Deixis
指示语
Professor Shaozhong Liu, Ph.D. (Pragmatics) / Ph.D. (Higher Education)
College of Foreign Studies, Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Homepage: www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu
Blog: cyrusliu.blog.163.com
Email: shaozhong@hotmail.com
10/12/2011
Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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Objectives and SLOs
• Objectives
1) Familiarize students with to the concept
Deixis
2) Discuss its relationship with Pragmatics
• Student learning outcomes (SLOs)
1) Be able to define the concept
2) Be able to illustrate with examples
3) Be able to analyze it in utterances
10/12/2011
Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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Defining deixis
• Deixis is a technical term (from Greek) for one of the
most basic things we do with utterances.
• It means ‘pointing’ via language.
• Any linguistic form used to accomplish this ‘pointing’ is
called a deictic expression. (When you notice a strange
object and ask, ‘What’s that?’, you are using a deictic
expression ‘that’ to indicate something in the
immediate context.
• Deictic expressions are also sometimes called
indexicals.
• Deictic expressions are among the first forms to be
spoken by very young children. (Yule, 1996/2000, p.9)
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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• All deictic expressions depend, for their interpretation,
on the speaker and hearer sharing the same context.
• Deictic expressions have their most basic uses in faceto-face spoken interaction where uttterances are easily
understood by the people present, but may need a
translation for someone not right there. (Yule,
1996/2000, p.9)
• Deixis is clearly a form of referring that is tied to the
speaker’s context, with the most basic distinction
between deictic expressions being ‘near speaker’
versus ‘away from speaker’.
• In English, the ’near speaker’ or proximal terms, are
‘this’, ‘here’, ‘now’. The ‘away from speaker’, or distal
terms, are ‘that’, ‘there’, ‘then’. (Yule, 1996/2000, p.9)
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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• Proximal terms are typically interpreted in
terms of the speaker’s location, or the deictic
center, so that ‘now’ is generally understood
as referring to some point or period in time
that has the time of the speaker’s utterance at
its center.
• Distal terms can simply indicate ‘away from
speaker’, but, in some languages, can be used
to distinguish between ‘near addressee’ and
‘away from both speaker and addressee’.
(Yule, 1996/2000, p.10)
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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Person deixis
• Personal pronouns: I, we, you, he, she, it, we, they, and
their variants.
• Expressions indicating higher status are described as
honorifics.
• The discussion of circumstances leading to the choice of
honorifics is sometimes called social deixis.
• T/V distinction of social deixis: from French tu/vous,
familiar vs. unfamiliar, or the higher older or more powerful
tend to use ‘tu’ version to a lower younger and less
powerful addressee ‘vous’. Examples: ni/nin, tu/vous, du/Si
(German), tu/Usted (Spanish) (Yule, 1996/2000, p.11)
• We-exclusive vs. we-inclusive: ‘We clean up after ourselves
around here.’ (p.11)
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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Spatial deixis
• Here, there, hither, yonder: Here it is / on the
yonder hill there stands a creature…
• Come, go: Come to bed! / Go to bed!
• Deictic projection: I am no there now / He’s
gone to Shanghai.
• Psychological distance: Physically close
objects tend to be treated by the speaker as
psychologically close. (Yule, 1996/2000, p.13)
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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Temporal deixis
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Now, then, from now on, …
‘then’ applies to both past and future:
November 22nd, 1963? I was in Scotland then.
Dinner at 8:30 on Saturday? Okay, I’ll see you then.
Back in an hour!
Free beer tomorrow!
Present tense as proximal form vs. past tense as distal form:
I could swim (when I was a child).
I could be in Hawaii (if I had a lot of money).
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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• Past tense used in if-clause to mark events
presented by the speaker as not being close to
present reality:
• If I had a yacht, … / If I was rich, …
Neither ideas are treated as having happened in
the past time. They are as deictically distant
from the speaker’s current situation. So distant,
indeed, that they actually communicate the
negative (we infer that the speaker has no yacht
and is not rich).
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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Context and deixis comprehension
• Without context, it is groundless to assign
meanings to deictical expressions.
• I agree with you on this, but not on that, with
you, but not with you.
• Meet me here tomorrow with a stick this big.
• 那个你那个了没有？
• 那个不大好那个。
• 今天来多少？跟昨天一样。
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Essentials in Pragmatics, Fall 2011
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• 你怎么样？老样子。
• 今日复明日，明日何其多？
• 昨天、今天和明天。
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