Linguistics & Semantics

Lesson 6: Pragmatics

Deixis (First Part)

According to Levinson ‘deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode.. features of the context of the utterance… and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of the context of utterance’. Deixis is an important field of language study in its own right –and very important for the learners of the second language.

It is often and best described as a ‘verbal pointing’, that is to say pointing by means of language. Deictic expressions includes such lexemes as: ‘personal or possessive pronouns (I, you, mine, yours)’, ‘demonstrative pronouns (this/that)’, ‘spatial/temporal adverbs (here/there/now)’, ‘other pro-forms (so/do)’. Deixis refers to world outside a text.

References to the context surrounding utterance is often referred to as primary deixis, exophoric deixis or simply deixis alone. Primary deixis is used to point a situation outside a text (situational deixis) or to the speaker’s and hearer’s (shared) knowledge of the word (knowledge 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 the text: anaphoric deixis is backward pointing, and is the norm in english texts. Examples include demonstrative pronouns: ‘such, said, similar, (the) same’. Cataphoric deixis is forward pointing. Examples include: ‘the following, certain, some (the speaker raised some objections…), this (let me say this…), these, several.

Deictic expressions fall into three categories: personal deixis (you, us), spatial deixis (here, there) and temporal deixis (now and then). Deixis is clearly tied to the speaker’s context, the most basic distinction between ‘near the speaker ( proximal) and ‘away from the speaker’ (distal).

Proximal deictic expressions include ‘this, here and now’. Distal deictic expressions include ‘that, there and then). Proximal expressions are generally interpreted in relation to the speaker’s location or deictic sentence. For example ‘now is taken to mean some point or period in time that matches the time of the speaker’s utterances’.

When we read ‘ Now Barabbas was a thief’ (John verse 18.40) 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 being so before). Rather we read it as S. John’s writing, ‘I am telling you now, that Barabbas was (not now but at the time in the past when this event happened) a thief.