Deixis

11 Key excerpts on "Deixis"

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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)

  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. For example, a noun such as tree may refer to a concrete entity in the situational context if it is accompanied by a demonstrative that relates the concept of tree to a concrete entity in the surrounding situation (cf. that tree ). Alternatively, content words can be grounded in the speech situation by non-linguistic means such as gesture, eye-gaze, or the presentation of an object. In general, as Levinson (2004) has pointed out, just about any nominal expression can be used deictically if it is accompanied by a communicative device that indi-cates a direct referential link between language and context. This paper surveys the form, meaning, and use of deictic expressions from a psycholinguistic and cross-linguistic perspective. Two basic categories of Deixis are distinguished: participant Deixis and object Deixis. Participant Deixis concerns the role of the speech participants and their social relationship to each other, whereas object Deixis concerns linguistic expressions referring to aspects of the situational or discourse context. The two types of Deixis serve radically different functions and are expressed by different types of words; but they also have impor-tant properties in common, which underlie their uniform classification as deictics. 2 Foundations of Deixis There is a long tradition in western philosophy of defining human cognition by formal operations over abstract symbols (cf. Montague 1974; see also article 13 Deixis and demonstratives 465 10 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Newen & Schröder) Logic and semantics and article 11 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Kempson) Formal semantics and representationalism ).

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  Toward a Typology of European Languages

  • 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.

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  The Body in Language

  • Horst Ruthrof(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  4. The body in Deixis and reference Before we are in a position to rework the traditional notions of Deixis and reference, we must briefly rehearse the standard explanations. Deixis is derived from the Greek word for 'pointing'. This is why in Peirce's writing Deixis is called 'indication'. The concept is regarded as comprising lexical items that make little or no sense without some information about the position of speakers in relation to their world and to what they are saying. Its forms include personal Deixis, which manifests itself in such words as pro-nouns and points to the participants in a speech situation. Spatial Deixis points to the speaker's position vis-a-vis other persons and the world of objects. Egocentric particulars such as 'this', 'that'; 'here', 'there'; or verbs such as 'come', 'go'; phrases like 'leave me alone', or 'how disappointing' all refer us back to the speaker and utterance situation. Lastly, temporal Deixis points to the speaker's temporal locus, the time of speaking in relation to what is said and to the larger temporal matrix of the world to which both speech situation and what is being said belong. Verb tenses as well as such temporal markers as 'tomorrow', 'in two years', 'meanwhile', 'now', 'then', or 'never' fall under the category of temporal Deixis. Together, spatial and temporal Deixis govern the technical aspects of the point of view from which a text is spoken. Only in realist texts are the two necessarily aligned in a quasi-perceptual way. This chapter introduces an extended version of Deixis, implicit or concealed Deixis. Implicit Deixis As we spread our examples to the borderlines of the set of obvious candid-ates for Deixis, we sense that we begin to lose definitional control. And if we think hard about what it is that characterizes orthodox Deixis, we find that the features that tell us about speakers are neither clear-cut nor all at the linguistic surface.

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  Psychology 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.

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  Corpus Pragmatics

  A Handbook

  • Karin Aijmer, Christoph Rühlemann(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part V Corpora and reference 12 Deixis Christoph Rühlemann and Matthew Brook O’Donnell 12.1 Introduction Talk, taken out of context, has little meaning. For those who participate in it, talk reveals its full and specific meanings only against the background of the context in which it occurs (Goodwin and Duranti 1992: 3): the said requires, for its interpretation and its analysis, the frame of the unsaid (Goffman 1974). This unsaid can take many different guises: what speakers said earlier (previous text), what they know of the world (world knowledge), of their culture (cultural knowledge) and of each other (social knowledge), how they interact non-verbally (non-verbal behavior), and what they intend to commu- nicate (illocutionary act), to name only a few. Another central component of the contextual frame is the spatio-temporal situation in which an utterance is made. While most other contextual components remain in the background (that is, in the unsaid), the situational context does come to the fore in the said. It becomes apparent in Deixis. Deixis comprises “those features of language which refer directly to the personal, temporal or locational charac- teristics of a situation within which an utterance takes place” (Crystal 2003: 127). Deixis is linguistic evidence of how what is said is grounded in the context of the situation in which it is said. It provides an interface linking language and situational context (Hanks 1992: 48; see also Lyons 1977: 636; Hanks 2011: 315). In Section 12.2 we characterize Deixis in some more detail. Section 12.3 reports on a case study on what is called “introductory this,” a usage of this which is specific to conversational narrative. While Section 12.2 uses examples collected from a wide range of corpus sources, the case study in Section 12.3 is based on, and illustrated by, data from the Narrative Corpus, a corpus of conversational narratives (see Rühlemann and O’Donnell 2012).

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  Foundations of Pragmatics

  • Wolfram Bublitz, Neal R. Norrick, Wolfram Bublitz, Neal R. Norrick(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  11. Deixis and indexicality William F. Hanks 1. Introduction The study of Deixis is central to pragmatics, because deictic systems define points of intersection between linguistic structure and the social settings in which speech takes place. It is standard in contemporary English language sources to distinguish Spatial ( here, there ), Temporal ( now, then , tense), Person (pronominals), Discourse (coreference or reference to prior talk) and Social Deixis (honorification and any indicators of social identity or status relations among participants and contexts). 1 Any one of these functional foci may be formally marked in utterances morpho-logically, lexically, or by construction type. Deictic phenomena inevitably interact with gesture (conventionalized or not) and with many other parts of the grammar, including evidentiality, status, modality, aspect, noun classification, possession, spatial and temporal description. This chapter focuses on those forms whose pri-mary function is to individuate objects of reference (including events, material things, talk itself or any individuated concept). Referential Deixis is found in all human languages and includes at least demonstratives, person markers, locative, directional and temporal markers, but excludes much “social Deixis” such as hon-orification (where social status is indexed but usually not singled out for comment) and standard sociolinguistic markers (where social factors are indexed but not singled out for comment). By starting from the distinctive structure of referential Deixis, one can better characterize its relation to grammar and to other varieties of indexicality. The main grammatical question is how deictic functions are encoded in languages. The challenge for pragmatics is to determine the constant capacity of deictic types to contribute to token acts of situated referring, and the relation be-tween such referring and other aspects of utterance context.

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  Introducing Pragmatics

  A Clinical Approach

  • Louise Cummings(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Deixis

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003177562-5

  Learning objectives: By the end of this chapter, you will:

  • Understand how certain linguistic expressions can be used to ‘point to’ or ‘pick out’ entities in the context of an utterance. The lexical items that encode context in this way are indexical and their function is one of Deixis.
  • Appreciate that a wide range of words are indexical in this way, including demonstratives (e.g. that), adverbs (e.g. there), adjectives (e.g. last week), and pronouns (e.g. you).
  • Reliably identify five categories of Deixis: person Deixis, social Deixis, time Deixis, place Deixis, and discourse Deixis.
  • Understand that some expressions can function as more than one form of Deixis such as the demonstrative in I walk home this way (place Deixis) and I fly to Rome this week (time Deixis).
  • Be aware that while deictic expressions look to context for reference, anaphoric expressions look to an antecedent within the utterance for reference.
  • Appreciate that it can be difficult to establish in specific cases if an expression has a deictic function or an anaphoric function.

  4.1 Introduction

  You are walking through a market in town, and you overhear a stall owner saying to a customer What did you think of that? You continue walking through the market, and you pass two friends who are taking leave of each other. One says to the other I will meet you there tomorrow. As you wait at the bus stop, an elderly woman asks you What time is the next bus to the city centre? These utterances are representative of the hundreds that we use and hear every day that contain ‘pointing’ words. These are expressions like I, you, there, tomorrow, and that where we must look to the extralinguistic context of the utterance to establish the referents of these terms – semantic elements alone will not suffice to ‘pick out’ the referents. Because you are physically present when these utterances are spoken, you know the referents of the expressions you, I, tomorrow, and next bus. Your presence at each of these speech events allows you to determine that the pronoun you refers to the customer, and I refers to one of the two friends who are saying goodbye to each other. Meanwhile, tomorrow refers to an upcoming 24-hour period, and next bus refers to the bus for the city centre that will arrive after a particular point in time. But even from your unique vantage point, you are still not able to determine what the stall owner is referring to when he uses the demonstrative pronoun that, or the location that the friend refers to by means of the adverb there

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  Key Terms in Stylistics

  • Nina Nørgaard, Beatrix Busse, Rocío Montoro(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The next category is that of empathetic Deixis which appears to be closely linked to the positioning of the speaker/writer as physical centre, so it is realized by forms also employed to indicate place Deixis such as the determiners/pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that’. Unlike place Deixis, though, Denotation and connotation 79 empathetic Deixis encodes psychological and emotional closeness or distance towards the person, object, events or circumstances referred to. For instance, compare the use of the determiners in (a) ‘I prefer this way of life’ and (b) ‘I can’t stand that attitude’. Finally discourse Deixis can be defined as: The use of expressions within an utterance to refer to some part of the discourse that contains this utterance (Levinson, 1983, p. 85). Therefore, discourse Deixis is Deixis in text. A text, whether in its written or oral real-ization, is closely related to the concepts of space and time [. . .]. Discourse Deixis is expressed with terms that are primarily used in encoding space or time Deixis. (Marmaridou, 2000, p. 93) Marmaridou deftly explains the way discourse Deixis works with the examples (a) ‘Listen to this joke’ and (b) ‘Do you remember that story’. Both forms can be said to be used discoursally because their referent is part of the discourse itself, but the temporality of the discourse as it unfolds is also invoked. In the examples above, therefore, (a) indicates temporal closeness for the ‘joke’ is about to be disclosed after uttering the sentence, whereas (b) suggests remoteness in that the story-telling being referred to took place sometime in the past. There are numerous studies exploiting the concept of Deixis and its further applications to other stylistic issues; see, for instance, Cockcroft (2005), Green (1995), McIntyre (2006, 2007a), Tsur (2003), van Peer and Graf (2002) and Werth (1995b).

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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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  The Hittite Demonstratives

  Studies in Deixis, Topics and Focus

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

    (Publisher)

  This modifier is the linguistic pendant of the almost obligatory gesture in the case of Deixis: it helps identify the intended referent. Again the demonstrative could be considered a linker. This time however the demonstrative links to a mental representation of an entity in the memory of speaker and addressee or only speaker. In other words, in both non-textual uses the demonstrative instructs the addressee to find its referent in a non-textual search domain. In case of Deixis the search domain is the speech situation, in case of recognitional and indefinite use the search domain is long term memory 66 . In table form: Demonstrative use Search domain Additional identifying information Situational use the speech situation pointing gesture Recognitional use private, shared long term memory modifier New this speaker memory modifier Table 2.12: Comparison of the deictic and recognitional use of demonstratives 2.3.4 Discourse deictic use of demonstratives With Levinson (1983: 62), “[d]iscourse Deixis has to do with the encoding of reference to portions of the unfolding discourse in which the utterance (which 66 The long term memory partition is also accessed when an entity mentioned a long time ago has to be retrieved (this is actually anaphora in the geographical approach). ISBN Print: 9783447102285 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447193344 © 2014, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden 2 Reference, Deixis and discourse 72 includes the text-referring expression) is located”: discourse deictic expressions refer to propositions as expressed by clauses, sentences, paragraphs, or an entire story. They do not refer to a proposition already referred to by a prior noun phrase, which is the domain of anaphoric expressions, but introduce those propositions as referents into the universe of discourse. Thus, they almost al-ways shift the attention to the referent of the discourse deictic expression (H IMMELMANN 1996: 224, D IESSEL 1999: 101).

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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)

  Langacker (1991: 2—3) assumes that: A speaker's knowledge of the conventional value of a lexical item cannot in general be reduced to a single structure, such as the prototype or the highest-level schema. He, therefore, equates the conventional meaning of a lexical item with the entire network, not with a single node. The precise configuration of the distinctions made in Figure 1 is of minor importance here. But there is a point of more general interest. Langacker's enterprise intends to categorize not only the concepts of lexi-cal items, but the concepts of all other linguistic units, whether they are morphological or syntactic. This categorizing approach implies a funda-mental concern with scrutinizing the conceptual nature of the relations between the linguistic units. Departing from some Langackerian fundamentals, I will try to explain Deixis in terms of a cognitive construal, i.e., the way in which speakers portray a situation. In what way does a speaker construe the conceived situation cognitively when using a deictic expression? This question re-veals a subjectivist view on meaning because it implies that the semantic value of an expression does not reside in the so-called inherent properties of the entity or situation referred to, but crucially involves the way the Deixisfrom a cognitive point of view 247 speaker conceives of this entity or situation (compare Langacker 1988 a: 5-6). In this paper* I will try to show that a broad category of deictics is applicable in basically the same cognitive construal. I will suggest that the deictics involved are conceived of as instantiations of one conceptual schema. 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.

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