Deixis Saja S. Athamna 220152398

Traditionally, by Deixis is meant the location and identification of person, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance and the participation in it, typically, of a single speaker and at least one addressee; it means “ pointing via language”.

we can analyze them this way: we can analyze them this way: *Person Deixis: those that are used to refer to speaker and addressee (I, you, we). *Place Deixis: those that refer to spatial context (here, there). *Time Deixis: these that refer to temporal context (now, then, verb tense markers). *Discourse Deixis: those that refer to parts of unfolding discourse (next, below, furthermore). *Social Deixis: those that encode aspects of the social relationship between speaker and addressee (Her Majesty). *Perceptual Deixis: There's Harry.

Deixis concerns the use of certain linguistic expressions to locate entities in spatiotemporal, social and discursive context. First and second person pronouns, demonstratives, tense, certain place and time adverbials, verbs such as come, go, bring, take and fetch. Such deictic expressions encode specific aspects of the speech event and cannot be interpreted unless contextual parameters are taken into account.

Examples: (English) Here are examples of deictic expressions: I refers to however is speaking You Now the time in which the word is uttered. There place of utterance. That The following Tenses

Personal or possessive pronoun: (I you mine yours) *Personal or possessive pronoun: (I you mine yours) *Demonstrative pronouns (this, that) *Spatial or temporal adverbs (here, there, now) *Personal or possessive adjectives (my, your) *Demonstrative adjectives (this, that) *Articles (the)

In principle, the distinction between Deixis and anaphora is clear-cut: Deixis is an exospheric relation, since the target of the referring expression is in the speech situation anaphora is an endophoric relation, since the target of the referring expression is in the universe of discourse. However, there are factors that complicate this distinction: On the one hand, for something to be in the universe of discourse implies, in the simplest case, that it is (mostly, has been) mentioned in the text, so that there is an endophoric relation between two elements of the text. And on the other hand, the utterance and its elements are perceptible and, therefore, physical objects and are, consequently, in the speech situation. Consequently, reference to such an object is Deixis. Consider : . The CEO fired Smith. – a. That is a lie! b. That was a mistake. A paraphrasis for .a is “What you said (i.e., your utterance the CEO fired Smith) is a lie!”, while a paraphrasis for #b is “For the CEO to fire Smith was a mistake.” The two paraphrastic patterns are not interchangeable (?For the CEO to fire Smith is a lie; ?What you said was a mistake).

Consequently, that in .a refers to the preceding utterance, while that in .b refers to the proposition which by virtue of that utterance is in the universe of discourse. Therefore, that in .a is a text-deictic element, whereas that in #b is an anaphoric element. Evidently, the antecedent of an anaphoric element may be a clause or sentence in its capacity of establishing a proposition in the universe of discourse. Such anaphora is therefore propositional anaphora. Propositional anaphora is the (endophoric) relation between coreferential expressions referring to the same proposition. Textual deixis is the (exophoric) relation of a (deictic) expression to another expression that occurs in the speech situation. Textual connectives (sometimes called “discourse markers”) such as then, therefore, nevertheless etc. are propositional anaphorics. They have nothing to do with textual deixis.

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