slippers and send me mine.”

TEMPORAL DEIXIS• One basic type of temporal deixis in

English is in the choice of verb tense, which has only two basic forms, the present and the past (the proximal and the distal). The past tense is always used in English in those if-clauses that mark events presented by the speaker as not being close to present reality.

• E.g. If I had a yacht…(source: Yule, 1996:15)

• The idea expressed in the example is not treated as having happened in the past. It is presented as deictically distant from the speaker’s current situation. So distant, that it actually communicates the negative (we infer that the speaker has no yacht).

Temporal deixis• Psychological distance can apply

to temporal deixis as well. We can treat temporal events as things that move towards us (into view) or away from us (out of view). For instance, we speak of the coming year or the approaching year. This may stem from our perception of things (like weather storms) which we see approaching both spatially and in time. We treat the near or immediate future as being close to utterance time by using the proximal deictic expression this alone, as in “this (that is the next) weekend” or “this evening” (said earlier in the day).

Spatial deixis

• The use of proximal and distal expressions in spatial deixis is confused by deictic projection. This is the speaker's ability to project himself or herself into a location at which he or she is not yet present. A familiar example is the use of here on telephone answering machines (“I'm not here at the moment...”). (My here is this room in this Faculty, while yours may be this school café, this flat in Tripoli or this university in Benghazi)

• It is likely that the basis of spatial deixis is psychological distance (rather than physical distance). Usually physical and (metaphorical) psychological distance will appear the same. But a speaker may wish to mark something physically close as psychologically distant, as when you indicate an item of food on your plate with “I don't like that”.

SPATIAL DEIXIS• The concept of distance is relevant to

spatial deixis, where the relative location of people and things is being indicated. Contemporary English makes use of two adverbs, ‘here’ and ‘there’, for the basic distinction. Some verbs of motion, such as ‘come’ and ‘go’, retain deictic sense when they are used to mark movement toward the speaker (‘Come to bed’) or away the speaker (‘Go to bed’).

Conclusion

Deictic expressions are in the pragmatics wastebasket

Why?

Because their interpretation depends on:

• the context,

• the speaker’s intention,

• and they express relative distance.

TASK

Identify indexicals in the following text

1. Debby: Go anywhere today?2. Dan: Yes, we went down to Como.

Up by bus, and back by hydrofoil.3. Debby: Anything to see there?4. Dan: Perhaps not the most

interesting of Italian towns, but it’s worth the trip.

5. Debby: I might do that next Saturday.

6. Jane: What do you mean when you say perhaps not the most interesting of Italian towns?

7. Jack: He means certainly not the most interesting…

8. Dan: Just trying to be polite.

Reflection I. What are the deictic expressions

in the following utterance?

I’m busy now so you can’t do that here. Come back tomorrow.

II. What are the anaphoric expressions in the following utterance?

Dr. Dang gave Jane some medicine after she asked him for it.