Deixis

In linguistics, deixis () is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time (e.g. then), place (e.g. here), or person (e.g. you) relative to the context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known natural languages and is closely related to anaphora, with a sometimes unclear distinction between the two. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is seen as the same as, or a subclass of, indexicality.

The term's origin is . To this, Chrysippus () added the specialized meaning point of reference, which is the sense in which the term is used in contemporary linguistics.

Types

There are three main types of deictic words, as described by Charles J. Fillmore: personal, spatial, and temporal. In some languages, these may overlap, such as spatial and personal deixis in many signed pronouns. Some linguists consider social deixis to be a fourth type.

Personal

Personal deictic words, called personal pronouns in English, refer to the grammatical persons involved in an utterance. These can include the first person (speaker), second person (addressee), third, and in some languages fourth and fifth person. Personal deixis may give further information about the referent, such as gender. Examples of personal deixis include:

:I am going to the cinema.

:Would you like to have dinner?

:They tried to hurt me, but she helped me.

Spatial

Spatial, or place, deixis is used to refer to spatial locations relative to an utterance. Similarly to personal deixis, the locations may be either those of the speaker and addressee or those of persons or objects being referred to. Spatial demonstratives include locative adverbs (e.g. here and there) and demonstratives (e.g. this, these, that, and those) although those are far from exclusive. such as:

:The shop is across the street.

where "across the street" is understood to mean "across the street from where I [the speaker] am right now." The Malagasy language has seven degrees of distance combined with two degrees of visibility, while many Inuit languages have even more complex systems.

Temporal

Temporal, or time, deixis is used to refer to time relevant to the utterance. This includes temporal adverbs (e.g. then and soon), nouns (e.g. tomorrow) and use of grammatical tense. Temporal deixis can be relative to the time when an utterance is made (the speaker’s "now") or the time when the utterance is heard or seen (the addressee’s "now"). Although these are often the same time, they can differ in cases such as a voice recording or written text. For example:

:It is raining now, but I hope when you read this it will be sunny.

Tenses are usually separated into absolute (deictic) and relative tenses. For example, simple English past tense is absolute, such as "He went." whereas the pluperfect is relative to some other deictically specified time, as in "When I got home, he had gone."

Discourse deixis

Discourse deixis, also referred to as text deixis, refers to the use of expressions within an utterance to refer to parts of the discourse that contain the utterance—including the utterance itself. For example, in "This is a great story." this refers to an upcoming portion of the discourse.

Switch reference is a type of discourse deixis, and a grammatical feature found in some languages, which indicates whether the argument of one clause is the same as the argument of the previous clause. In some languages, this is done through same subject markers and different subject markers. In the translated example "John punched Tom, and left-[same subject marker]," it is John who left, and in "John punched Tom, and left-[different subject marker]," it is Tom who left.

Discourse deixis has been observed in internet language, particularly with the use of iconic language forms resembling arrows.

Social deixis concerns the social information that is encoded within various expressions, such as relative social status and familiarity. These include T–V distinctions and honorifics.

Deictic center

A deictic center, sometimes referred to as an origo, is a set of theoretical points that a deictic expression is 'anchored' to, such that the evaluation of the meaning of the expression leads one to the relevant point. As deictic expressions are frequently egocentric, the center often consists of the speaker at the time and place of the utterance and, additionally, the place in the discourse and relevant social factors. However, deictic expressions can also be used in such a way that the deictic center is transferred to other participants in the exchange or to persons / places / etc. being described in a narrative. For example, in the sentence;

:I am standing here now.

the deictic center is simply the person at the time and place of speaking.

If, for example, two people in London and New York are talking over the phone, the Londoner can say both of the two sentences below, with equal validity:

:We are leaving [New York] next week.

:We are coming [to London] next week.

where the deictic center is in New York and London, respectively. More importantly, each is associated with a different field of study. Deixis is associated with linguistics, and indexicality is associated with philosophy as well as pragmatics.

Deictic field and narration

In linguistics, psychology, and literary theory, the concepts of deictic field and deictic shift are sometimes deployed in the study of narrative media. These terms provide a theoretical framework for helping literary analysts to conceptualize the ways in which readers redirect their attention away from their immediate surroundings as they become immersed in the reality generated by the text.

The term "deixis" refers to the ways in which language encodes contextual information into its grammatical system. More broadly, deixis refers to the inherent ambiguity of certain linguistic expressions and the interpretive processes that communicants must perform in order to disambiguate these words and phrases. Such ambiguity can only be resolved by analyzing the context in which the utterance occurs. To understand deixis, one must first understand that language grammaticalizes context-dependent features such as person, space, and time. When language is oriented toward its context, certain expressions in speech emerge that differentiate the "here" and "now" (proximal deixis) from the "then" and "there" (distal deixis). According to Karl Buhler, an Austrian psychologist who was one of the earliest to present a theory of deixis, "When philosophers, linguists, and narrative theorists attempt to understand the role of subjectivity in language and conversely, the role of language in subjectivity, they invariably notice a certain aspect of language which seems to depend on extralinguistic, subjective, occasion-specific considerations." Within the context of narrative, deixis reflects those aspects of storytelling by which the audience is pragmatically directed to understand the perspective of the narrator or the perspective of the story's characters in relation to their own story-external vantage point. Essentially, deictic expressions help form the layers of narrative that direct the audience to either the narratorial discourse or to the story world. "Deixis (adjectival form, deictic) is a psycholinguistic term for those aspects of meaning associated with self-world orientation".