Deixis and Distance

1. Deixis and Distance

2. Sources

3. Definition of Deixis
• D. Alan Cruse (2000):
 Deixis means different things to different people. For Buhler
(1934), any expression which located a referent in space or time
was a deictic expression.
• J.R Hurford (2007):
 Deitic words is sets of words whose meanings vary
systematically according to who uses them, and where and when
they are used. The general phenomenon of their occurrence is
called deixis. The word deixis is from a Greek word meaning
‘pointing’.

4. • Deictic expressions (Deixis) are based on the idea of
identification or drawing attention through pointing by
means of language. Deictic expression is any expression that
uses deictic word.
• A Deictic word is one which takes some element of its
meaning from the context or situation (i.e. the speaker, the
addressee, the time and the place) of the utterance in which
it is used.
Definition of Deixis

5. Deictic expressions
• Deictic expressions are meaningful in a given context.
• Deictic expressions are words, phrases and features of grammar that have
to be interpreted in relation to the situation in which they are uttered, such as
me ‘the sender of this utterance’ or here ‘the place where the sender is’.
• Our semantic knowledge of the meanings of deictic expressions guides us on
how, pragmatically, to interpret them in context. Thus we have yesterday ‘the
day before the day of utterance’, this ‘the obvious-in-context thing near the
speaker or coming soon’, she ‘the female individual’ and so on.
Patrick Griffith:2006

6. Kinds of Deixis
• Person Deixis
• Spatial/Place Deixis
• Time/Temporal Deixis
• Social Deixis
• Discourse Deixis

7. Person deixis
• Any expression used to point to a person
• Person deixis involves basically the speaker, known as the first person, the
addressee, known as the second person, and other significant participants in
the speech situation, neither speaker nor hearer; these are known as third
person. (J.R Hurford:2007)
Singular Plural
1st Person I/my/me We/our/us
2nd Person You/your You/your
3rd Person She/his/her; he/his/him, it/its They/their/them

8. Examples of Person Deixis
• I am going to the movies.
• Would you like to have dinner?
• She wants to get the best score in the final exam.

9. Spatial/Place deixis
• Concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an
utterance.
• Spatial deixis manifests itself principally in the form of
locative adverbs such as here (means something like region
relatively close to the speaker); that (means relatively distant
from the speaker) and demonstratives/determiners such as
this and that.

10. Examples of Place Deixis
• I enjoy living in this city.
• She was sitting over there.

11. Time/Temporal Deixis
• Any expression used to point to a time
• Concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in
an utterance.
• Temporal deictics function to locate points or intervals on the time
axis, using (ultimately) the moment of utterance as a reference
point. There are thus three major divisions of the time axis:
(i) before the moment of utterance
(ii) at the time of utterance
(iii) after the time of utterance.
• The most basic temporal deictics in English are now and then

12. Time/Temporal Deixis
• The compatibility of some deictic adverbials with past,
present and future time.
Past time Present time Future time
Last time
Yesterday
Last year
Now
at present
today
nowadays
next year
Tomorrow
in forty-five minutes from now

13. Examples of Time Deixis
• It is raining now, but I hope when you read this will be
sunny.
• I saw him last week.

14. Social Deixis
It is used to point out to a reference based on the class the speaker
refers to. There are two types of social deixis. They are :
• Absolute deictic : Forms attached to social roles. for example: your
honor/Mr.President.
• Relational deictic : Reference to a social relationship between the
speaker and addressee. They are lexical and they make use of
pronouns (my, he, etc).

15. Discourse Deixis
• Discourse deixis refers to such matters as the use of this to
point to future discourse elements
• It is expressed in terms of expressions related to time and
space such as next, subsequently, prior to that and so on.

16. Examples of Discourse Deixis
• In the last paragraph
• In the next Thursday

17. Reference
• What speaker or writers do when they use expressions to pick out
for their audience particular people, things, times, places, events or
ideas;.
• As an act in which a speaker, or writer uses linguistics form to enable
listener, reader, to identify something.

18. Examples of reference
• Look at that book! It has many chapters.
• Jhony has so many books. They are vocabulary, novel,
translation book., etc.

19. THANK YOU