Deixis

Deixis

Essentially deixis concerns the ways in which language encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterances.

The topic of deixis, or as philosophers usually prefer, indexical expressions/ indexical, may be usefully approached by considering how truth conditional semantics deals with certain natural language expressions.

Descriptive approaches

Given the undoubted importance of deixis to philosophical, psychological and linguistic approaches to the analysis of language, there has been surprisingly little work of a descriptive nature in the area, with a consequent lack of adequate theories and frameworks of analysis.

There are 3 traditional categories of deixis, they are:

1.      Person

2.      Place

3.      Time

Briefly, these categories are understood in the following way. Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of the participants in the speech event in which the utterance in question is delivered.

The category 1^st person à the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself

2^nd person à  the encoding of the speaker's reference to one or more addresses

3^rd person à the encoding of reference to persons and entities which are neither speakers nor addresses of the utterance in question.

            Place deixis concerns the encoding of spatial locations relative to the location of the participants in the speech event. Time deixis concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to time at which an utterance was spoken or a written message inscribed.

Discourse or text deixis concerns the use of expressions with in some utterance to refer to some portion of the discourse that contains that utterance, including the utterance itself.

Social deixis concerns that aspect of sentences which reflect or establish or are determined by certain realities of the social situation in which the speech act occurs (Fillmore, 1975: 76).

It concerns the encoding of social distinctions that are relative to participant-roles, particularly aspect of the social relationship holding between speaker and addresses/ speaker and some referent.

Source:  Levinson, Stephen C.1983. Pragmatics. New york: Cambriedge University Press