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.
7 Key excerpts on "Deictic expressions"
eBook - ePub- Anne O'Keeffe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adolphs(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Corpus techniques, such as word frequency lists, allow the researcher to bring into relief the importance of deixis in our everyday speech and writing. It is generally accepted that deixis is extremely prevalent in everyday speech and writing but corpus linguistics allows us to show just how frequent it is in relation to other grammatical features. Corpus linguistics also enables the researcher to conduct comparisons of how deixis is used across different genres (for example, casual conversation, academic discourse, and so on) as well as across different modes (spoken and written language). 3.2 DEICTIC VERSUS NON-DEICTIC EXPRESSION Personal pronouns, demonstratives (both pronouns and determiners) and adverbs of space and time can be used both deictically and non-deictically, as will be seen in the examples here. As we have already mentioned, to classify something as deictic means that the expression derives part of its meaning from the context. Deictics allow the interlocutors to ‘point’ to something in the context thereby enabling them to orientate themselves in a variety of ways, be it personally, spatially or temporally. Personal pronouns The examples given in 3.1 demonstrate the use of a personal pronoun, in this case you, in both deictic and non-deictic senses: (3.1) Deictic usage Non-deictic usage A: I owe you a fiver. A: There’s a school that’s out there that you book in for a week and you can learn how to hang-glide. In the deictic usage of you, the speaker identifies a particular person, the addressee. In this example, the addressee is the referent. This deictic use of you in 3.1 is also likely to be accompanied by some gesture such as eye contact (in this example, a fiver refers to Irish and British English slang for a £5 or €5 note). In the non-deictic use, you is used to refer to people in general, and therefore does not rely on the context for meaning...
eBook - ePub- Gunter Senft(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Deictic terms or indexicals are expressions whose reference is highly context-dependent and shifts from context to context; they can be defined as follows: Deictic terms, such as here, there, I, you this, that, derive their interpretation in part from the speaker/listener situation in which the utterance is made. Among these terms only here, I, and in some cases you are directly referential; given the situation, their reference is unambiguous. The other deictic terms, however, require the speaker to make some form of pointing gesture, for example by nodding the head, visibly directing the gaze, turning the body, or moving arm and hand in the appropriate direction. Without such a paralinguistic gesture, the utterance is incomplete in an essential aspect. (Levelt et al. 1985: 134) 3 Veronika Ehrich (1992) understands ‘deixis’ as the general term for Bühler’s various Zeigarten or ‘kinds of pointing’ (Bühler 1934: 83; 1990: 97), and Zeigmodi or ‘modes of pointing’ (Bühler 1934: 80; 1990: 94). The following kinds of pointing (Bühler’s ‘ Zeigarten ’) can be differentiated: • Personal deixis allows distinctions among the speaker (‘ I ’ = first person), the addressee (‘ you ’ = second person) and everyone else (‘ s/he ’, ‘ they ’, ‘ the spectators ’, ‘ the others ’, etc. = third person). • Social deixis (‘ mate ’, ‘ Sir ’, ‘ your honour ’, etc.) encodes ‘the speaker’s social relationship to another party, frequently but not always the addressee, on a dimension of rank’ (Levinson 1997: 218). • Temporal deixis (‘ now ’, ‘ today ’, ‘ next week ’, ‘ in 1952 ’, etc.) ‘allows the speaker to point in time’ (Trask 1999: 68). • Spatial deixis (‘ here ’, ‘ there ’, ‘ east ’, ‘ west ’, ‘ in front of ’, ‘ behind ’, ‘ left ’, ‘ right ’, etc.) allows pointing to spatial locations. In addition, the following modes of pointing are differentiated by Bühler: • In the situative modus, situative deictic reference is made to referents within the perceived space of speaker and hearer (i.e...
eBook - ePub- Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...For example, he or she would not normally be discussed as Deictic expressions, as they are typically anaphoric, referring back to something mentioned previously in the discourse rather than connecting with the extralinguistic context (we will discuss anaphora in the following section). But it is not too difficult to imagine a context in which they clearly have a deictic referring function. Consider a (reconstructed) conversation during which a parent brings a crying baby into the room and an interlocutor says: Table 2.2 Deixis types and English expressions Deixis type Examples of English Deictic expressions (a) Participants I, you, we, etc. (b) Social relationships Geoff, Mr Leech, Professor Leech, Sir, Madam, your grace, etc. Spatial this, that, here, there, come, go, opposite, away, etc. Temporal now, then, today, next week, [tense], recently, soon, etc. Discourse that chapter, this means that... , in the next chapter, etc. [2.10] So, he’s the one making all the noise! We should also keep in mind the fact that items within categories, such as those of Table 2.1, vary with respect to the degree to which they are semantically descriptive and contextually pragmatic. For example, here indicates the speaker’s spatial deictic centre, but come also encodes the meaning of locomotion towards it. Let us elaborate on the particular categories of Table 2.2. Personal, as a deictic category, refers to the identification of three discourse roles in the speaking situation: the speaker (the first person), the hearer (the second person), and the party being talked about (the third person). Person is a hugely important grammatical category. First, second and/or third person is marked or implicit in all utterances. An indication of its importance in English is in the fact that the second most frequent word in spoken English is I and the third is you (Leech et al...
eBook - ePubDiscourse Deixis in Metafiction
The Language of Metanarration, Metalepsis and Disnarration
- Andrea Macrae(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Levinson and Lyons demonstrate that terms which are prototypically used deictically can be used non-deictically: Levinson compares the use of ‘‘that’’ in the sentences “That’s a beautiful view” and “Oh, I did this and that” (1983, p. 66; see also Green, 1995). Furthermore, expressions which are, taken as a whole, deictic in quality are often constituted by a combination of prototypically deictic terms and non-deictic terms. Levinson makes the point that many complex time adverbials involve an interaction of calendrical terms or some other non-deictic name or unit of measurement of time, such as ‘day’, ‘season’, ‘year’, etc., or the names of specific months, and deictic modifiers, such as ‘this’, ‘last’, and ‘next’, to create Deictic expressions such as ‘this week’ and ‘next month’ (Levinson, 1983, p. 73; see also Lyons, 1977, p. 678). Many spatial locative expressions follow similar patterns, using the same deictic modifiers but in combination with non-deictic geographic or locative referents or spatial units of measurement (e.g. ‘the next town’, ‘the last 15 miles’). Deixis should be considered functions: words can function deictically or not, and words which can function deictically may be able to function as spatial deixis, or as person deixis, etc. Words considered to belong to specific subcategories of deixis are words which can function as that type of deixis but which may additionally belong to and function as another. Also, deixis varies across languages. For example, spatial prepositional phrases involving deixis can vary in their metaphorical value and in their frequency in different languages (cf. Hanks, 1990, 2009; Jungbluth and Da Milano, 2015). Lastly, deixis has been explored within many fields within linguistics and language study, including philology, transformational grammar, child language acquisition, pragmatics, and cognition. Each of these lenses on deixis has slightly different priorities and perspectives...
eBook - ePub- Sebastian Loebner(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It consists of things directly and automatically given for speaker and addressee: who it is who produces the utterance, to whom it is addressed, at which time and at which place it is produced. At least this is the case in the standard situation of face-to-face communication. All languages have means of directly referring to immediate elements of the CoU. Among these means are pronouns such as I and you or expressions like here and now. Linguists call such expressions deictic and the general phenomenon deixis. The use of Deictic expressions not only anchors an utterance in the world, it also imposes the perspective of the speaker on the utterance. The speaker forms the so-called deictic centre ; the ‘I’ is the one who decides who is being addressed; where the speaker is is ‘here’; when they speak is ‘now’. In the first part of this chapter, we will consider the three most important deictic relations: relation to the persons involved in the utterance (4.1), to the spatial situation (4.2) and to the time of utterance (4.3). 4.1 PERSON DEIXIS Person deixis is deixis based on the linguistic category of person. The category of person relates to the roles that the participants take in an individual utterance: in the singular, the ‘1st person’ is the speaker, or producer, of the utterance, S for short; the ‘2nd person’ is the addressee, 2 or A; the term ‘3rd person’ subsumes everybody who is neither first nor 2nd person. 3 These roles are called discourse roles. In most languages the discourse roles play a role in grammar; these are languages that have the category of ‘grammatical person’. English is one of these languages: grammatical person plays a role in the choice of personal pronouns and the forms of fnite verbs (she say s ; I am ; you are ; etc.). The most salient linguistic means of person deixis are systems of personal pronouns. They may differ in the grammatical categories of person, gender, number and formality. Table 4.1 displays the personal pronouns in German...
- Jan McAllister, James E. Miller(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...In such situations, speakers can draw attention to something by physically pointing at it or by using linguistic pointing words such as that or this, or by doing both. Pointing words provide no description of a thing but they are extremely frequent in speech because in conversation and in spoken narrative much can be understood with reference to only four factors: the speaker and the addressee; where they are in the location; where other things in the location are relative to them; the moment of speech (time of utterance). Pointing words and phrases are known as deictic words (Deixis derives from the Classical Greek verb deiknumi ‘to show, point out’. The root deik- is connected with dig- in digit (= finger), the body part that is used for pointing.). They fall into various deictic categories: personal pronouns, demonstratives, spatial expressions, temporal phrases, verbs of movement and tense. A convenient term for what is pointed at is ‘ deictic target’. The demonstratives, but also the personal pronouns, have basic uses that can be analysed by means of the four factors in the above list. The deictic targets associated with these basic uses may appear obvious but, as we will see below, even a very basic use may have a shifting deictic target. As we will see in Section 11.3.8, deictics also have extended uses, especially in connection with social relationships and the organisation of narrative. In order to analyse how deictic words are used in context, two more concepts are required: construal and perspective. Human beings do not (or should not!) just look at a landscape blankly. They construe or interpret it; that is, they assign a structure to it and base any linguistic description of the landscape on that structure...
eBook - ePubRealms of Meaning
An Introduction to Semantics
- Thomas R. Hofmann(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Deixis When someone calls for a bit of help, we would normally say ‘I’m coming’ or ‘I’ll come in a moment.’ A Japanese might say, however, ‘Sugu iki-masu’ which translates as ‘I go in a moment’, but he doesn’t mean that he is leaving and refusing to help. Many languages use to go in some cases where English uses to come. So what do these words mean? And why can’t we say ⋆ ‘She went here yesterday’ in ordinary speech? Language would be impossible without a speaker and a hearer. It is not hard, then, to see why interesting things happen with words that are related to the speaker and the person he or she is talking to (the addressee). This is what linguists call deixis. Deictic or ‘pointing’ words such as this, that and the like are found in all languages and are very useful for ‘referring’ to objects around you. You will even see, if you watch yourself or others, that these words are often accompanied by a pointing gesture – with a finger typically, or if that is too impolite, maybe an elbow, or just the eyes. This and that In perhaps every language, deictic words form systems or patterns that are semantic in nature, so semantics often starts in noticing these patterns and realizing that there must be fundamental units of meaning on which these patterns are based. Japanese has one of the more perfect deictic systems, so let us begin there. The central part of the system includes the following demonstrative expressions. This loses a lot in translation, but just to show what is lost, and how different languages can be, we would have to translate the table above as follows, even though each word in the original has a quite distinct meaning. Spanish distinguishes the rows better. Speakers of Japanese know that the words in the first row belong together, not simply because they all have the same beginning ko- in common, but because they describe something related to the location or territory, physical or psychological, of the speaker...
