Deictic centre

10 Key excerpts on "Deictic centre"

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  Discourse Deixis in Metafiction

  The Language of Metanarration, Metalepsis and Disnarration

  • Andrea Macrae(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Deixis im vorstellungsraum gives us one dimension of deixis in literature, then: the conceptual. In literary discourse, the Deictic centre, the elements referred to, and the deictic relations between the centre and elements are conceptual, specifically, based on imaginative invention.

  A second feature of deixis in literature relates to what Ehlich (1983, p. 89) calls deixis im textraum (deixis in the realm of the text). Ehlich uses this term to refer to a particular use of discourse deixis. Along with the conceptual space of the storyworld, deixis in written literature, and discourse deixis especially, involves the ‘space’ of the material written text. The Deictic centres in question here are that of the writer in the act of producing the text and that of the reader in the act of processing the text and her corresponding sequential conceptual act of imaginatively realising the text. The elements deictically referred to are units of text. Rauh describes this kind of Deictic centre as

  a center of orientation […] which corresponds […] to his momentary situation within the course of a text, considered either temporal or local and with respect to which either temporal or local domains of the textual context are determined. […] Establishing a center of orientation in discourse is possible because the encoding of discourse is a continuous process along which at any point the encoder may stop and establish a center of orientation. Since a continuous piece of discourse may be looked upon as having either temporal or (in writing) local extension, the fixing of temporal or local points of orientation is respectively possible. […] If a continuous piece of discourse is treated as having local extension, practically all local deictic expressions can be used. In this context their symbolic meanings are unchanged and only their indexical meanings are different, their referents not being extra-linguistic local areas but segments of discourse.

  (1983, pp. 48–49)

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  Speech and Thought Representation in English

  A Cognitive-Functional Approach

  • Lieven Vandelanotte(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The deictic coordinates that deter-mine a speaker’s linguistic ‘situatedness’ have been identified by Bühler (1934, 1982) as here, now, and I . Thus, for instance, it is only in relation to the I of a speaker that an addressee can be identified as you , just as it is only in relation to the now of a speaker that yesterday can be used meaning-fully. In terms of Peirce’s semiotics, what deictic elements do is to ‘point to’ designata in relation to the “origo” (Bühler’s term) or Deictic centre: they function indexically in order to “bring the thought to a particular experience” (Peirce 1955: 56). It is important to clarify the distinction between the notion of ‘speech situation’ and the notion of ‘Deictic centre’. 1 A speech situation is defined primarily in terms of the participants therein, speaker and addressee (either or both of which may of course be a ‘plural’ collective), and only secondar-ily in terms of the circumstances of their interaction such as time, space, and their shared knowledge and background. As Davies has remarked in connection with speech situations (for which she borrows Lyons’ [1977] more broadly defined term ‘situations of utterance’, SU): Place may vary, as when two people talk while walking, and time may ex-tend over variable periods, some of them quite long, within what I would see as one SU. Conversely, one participant in a conversation might leave, and a new individual join in, within a short space of time, and in the same space. Here I would distinguish two SUs.” (Davies 1979: 58) 1 I thank Eirian Davies for discussion of this point. 60 Deixis and expressivity in DST and IST A Deictic centre , in my view, is defined always in relation to only one participant – a current speaker or a represented speaker – and defines this participant’s situatedness in terms of identity, time, and place.

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  Contemporary Stylistics

  Language, Cognition, Interpretation

  • Alison Gibbons, Sara Whiteley(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  162 13 Deixis and deictic shift 13.1 Cognitive deixis In Chapter 12, we explored the cognitive poetic framework of figure and ground, which depends on processes of sensory perception. In this chapter, we consider ‘deixis’, which Green refers to as ‘a fundamental element of human discourse’ (1995: 11). Deixis is a Greek term meaning ‘pointing’, and refers to a subset of words that are dependent on their contexts of usage for meaning. Our understanding of deictic words is underpinned by our embodied cognition . This is an important idea in cognitive linguistics, highlighting that our cognition of language is grounded in our bodily experiences within the world. Pronouns, demonstratives, and adverbs are typical deictic elements, though deixis is not restricted to any particular word class. Deictic expressions encode a language user’s embodied position in the world. The origo or Deictic centre is the conceptual position from which the speaker cognises the world. The deictic expressions ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ encode a central point in relation to perceptual, spatial, and temporal fields. ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ also show up the contextually bound nature of deictic expressions. For instance, in conversation, you refer to yourself using the first person yet when somebody else uses ‘I’, you have no problem understanding that the first person now refers to the new speaker. This is because deictic terms shift their reference in the context of usage and we reorient our interpretive cognition in rela-tion to the Deictic centre of the discourse (in this case, the speaking ‘I’). There are six deictic fields or dimensions . The first three are rather straightforward: spatial deixis provides spatial orientation, temporal deixis anchors the text in time, and perceptual deixis involves the sub-jective participants as represented by personal pronouns and characters (including proper names as well as noun phrases such as ‘the woman’).

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  Psychology of Language

  A Critical Introduction

  • Michael A Forrester(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  . .' (she referring to Snow White). The study of anaphoric relations is a key part of experimental psycholinguistics, particularly in studies of sentence and extended text comprehension (Garrod, Freudenthal & Boyle, 1 994; Williams, 1993). We will go on to look a little closer at the role of dis-course deixis particularly as it helps clarify important distinctions between talk and text. Deictic comprehension and conceptualising the Deictic centre Keeping in mind the idea that deixis serves as a good topic for examining the relationship between 'thinking ' and 'talk ', we can consider the relation-ship between the event of making an utterance (saying something) and the speaker who actually makes the sound. A useful way to conceive of what is involved is by thinking of what is known as the Deictic centre: 62 Psychology of Language • The central position is the speaker. • The central time is the moment when the speaker makes the utterance. • The central place is the speaker's location at the time of the utterance. • The discourse centre is the point which the speaker is currently at (or has reached) at the moment of the production of hislher utterance. • The social centre is the speaker's social status or rank, to which the status or rank of the addressee is relative. Outlined in this way, the complexity of deictic comprehension seems to defy description, which is curious given that most of us appear to use deictic terms unproblematically when we communicate. However, this should remind us that we have all spent a very long time acquiring language, and Karmiloff-Smith (1983) notes that even at age seven or eight years, children still have difficulty with deictic expressions.

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  World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives

  • Jane Lugea(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  For example, the demonstrative this or Spanish este , the pronouns he or él , and temporal adverbs such as now or ahora are all deictic terms as we cannot know their referent if we do not know the space, time or person at their source. In fact, these examples respectively represent the three ‘core’ deictic categories: space, person and time. Deictic terms have fixed grammatical meanings, but the referent changes with each instance of use. As such, deixis is a notoriously tricky object of linguistic study (Levinson 2006: 97) and interests linguists from a broad range of fields including pragmatics, semantics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, computational linguistics, as 1 Introduction World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives 2 well as philosophers and logicians (who tend to use the broader term ‘indexical’, as Escavy Zamora [2009] and Nunberg [1998] explain). Furthermore, deixis is a crucial property of all natural languages (Bar-Hillel 1970: 76), to the extent that it is one of the few identifiable pragmatic universals (Levinson 1983). It is pervasive across the levels of a given language; in English, for example, it is manifest in the tense system, the pronominal system, the demonstrative system and in spatial and temporal adverbs. In fact, not only are all languages indexical, but so are more than 90 per cent of the sentences that humans utter (Kryk 1990: 49). Considering the vital role deixis plays in anchoring an utterance to the context of its production, it stands to reason that it should be such a pervasive and universal phenomenon. Nevertheless, Levinson, who has devoted considerable attention to deixis (1992, 1983, 2003, 2006), has identified it as an ‘understudied’ linguistic phenomenon with ‘no adequate cross-linguistic typology’ (Levinson 2006: 97).

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  The Hittite Demonstratives

  Studies in Deixis, Topics and Focus

  • Petra Goedegebuure(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Harrassowitz Verlag

    (Publisher)

  Gerner (2009: 47) lists nine types of deictic center, of which five are im-portant for situational reference. The deictic center may consist of Speaker (S), Addressee (A), Third person (T), or a combination of these (G ERNER 2009: 47, table 1) : Deictic center Description 1. S The speaker is sole anchor point in relation to which deictic information is provided. 2. A Deictic information depends solely on the addressee. 3. T Deictic information is provided in relation to a third person. 4. S & A Deictic information is given in relation to both the speaker and addressee. 5. S & A & T Deictic information depends on a complex deictic center built up by the speaker, the addressee, and a third person. Table 2.8: Types of deictic center Demonstrative systems that exhibit deictic contrasts are distance-based, per-son-based, or a combination. In a distance-based system the deictic center is always the speaker, with no more than three distance values ( PROXIMAL , MEDIAL , DISTAL ). Examples of languages with a three term distance-based sys-tem are Spanish and Lezgian. Each additional demonstrative needs to express something else, such as visibility or elevation (D IESSEL 1999: 40). Person-based systems are more complex because they are based on two (or more 62 ) deictic centers. Referents are either seen from the perspective of the speaker excluding the addressee, or from speaker and addressee together. It seems that such 62 Gerner (2009: 47f.) mentions two languages that have three deictic centers, Kwakw’ala and Bella Bella, both members of the Wakashan language family. ISBN Print: 9783447102285 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447193344 © 2014, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden 2 Reference, deixis and discourse 66 systems usually include the values near-speaker, near-addressee (as seen from the speaker) and far-from-speaker+addressee (as seen from both) (G ERNER 2009: 50). Person-based systems are found in for example Latin and Japanese.

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  Semantics - Interfaces

  • Claudia Maienborn, Klaus Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus Heusinger, Paul Portner(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  4.3 Discourse deixis Like time deixis, discourse deixis is based on the metaphorical structuring of time as space. Discourse consists of words and utterances that are processed in sequen-tial order, that is, one element at a time. The sequential ordering of discourse elements is commonly conceptualized as a string of linguistic entities, to which speakers may refer in the same way as they refer to temporal entities on the time line. Both time deixis and discourse deixis involve a band of successive elements that is divided into separate areas by the Deictic centre. However, while the Deictic centre of time deixis is defined as the time including the moment of utterance, the Deictic centre of discourse deixis is defined by the location of a deictic word in the ongoing discourse, from where the interlocutors’ attention is directed to linguistic elements along the string of words and utterances. Bühler (1934) described this as follows: If discourse deictic expressions could speak, “they would speak as follows: look ahead or back along the band of the present utterance. There something will be found that actually belongs here, where I am, so that it can be connected with what now follows. Or the other way round: what comes after me belongs there, it was only displaced from that position for relief.” [Bühler 1934: 390] Discourse deixis can be realized by a variety of expressions. English has a few linguistic terms that may be analyzed as genuine discourse deictics (e.g., the aforementioned, the latter ); but more frequently discourse deixis involves deictic expressions from other conceptual domains. For instance, sequential adjectives such as last and next , which are commonly used as time deictic expressions, may be used with reference to linguistic elements in the ongoing discourse (cf. 22a-b). (22) a. the last paragraph b. the next chapter The most frequent discourse deictic expressions are borrowed from the spatial domain.

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  Meaning as Explanation

  Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory

  • Ellen Contini-Morava, Barbara S. Goldberg, Ellen Contini-Morava, Barbara S. Goldberg(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The exploration of this idea may result in a more coherent lin-guistic theory and may at least provide a basis for a clear descriptive characterization of similarities and dissimilarities between the deictics un-der scrutiny. 1 In section 2,1 will study a category of deictics by examining what kind of meaning and use they have in common. In section 3,1 will concentrate on the question of whether a few particular usages of some deictics can be understood as instantiations or should be understood as extensions of the types concerned. 2. Schema and instantiations 2.1. Schema What can be viewed as the basic characteristic of deictics such as personal and possessive pronouns, demonstratives and tenses? Under what cir-cumstances are such deictics applied? I assume that the use of deictics under scrutiny is based on the following cognitive construal. (1) A speaker can present an entity by means of a deictic element when: a. the speaker has a mental field of vision serving as his current frame of reference; b. the speaker has a vantage point from which he surveys his mental field of vision; c. the speaker views his mental field of vision as divided into some regions; d. the speaker views the regions as related differently to his van-tage point; e. the speaker views an entity in at least one of the regions as salient; f. the speaker views the entity as unique in the region concerned; g. the speaker has a linguistic element with which he not only can indicate that an entity is related to a region as a unique 248 Theo A. J. M. Janssen element in it but also can indicate the particular region to which it is related. Thus, by using a region-based deictic the speaker refers to an entity uniquely related to one of the regions into which he perceives his mental field of vision to be divided. Properties a-g define the specific require-ments for the linguistic act of applying a deictic element. Properties a-f define a mental situation in its arrangement required for the deictic act.

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  The Construal of Space in Language and Thought

  • Martin Pütz, René Dirven, Martin Pütz, René Dirven(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  (b) Diachronically, the deictic system of a language calls for intralin-guistic analyses, tracing the history of particular forms within the de-velopment of a single language, as well as interlinguistic studies re-vealing the historical facts within particular language groups, possible Sprachbund phenomena, etc. (c) The deictic system of a language is also shaped by its speakers, in particular their perceptual and cognitive understanding of the notion of space. Hence, these factors should be investigated in connection with the geographical and socio-cultural context in which the mem-bers of a particular speech community are located. If all these factors are given due attention, one day the dividing line between the European and non-European languages, allegedly spoken by representatives of more complex vs. less complex cultures, might be aban-doned in favor of an elaborate system of isoglosses reflecting the division of our common space, the World. Notes 1. Cf. Denny's (1978) Cultural Ecology Hypothesis concerning the simpli-city of (Indo)European deictic systems as opposed to the complexity of the deictic systems spoken by societies with minimally man-made envi-ronments. Similarly, Perkins (1992) has tried to prove that the com-plexity of the grammatical systems is inversely proportionate to the com-plexity of the culture in which the language is spoken. 2. Note that Russian employs the same form tot for both the neutral and distal uses. According to Hauenschild (1982), the systematic position of Russian tot can be described as either neutral or distal. Thus, it will be 342 Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky neutral in its function in syntactic deixis, but it will have the meaning of distance when the syntagmatic contrast to the proximal term of the op-position hot is explicit or implicit (1982: 183). 3. The complexity of a culture is measured on a Cultural Complexity Scale based on such variables as e.g.

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  Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes

  The Human Dimension

  • Marge E. Landsberg(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  At this stage iconicity is lost, or rather, suppressed: starting-points and datum points for spatial location are only inferred from the context. 6. Temporal deixis By analogy (perhaps, by cognitive metaphor?) elements of the spatial and directional deixis discussed in section 5 above are reanalyzed as temporal deixis. Traugott (1978: 371) states: the whole temporal system, that is, tense, sequencing, aspect, and the time adverbials which form part of these cate-gories or establish further, secondary reference points, must be generated as locatives in a semantic base The iconic source of temporal deixis is perhaps most clearly seen where the deictics are canonically oriented, in the case of temporality towards the speaker's now, as in Now I am a man but then I 126 Leonard Rolfe was but a child. Other temporal deictics such as tomorrow or last week are canonically oriented in the same way, as in Come any time after tomorrow, Did you see him last week? But canonical orientation can be suppressed and then there is absolute temporality, as in The week before World War II broke out or Napoleon was born in 1769. The link between spatial and temporal deixis may be seen in the Bantu language Shona as in Figure 1. category item function meaning stem -no near demonstrative 'this/these here' verb -no-present indicative punctuality: 'now' infix affirmative marker stem -ya far demonstrative 'that/those there' verb -ya past tense subject 'then' prefix concord (for all aspects and moods) Figure 1. Spatial and temporal deictics in Shona (Source: Hannan 1974) An interesting example of deictic iconicity is seen for the other type of Shona far-demonstrative (see Figure 1), which merely has the concord prefix without the stem. Fortune (19647: 66) states: This demonstrative is used to refer to things at some distance from the speaker. The further they are from him the higher is the pitch of voice with which they are pronounced.

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