Deixis

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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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).

6. 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

7. 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

8. • 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”.

9. 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.

10. (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.

11. 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 video
footage of the village in which the attack occurred.
Listeners (viewer and anchor) know that “here” does
not mean in their own living room, although that is the
point from which the television sound is emanating, but
that “here” refers to a location proximal to the speaker.
In the same manner, “these houses” is understood to
refer to the houses in the video footage.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. • 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".

17. • 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.

18. (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.

19. 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)

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.”

25. 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).

26. 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).

27. 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)

28. • 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”.

29. 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’).

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.