DEIXIS
A. Introduction
When people say something, they may not only intent to say it, but also mean
something behind the utterances they say, and the actions performed via utterances
are called as speech acts . Therefore, people not only produce strings of words as
sentences, but also utterances that are intended to achieve their intention. Deixis, as one of
the communication strategies also belongs to speech acts.
Yule (1996: 9) defines deixis as technical term for one of the most basic things we
do with utterances. In addition, Cruse defines that deixis signifies different things to
different people (2000: 319). It shows that deictical words have no exact referent.
Essentially, deixis
relates
to
the
way
in
which
languages
encode
or
grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus relates to the
ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of
utterances (Levinson, 1983: 54). Any linguistic varieties applied to accomplish this
‘pointing’ are called a deictic expression or indexicals .However, to explicate the
importance of a deictic information for interpreting utterances is possibly best
exemplified by what happens when such information is incomplete, as what has been
stated by Fillmore (1975: 38-9) in Levinson (1983: 54). Take a look at the example of
deictic expression below:
I’ll bring you a gift and put it here tomorrow.
From the example above, the speaker uses the word ‘I’ to point at himself or
herself, in other words, ‘I’ refers to the person who is currently speaking. The speaker
uses the word ‘you’ to point at the intended addressee or hearer. The word ‘here’ indicates
the place of speaking and ‘tomorrow’ indicates the time after the utterance is spoken.
Suppose it was not directly said to certain people but it was written in a note that
people find somewhere, the message will mean nothing because that people cannot
get complete information of who the speaker is, when and where the exact time and place
is. Deixis, in prior time, was divided into three categories: person, place and time deixis.
In addition, it could be said that deixis is systematized in egocentric way
considering the speaker as central point that relates everything to his
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point
of
view and also considering the deictic centre that are supposed to be as follows: (i) the
central person is the speaker, (ii) the central time is the time at which the speaker
produces the utterance, (iii) the central place is the speaker’s location at utterance time,
(iv) the discourse centre is the point which the speaker is currently at in the production of
his utterance, and (v) the social centre is the speaker’s social status and rank, to
which the status or rank of addressees or referents is relative (Levinson, 1983: 63-4).
The important point is that deixis has to do with the predetermination of
many different aspects of the circumstances surrounding the utterance inside the utterance
itself (Levinson, 1983: 55).
When we find a following notice on someone’s office door
I’ll be back in an hour
We cannot know when the writer will return, because we don’t know when it was
written.
When we finds a bottle in the sea, and inside it a message which reads
Meet me here a week from now with a stick about this big.
We don’t know who to meet, where or when to meet him or her, or how big a stick to
bring.
We can interpret the words ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this big’ if we know the context of
the utterance.
Reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the
context of the utterance, such as : who is speaking, the time or place of speaking, the
gestures of the speaker, or the current location in the discourse, is deixis.
The word ‘deixis’ is borrowed from the Greek word for pointing or indicating.
Essentially deixis concern the ways in which language encode or grammaticalize feature of
the context of utterance or speech event, and also concerns ways in which the
interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance (Levinson,
1983:173). Furthermore, Saeed, (1997:173) stated the deictic devices in a language
commit a speaker to set up a frame of reference around herself.
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B. Philosophical approaches
The topic of deixis, or as philosophers usually prefer indexical expression, may be
usefully approached by considering how truth-condition semantics deal with certain
natural language expressions
Examples : - You are the mother of Napoleon
- This is an eighteenth-century man-trap.
- Mary is in love with that fellow over there.
- It is now 12.15
The sentences are true, respectively, just in case the addressee is indeed the mother of
Napoleon, the object currently being indicated by the speaker is indeed an eighteenthcentury man-trap, Mary is indeed in love with the fellow in the location indicated by the
speaker and at the time of speaking it is indeed 12.15. In each case the context-dependency
can be traced to specific expressions or indexicals.
Donellan (1966; Levinson 1983) noted the distinction between two usage of
definite description (noun phrases in English with determiner the):
1. A referential use
The man drinking champagne is Lord Godolphin
2. An attributive use
The man who can lift this stone is stronger than an ox
The sentence “The man drinking champagne is Lord Godolphin” is very similar
to “That man (the speaker indicates the man drinking champagne) is Lord Godolphin”.
Both sentences are containing demonstrative or indexical element. Demonstrative
pronouns typically involve a gesture. And so it begins to look as if definite referring
expressions may in general be used either in speaker reference or in semantic (or
attributive) reference, and it is only the context of use that tells us which way to understand
them. If this is so, then the role of pragmatics (in indexical sense) in fixing the proposition
that a sentence expresses, is greatly increased.
However, none of these philosophical approaches does justice to the complexity
and variety of the deictic expressions that occur in natural languages, and we should now
turn to consider linguistic approaches and findings.
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C. Descriptive Approach
Indexical expressions are approached by using the categories of deixis. Deixis is
categorized into person deixis, place deixis, time deixies, discourse deixis, and social
deixis.
In utterances the usage of demonstrative pronoun is not only deictic but also nondeictic. Fillmore (1971) distinguished two kind of deictic usage, namely gestural usage and
symbolic usage. The non-deictic usage is distinguished into anaphoric and non-anaphoric.
Anaphoric can be deictic or non-deictic.
Example : a. -
b.
Move it from there to there ( gestural usage )
-
Hello, is Harry there? ( symbolic usage)
-
There we go ( non-anaphoric )
-
( by pointing a boy ) He is very smart ( gestural usage )
-
He will be back soon ( symbolic usage )
-
John came in and he lit a fire ( anaphoric )
An appreciation of these complexities will indicate how involved and unexplored the
phenomenon of deixis really is and how the philosophical approaches to indexicals can
handle only a small proportion of these problems.
Based on Levinson (1983), there are five kinds of deixies: person deixies, time
deixies, place deixies, discourse deixies, and social deices.
1. Person Deixis
Levinson (1983: 62-8) stated that person deixis deals with the
predetermination of the role of participants in the speech event in which the
utterance in question is uttered and it is reflected directly in the grammatical
categories of person.
Person deixis that can be considered as ‘trully’ deictic are personal pronoun,
first and second person pronoun. Besides, other than first person, known as speaker
and second person, known as addressee, another important participant in the speech
situation, neither speaker nor hearer are also included to person deixis, that are
known as third person.
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However, as stated by Burling and Ingram in Levinson (1983:
69),
pronominal systems also can be considered deictic. Those pronominal systems are
as follows: for first person, speaker inclusion (+ S); for second person, addressee
inclusion (+ A); and for third person, speaker and addressee exclusion (– S, – A).
Besides, in many languages, there are two first person pronouns plural known as
exclusive and inclusive ‘we’. As the term, exclusive ‘we’ includes speaker and
other, but excludes the addressee (+S, –A), whereas inclusive ‘we’ includes
speaker, other and addressee or /+S, +A/. Let’s take a look at the example below:
Let’s go to the cinema
Let’s go to see you tomorrow (?)
The first sentence is inclusive as it includes the addressee, while the second
one is exclusive as it excludes the addressee. In the fact that -‘s in the word “let’s”
stands for ‘us’, it may be inappropriate for the second sentence because the word
‘us’ is considered inclusive while the second sentence is exclusive as it also
mentions the pronoun ‘you’ (Levinson, 1983: 69).
2. TIME DIEXIES
Both time and place deixis are greatly complicated by the interaction of
deictic co-ordinates with the non-deictic conceptualization of time and place. To
understand these aspects of deixes in depth it is necessary to have a good
understanding of the semantic organization of space and time in general, but these
topics lie beyond the scope of this book (Leech, 1969; Fillmore, 1975; Lyons,
5
1977a; Levinson, 1983). Briefly, though, the bases for systems of reckoning and
measuring time in most languages seem to be the natural and prominent cycles of
day and night, lunar months, seasons, and years. Such units can either be used as
measures, relative to some fixed point of interest (including, crucially, the deictic
centre) or they can be used calendrically to locate events in ‘absolute’ time relative
to some absolute origo, or at least to some part of each natural cycle designated as
the beginning of that cycle (Fillmore, 1975; Levinson 1983). It is with these units,
calendrical and non-calendrical, that time diexis interact.
Time deixis is also called as temporal deixis. Time deixis is a reference
to time relative to a temporal reference point and it is typically the moment of
utterance. These language resources are the adjectives of time in the
line….yesterday….now….tomorrow, and the verb tenses. The verb sometimes also
has another function besides referring to a specific time. Furthermore, Levinson
(1993: 73) said that the basis for systems of reckoning and measuring time in most
languages seem to be the natural and prominent cycles of day and night, lunar
months, season and years. While, Grundy (2000: 31-32) states another important
time deixis is tense system. In fact, almost every sentence makes reference to an
event time. Often this event time can only be determined in relation to the time of
the utterance. Moreover, Yule (1996, 14-15) says that the basic type of temporal
deixis in English is in the choice of verb tense. English only has two basic forms,
the present and the past. For example:
a. I live here now.
b. I live there then.
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The present tense is the proximal form as in (a) and the past tense is distal form as
in (b). The deictic items use reference can only be determined in relation to the
time of the utterance in which they occur. Such as:
• This / last / next Monday / week / month / year.
• Now, then, ago, later, soon, before.
• Yesterday, today, tomorrow.
In other words, time deixis is an expression in relation to point to certain period
when the utterances produced by the speaker.
3. PLACE DIEXIES
Place deixis is also described as spatial deixis, where the relative location
of people and things is being indicated. Place deixis or spatial deixis usually
expressed in this, these, there, here, that, and those. Place deixis can be described
along many of the same parameters that apply to the time deixis. Therefore, those
references to place can be absolute or relational in nature. Absolute references to
place locate an object or person in a specific longitude and latitude, while relational
references locate people and place in terms of each other and the speaker
Levinson (1983: 79) stated that place or space deixis concerns for the
specification of locations to anchorage points in the speech event and typically the
7
speaker, and there are two basic ways of referring objects by describing or naming
them on the one hand and by locating them on the other. Alternatively, they can be
deictically specified to the location of participants at the time of speaking. There
are a proximal (close to the speaker) such as this, and these, and a distal (sometime
close to the addressee) such as that, and those. Each may be used either as a
pronoun or in a combination with noun.
Grundy (2000: 28) add that there are three degrees of proximity is by no
means uncommon, with some languages distinguishing proximity to the speaker
and to the addressee. They are: here (proximal), there (distal), where (and the
archaic hither, hence, thither, thence, wither, whence), left, right, up, down, above,
below, in front, behind, come go, bring, and take. Briefly, place deixis is an
expression used to show the location relative to the location of a participant in the
speech even.
4. DISCOURSE DEIXIS
Discourse, or text, deixis concerns the use of expressions within some
utterance to refer to some portion of the discourse that contains that utterance (
including the utterance itself ). We may also include in discourse deixis a number
of other ways in which an utterance signals its relation to surrounding text, e.g.
utterance-initial anyway seems to indicate that the utterance that contains it is not
addressed to the immediately preceding discourse, but to one or more steps back.
(such signals are deictic because they have the distinctive relativity of reference,
being anchored to the discourse location of the current utterance ).
Here are examples of deictic expressions:

I

You
8

Now

There

That

The following

Tenses
We also have place-deictic terms re-used here, and especially the
demonstratives this and that. Thus this can be used to refer to a forthcoming
portion of the discourse, and that to a preceding portion. Like as the following :
 I bet you haven’t heard this story
 That was the funniest story I’ve ever heard
Considerable confusion is likely to be caused here if we do not
immediately make the distinction between discourse deixis and anaphora. As we
note, anaphora concerns the use of (usually) a pronoun to refer to the same referent
as some prior term, as in :
 Harry’s a sweetheart, he’s so considerate
Where harry and he can be said to be co-referential, i.e. pick out the same
referent. Anaphora can, of course, hold within sentences, across sentences, and
across turns at speaking in dialogue.
In principle the distinction is clear: where a pronoun refers to a linguistic
expression (or chunk of discourse) itself, it is discourse-deictic, where a pronoun
refers to the same entity as a prior linguistic expression refers to, it is anaphoric.
Fillmore (1971; Levinson, 1983) hopes that theory of discourse deixis will
resolve the well-known paradoxes associated with sentences like (this sentence is
not true). A number of significant problems for the distinction between anaphora
and discourse deixis have been thrown up by the very considerable body of work
on pronominalization. firstly, there are the so-called pronouns of laziness.
In that case, there are good arguments for considering that anaphora
ultimately rests on deictic notion (Lyons, 1977; Levinson 1983). Such a conclusion
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would have important repercussions for the philosophical worries about the deictic
nature.
To return to straightforward issues in discourse deixis, there are many
words and phrases in English, and no doubt most languages, that indicate the
relationship between an utterance and the prior discourse. Examples are utteranceinitial usages of but, therefore, in conclusion, to the contrary, still, however,
anyway, well, besides, actually, all in all, so, after all, and so on. It is generally
conceded that such words have at least a component of meaning that resists truthconditional treatment ( Grice, 1975; Wilson, 1975; Levinson, 1983).
Some languages also have morphemes that mark such Clearly discourse
notions as main story line. For example, in the Amerindian language Cubeo, the
main protagonists and their actions in a story are tagged by a particle in such a
systematic way that a concise and accurate précis is obtained if just those sentences
containing the particle are extracted.
5. SOCIAL DEIXIS
Social deixis concerns the encoding of social distinctions that are relative to
participant-roles, particularly aspects of the social relationship holding between
speaker and addressee(s) or speaker and some referent. There will be different
expressions between speaker and addressee or other referent, if they have different
social relationship. Distinctions of fine gradation between relative ranks of speaker
and addressee are systematically encoded throughout: morphological system;
honorifics; but such distinctions are also regularly encoded in choice between
pronoun, summons forms or vocatives, and titles of address in familiar language
(Levinson, 1983: 63).
Social deixis concerns “that aspects of sentences which reflect or establish
or are determined by certain realties of the social situation in which the speech act
occurs (Fillmore, 1975: 76 in Levinson, 1983: 89). Social deixis deals with context
and situation that relates to certain culture. Yule (1996: 10) stated that deictic
expressions which indicate higher status are described as honorifics. The discussion
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of the circumstances which lead to the choice of one of these forms rather than
another is sometimes as social deixis.
Social deixis is exemplified by certain uses of the so-called T/V (tu/vous)
pronouns in many languages (Cruse, 2000: 321). It will be illustrated with French
with three possibilities to communicate (A and B):
•
A address B with tu, B address A with vous,
•
A address B with vous, B address A with tu,
•
A and B both use the same form (either tu or vous),
Note: tu (familiar), and vous (non-familiar)
In the social context, speaker and addressee, the higher, older, and powerful
speaker will tend to use the tu version to a lower, younger, and less powerful
addressee, and be addressed by the vous form in a return.
There are two basic kinds of socially deictic information: relational and
absolute.
Relational:
•
Speaker and referent (e.g. referent honorifics)
Respect can be only be conveyed by referring the ‘target’ of the
respect.
•
Speaker and addressee (e.g. addressee honorifics)
It can be conveyed without necessarily referring to the target.
•
Speaker and bystander (e.g. bystander or audience honorifics)
Bystander does duty as a cover term for participants in audience role
and for non-particioating overhearers.
•
Speaker and setting (e.g. formality levels)
Absolute:
•
Authorized speaker:
Thai:
- ‘khrab’  a polite participle that can only be used by male
speakers.
- ‘kha’  a polite participle that can only be used by female
speakers
•
Authorized recipient:
Title Address: Your Honour, Mr. President
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D. CONCLUSION
1. Deixis is reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to
the context of the utterance, such as : who is speaking, the time or place of
speaking, the gestures of the speaker, or the current location in the discourse.
2. Philosophical approaches to indexicals covers just some aspects of person, time
and place deixis, and a mass of complicated linguistics facts, to which some
preliminary order has been brought by the work of Fillmore and Lyons in
particular.
3. Descriptive approaches categorize deixies into person deixis, time deixis, place
deixis, discourse deixis, and social deixies. The usage of demonstrative pronoun is
not only deictic but also non-deictic.
4. Levinson (1983) stated that there are five types of deixies:
a. Person Deixis
b. Place Deixis
c. Time Deixis
d. Discourse Deixis
e. Social Deixis
E. REFERENCES
Cruse, D. A. 2000. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grundy, P. 2000. Doing Pragmatics. London: St. Martin’s Press Inc.
Levinson, A. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres.
Saeed, J. I. 1997. Semantics. Oxford: Blaxkwell Publishers.
Yule, G. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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PRAGMATICS
DEIXIS
Lecturer: Drs. Ahmad Sofwan, M.A., Ph.D.
By:
GROUP 1
RETNO KUSUMO DEWI
(2003512076)
AGRISSTO BINTANG A. P.
(2003512005)
AGUNG WAHYU P.
(2003512078)
DANIAR SOFENY
(2003512093)
NUR KHASANAH
(0204511055)
POST GRADUATE PROGRAM – ENGLISH STUDIES
STATE UNIVERSITY OF SEMARANG (UNNES)
2013
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