1. Deixis The word ‘deixis’ < Greek , meaning ‘pointing, indicating’ Definition: is the marking of the orientation or position of entities and events with respect to certain points of reference. Imagine you find this note on the road: “you’ll have to bring it back tomorrow because she sin’t here today”

2. Some sentences in English are impossible to understand if we don’t know who is speaking. Expressions like these are called deictic expressions. I want this didh, this dish, and this dish (context =?) Types of deixis Personal deixis: generally comments about ourselves or our interlocutors. e.g. I really should be going now Did you return the video I asked you to?

3. The pronouns I, you are markers of personal deixis. When we use these pronouns, we orient our utterances with respect to ourselves, interlocutors and other parties. Spatial deixis: these mark the orientation or position in space of the referent of a linguistic expression., eg. Demonstratives (this, that), adverbs (here, there) Temporal deixis:these mark the orientation or position in time, these include before, last year, tomorrow, now and this evening.

4. Textual deixis: the orientation of an utterance with respect to other utterances in a string of utterances. e.g. He started to swear at me and curse. That made me even more angry.