Deixis
In linguistics, deixis is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time, place, or person 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, second person, 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: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 and demonstratives although those are far from exclusive. Spatial demonstratives are often relative to the location of the speaker such as:where "across the street" is understood to mean "across the street from where I am right now."
Words relating to spatial deixis can be proximal, medial, distal, far-distal.'' 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, nouns and use of grammatical tense. Temporal deixis can be relative to the time when an utterance is made or the time when the utterance is heard or seen. Although these are often the same time, they can differ in cases such as a voice recording or written text. For example:Tenses are usually separated into absolute 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-," it is John who left, and in "John punched Tom, and left-," 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
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;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:
where the deictic center is in New York and London, respectively.
Similarly, when telling a story about someone, the deictic center is likely to switch to third-person pronouns. So then in the sentence;
it is understood that the center is with the persons being spoken of, and thus, "to the left" refers not to the speaker's left, but to the object of the story's left - the persons referred to as 'they' at the time immediately before they ran twenty feet.
Usages
It is helpful to distinguish between two usages of deixis, gestural and symbolic, as well as non-deictic usages of frequently deictic words. Gestural deixis refers, broadly, to deictic expressions whose understanding requires some sort of audio-visual information. A simple example is when an object is pointed at and referred to as "this" or "that". However, the category can include other types of information than pointing, such as direction of gaze, tone of voice, and so on. Symbolic usage, by contrast, requires generally only basic spatio-temporal knowledge of the utterance. So, for examplerequires being able to see which finger is being held up, whereas
requires only knowledge of the current location. In a similar vein,
is a non-deictic usage of "this", which does not identify anywhere specifically. Rather, it is used as an indefinite article, much the way "a" could be used in its place.
Distinction with similar terms
The distinction between deixis and anaphora is unclearly defined. Generally, an anaphoric reference refers to something within a text that has been previously identified. For example, in "Susan dropped the plate. It shattered loudly," the word it refers to the phrase, "the plate". An expression can be both deictic and anaphoric at the same time, for example "I was born in London, and I have lived here/there all my life." here or there function anaphorically in their reference to London, and deictically in that the choice between "here" or "there" indicates whether the speaker is or is not currently in London.The terms deixis and indexicality are frequently used almost interchangeably, and both deal with essentially the same idea of contextually-dependent references. However, the two terms have different histories and traditions. In the past, deixis was associated specifically with spatiotemporal reference, and indexicality was used more broadly. 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.Deixis
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" from the "then" and "there". 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 is a psycholinguistic term for those aspects of meaning associated with self-world orientation". Deixis is an integral component of the lens by which the audience perceives the narrative.Labov's narrative model
argues that stories of personal experience can be divided into distinct sections, each of which serves a unique function within the narrative progression. Labov schematizes the organization of natural narrative using the following conceptual units: abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, and coda. Generally, anecdotal narratives tend to arrange these units in the order outlined; however, this is not an inflexible, structural progression that defines how every narrative must develop. For instance, sentences and phrasal items that serve an evaluative function can be interspersed throughout a narrative. Some stretches of narrative discourse also feature overlap among these Labovian categories. Each of Labov's narrative divisions serves a characteristic purpose typified by a particular section's grammatical construction and functional role within the unfolding narrative, but the boundaries of such divisions are not always clear-cut.As a feature of natural language, deixis is an important element of oral narrative and can be realized in different ways in each of Labov's categories. According to Galbraith, "All language use depends on some felt relevance to situation, on the attention of participants, and their ability to lift out the topic....Like zero in mathematics and the dark space in the theater, deixis orients us within a situation without calling attention to itself". Two of Labov's categories that often feature deixis prominently are the "orientation" and the "coda". The orientation typically occurs near the beginning of a narrative and serves to introduce the characters, settings, and events. Given its presentative quality, the orientation shifts the deictic center away from the speaker's here-and-now into the spatiotemporal coordinates of the story, which logically must occur at a time prior to the story's enunciation. The coda occurs toward the end of a narrative and functions as a means of terminating the flow of story events. By doing so, the coda reorients the speakers and listeners out of the story world and back into the communicative present.