Languages & Linguistics
Deictic expressions
Deictic expressions are words or phrases that rely on the context of the speaker and the listener to convey meaning. They include words like "this," "that," "here," and "there," which require the surrounding situation to be understood. Deictic expressions are essential for communication, as they help to establish spatial, temporal, and interpersonal relationships within a conversation.
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eBook - PDF- Claudia Maienborn, Klaus Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus Heusinger, Paul Portner(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
English has a wide variety of expressions that are commonly analyzed as deictics: personal pronouns such as I and you , spatial adverbs such as here and there , demonstra-tives such as this and that , temporal adverbs such as now, then, today, ago, and recently , motion verbs such as come and go , and tense morphemes such as the Holger Diessel, Jena, Germany 464 Holger Diessel future auxiliary will and the past tense suffix -ed (cf. Lyons 1977; Fillmore 1997). In addition, grammatical constructions such as the imperative and the vocative are often characterized as deictics (cf. Levinson 1983). Deictic expressions raise important issues for semantic theory (cf. article 4 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Abbott) Reference ). In (formal) semantics, Deictic expressions (also called indexicals ; cf. Peirce 1955) are defined as linguistic signs with “direct reference” (Kaplan 1989: 483). In contrast to content words, Deictic expressions do not evoke a concept of some entity (Frege’s sense ) but establish a direct referential link between world and language (cf. article 17 [Seman-tics: Noun Phrases and Verb Phrases] (Schlenker) Indexicality and de se ). Since the interpretation of deixis is immediately determined by aspects of the speech situ-ation, Deictic expressions require a particular treatment in semantic theory (cf. Kaplan 1989; see also papers in Davis 1991, vol. III and Kasher 1998, vol. III). In the literature, Deictic expressions are commonly distinguished from deictic uses (cf. Nunberg 1998; Levinson 2004). Deictic expressions are linguistic elements “with built-in contextual parameters” that must be specified by aspects of the situational or discourse context (Levinson 2004: 14). Other linguistic ele-ments can be used deictically if they are combined with a genuine deictic or refe-rential expression.
eBook - PDF- Åshild Næss, Even Hovdhaugen(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Chapter 5 Deictics 5.1. Introduction Deictics are words or morphemes which change their reference according to the context in which they are uttered. Deixis may be of several types: personal deixis, which is typically expressed by the forms we call pronouns ( I refers to a different person when “I” say it than when “you” say it), spatial deixis (‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, ‘there’ etc.), or temporal deixis (‘now’, ‘then’, ‘to-day’).The notion of temporal deixis is generally less central to the organiza-tion of grammar than the other two (Anderson and Keenan 1985: 295–296) and will not be dealt with in any detail in this chapter, except insofar as forms with basic spatial-deictic reference can be used with a temporal deictic func-tion; here we will focus on personal and spatial deixis. Temporal-deictic forms are typically adverbs; they are treated in 11.4. These two basic forms of deixis, personal and spatial, overlap to some ex-tent, not just in Vaeakau-Taumako, but in languages in general; spatial-deictic forms typically make reference to location or movement relative to the speech-act event, and therefore ultimately to the speech-act participants (Anderson and Keenan 1985: 277). Deictic forms typically have two related functions. The first is referring di-rectly to aspects of the extralinguistic speech situation, so-called exophoric reference (the term “deixis” in itself strictly speaking refers to such exophoric reference, “pointing out” of the act of speaking towards features in the physi-cal world). The phrase That book when used to point out a book which is visi-ble to both participants in the speech-situation has exophoric reference. The second function of deictic forms is to refer to previously or subse-quently occurring items of discourse, so-called endophoric reference. In a phrase like That book I was telling you about before , That book has endo-phoric reference.
eBook - PDFPsychology of Language
A Critical Introduction
- Michael A Forrester(Author)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
They serve as a meeting point for syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of language. (Lyons, 1977, p. 637) Words and phrases such as 'Uyou '; 'this/that '; 'here/there '; 'in front of f behind'; 'yesterday/next week'; , come/go'; 'underlbetween ', and so on, are all deictic expresssions. There are also forms of deixis knows as social honorifics which encode aspects of the status or rank of the person being addressed (e.g . the way in whic h you are meant to address someone 60 Psychology of Langu age of considerably higher social rank -the Queen of England would be addressed as 'Ma 'am', the chief executive of the American government, Mr President). The study of deictic terms has become a key topic within pragmatics because it brings together aspects of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, all three domains influencing comprehension and use. Levinson (1983) suggests that pragmatics is really all about understanding the way in which a given context determines how a sentence spoken in that context specifies what propositions are being expressed on the occasion of its utterance. Needless to say, this helps explain why deixis is an area of language which is conceptually complex and has evaded concise analysis by philosophers of language and psychologists. Over and above the observation that the study of deictic terms serves as a fruitful way of bridging the gap between the first two themes of this book (think ing and talk), there a number of other reasons why deixis is important to a psychology of language. First, it lies at the interface between language comprehension and social interaction. It is impossible to understand these expressions without also understanding the roles, rules and circumstances surrounding their expression in context.
eBook - PDF- Johannes Bechert, Giuliano Bernini, Claude Buridant, Johannes Bechert, Giuliano Bernini, Claude Buridant(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
2. Deixis Deixis — a pragmatic universal? Barbara Kryk Introduction The significance of deixis in natural language is undeniable. Not only are all languages indexical, but so are over 90% of the sentences produced by humans. Since indexicality turns out to be a crucial characteristic of natural language (Bar—Hillel 1970: 76), many relevant studies (e.g. Levinson 1983) consider deixis as one of the plausible candidates for a pragmatic universal. Moreover, I assume, after Dahl (this volume), that the grammatical systems of European languages can only be well understood if looked at in a larger typological perspective. In the light of these observations, the aim of the present study is to investigate the nature of the deictic systems of some Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages from the point of view of their universality. The complexity of the notion of deixis has already been pointed out by Bühler (1982: 10): Deictic expressions refer to a deictic field of language whose zero point — the Origo — is fixed by the person who is speaking (the T), the place of the utterance (the 'here'), and the time of the utterance (the 'now'). Hence, he distinguishes person, place, and time deixis, which are later complemented by discourse and social deixis. 1 For reasons of brevity, the scope of this study is limited to the analysis of demonstrative pronouns employed deictically; thus, the interesting topic of the deictic character of personal pronouns must be disregarded. 2 Moreover, there will be no discussion of deictic pronouns as anaphora, clarified in Lyons (1977: 660 ff.), Ehlich (1982; 1983), and Kryk (1987: 67 ff.). It will be shown below that even the seemingly uncontroversial category of demonstratives, whose main function is to mark the distance of an entity from the zero-point of the speaker's spatio-temporal location, can be realized differently across languages.
eBook - PDFGrounding
The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference
- Frank Brisard(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Deictic principles of pronominals, demonstratives, and tenses Theo A. J. M. Janssen 1. Introduction 1 Personal pronouns, demonstratives, and tenses are generally seen as deictic elements. 2 This suggests that they share some important se-mantic characteristics. This possibly common set of characteristics asks for an explanation of both their cognitive functionality and the way speakers and addressees construe the situation for which deic-tics are applied. Therefore, I will explore the cognitive structuring of the framework of the speech situation. With regard to the use of deictics, I will suggest that the speaker and, in her wake, the ad-dressee discern a specific structuring of the cognitive framework of the speech situation. The main characteristics of this framework are, first, the speaker's vantage point, second, her mental field of vision, and, third, the division of the speaker's mental field of vision into a number of deictic dimensions, each of which is divided into at least two distinct regions or zones. The entities referred to by means of Deictic expressions are conceived of as each occupying a different region of the speaker's mental field of vision. The terminology (field of vision, deictic dimension, region, and zone) might suggest that my approach to deixis is based on a localist assumption. However, I will argue that deictics such as demonstra-tives cannot be adequately characterized on the basis of spatial no-tions. I will describe demonstratives — and tenses — in a way simi-lar to personal pronouns, namely by means of a nonlocalist analysis. The semantic interconnectedness of personal pronouns (which is re-flected morphologically in some languages, as I will show) appears to be closely related to the internal interconnectedness of demonstra-tives with regard to both their semantic and — in some languages — their morphological structure.
- Jane Lugea(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
That is, that the prototypical core meanings of deictic terms are exploited for a variety of non-prototypical uses and depend on the communicative context for their interpretation, and furthermore, that the deictic centre does not always rest with the speaker, but is shared by all discourse participants. Despite this sociocentric approach, I recognize that deixis is a way of expressing subjectivity in language, and in this sense it overlaps with modality. Hence the commonalities in deixis and modality are explored in Section 2.4, where they are explained in terms of the Cognitive Grammar notion of ‘grounding’. As the Spanish and English modal auxiliaries are compared in a later chapter (Section 5.4.3), modality is described in the final section of this chapter (Section 2.4.3) in relation to deixis and in terms of the various kinds of modality and their expression of subjectivity. 2 Deixis and Modality World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives 18 2.1 Spatial, temporal and personal deixis In Chapter 1 (Section 1.1.1) a preliminary and very rudimentary definition of deixis was provided, outlining the deictic terms’ capacity to anchor utterances to the context in which they are used. Most linguists recognize the ‘core’ deictic categories as space, time and person, where deictic terms anchor the utterance respectively to the location, time and people in the discourse situation. These are covered in the following three sections (Sections 2.1.1, 2.1.2 and 2.1.3), where their expression in Spanish and English is described. The ‘peripheral’ deictic categories of discourse deixis and empathetic deixis, which use the core categories (especially space and time) to express textual and social relationships, are described briefly in Sections 2.1.4 and 2.1.5, respectively. However, as these categories are simply extended uses of the core categories, they are not dealt with in great detail.
- Martin Pütz, René Dirven, Martin Pütz, René Dirven(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Spatial deixis in Afrikaans dictionaries Willem J. Botha 1. Introduction Weissenborn and Klein (1982: 3) consider deixis to be the domain par ex-cellence where language and reality meet. From this point of view deixis could be regarded as one of the linguistic mechanisms by which contextual information is integrated into language. And regarding contextuality they postulate: Contextuality is not only one of the most fundamental characteristics of natu-ral languages - ... ; it is one of the central links between language, percep-tion, and cognition: what is meant when something is uttered depends on the linguistic form of the utterance, on the features of the situation as perceived by speaker and listener (including previous utterances), and on general knowledge shared by them. Eikmeyer and Rieser (1981: 148) take the view that the linguistic meaning of any expression of a natural language is taken to be context-de-pendent, but they deem context dependency not to be restricted to deictic or other indexical expressions. The lexicographer is primarily concerned with the (conceptual/cognitive) meaning of the lexical item. Therefore Smith (1985: 100) can postulate: (T)he contents of a standard dictionary are a good source of information about the conceptual meaning expressed by a language. To portray the conceptual meaning of a linguistic expression the lexico-grapher makes use of different devices; to mention a few - the lexicogra-phic definition, citations, labels, etc.; but also the semantic relations of words to each other: their similarity, their dissimilarity, their implications, their presuppositions (according to Ballmer and Brennenstuhl 1981: 419). Taking only deictic words as context-dependent expressions into account, the question arises: do these strategies provide adequately for a comprehen-sive lexical definition?
eBook - PDFThe Hittite Demonstratives
Studies in Deixis, Topics and Focus
- Petra Goedegebuure(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Harrassowitz Verlag(Publisher)
The choice for a specific demonstrative depends on location near (one of) the speech participants in a person-based system or on relative distance from the speaker in a distance-based system. It is possible to distinguish four types of deixis: gestural deixis, symbolic deixis, linguistic self-reference and Deixis am Phantasma , the latter mainly ISBN Print: 9783447102285 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447193344 © 2014, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden 2.3 Demonstratives 67 found in narratives. These types of deixis can be, and regularly are, accompa-nied by pointing gestures. It is therefore often said that demonstratives are poin-ters or localizers, although not everyone agrees with this characterization. Fol-lowing Hawkins (1978: 115, 152f.), the demonstrative expression simply links or matches a mental representation with the speech situation 63 , without being capable of further identifying the referent itself. The demonstrative instructs the hearer to identify its referent in the speech setting 64 , but the identification proper is performed by a visual cue such as a gesture, nod or gaze. 65 The four types of situational deixis are all able to occur in direct speech em-bedded in narrative (see table 2.11). This is of the utmost importance for extinct languages: for these languages direct speech is the only way to access the semantics of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives. Primary situational deixis Derived situational deixis = Direct speech Gestural deixis This finger hurts S/he said: “This finger hurts” Symbolic deixis This city stinks S/he said: “This city stinks” Deixis am Phan-tasma … coming on his bi-cycle this way S/he said: “… coming on his bicycle this way ” Linguistic self-reference … funny to make this telling S/he said: “… funny to make this telling ” Table 2.11: Primary and derived situational deixis 63 Hawkins does not restrict himself to the speech setting.
eBook - PDFSpeech 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.
- Giuliano Bernini, Marcia L. Schwartz, Giuliano Bernini, Marcia L. Schwartz(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
6. We use the terms topicality and focality as discourse determined notions, without pre-conceptions about possible systematic coding in the language under consideration (as in Bolkestein 1998), that is, as different from the notion “sentence topic” as used in Maslova and Bernini (this volume). 7. Such combinations of a deictic pronoun with a deictic adverbial are also found in Swedish and Danish. Combinations of deictic pronoun and deictic adverbial also ap-pear some Romance languages, cf., for example, (Northern) Italian questo (libro) qui ‘this (book) here’, quel (libro) là ‘that (book) there’. They appear to be lexicalized in French celui-ci, celui-là . In spoken Welsh (MacAuley 1992: 292) a postnominal de-ictic adverbial functions as a demonstrative, cf. y din yma ‘ART man here’ for ‘this man’, y dinion yna ‘ART men there’ for ‘these men’. In Dutch a combination of the distal pronoun with a proximate adverb die : : : hier seems to be more acceptable than a proximate pronoun with a distal adverb ? deze : : : daar . 8. Although in Dutch the relative pronoun die/dat is morphologically identical to the Deixis and anaphora: Some case studies 251 distal demonstrative, the main clause word order (Vf-2) makes it perfectly clear that we are dealing with a main clause. References Anderson, Stephen R., and Edward L. Keenan 1985 Deixis. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description III , Timothy Shopen (ed.), 259–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ariel, M. 1988 Referring and accessibility. Journal of Linguistics 24: 65–87. 1990 Accessing Noun-phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge. 1991 The function of accessibility in a theory of grammar. Journal of Pragmatics 16: 443– 463. 1994 Interpreting anaphoric expressions: a cognitive versus a pragmatic approach. Journal of Linguistics 30: 3–42. Berretta, Monica 1990 Catene anaforiche in prospettiva funzionale.
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