Deixis and their types

By: Sheyar Dara Abdulkader

 Definition

 In linguistics, deixis (/ˈdaɪksɪs/) refers to words and phrases, such as

“me” or “here”, that cannot be fully understood without additional
contextual information, Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is
fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or
place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to convey
any meaning – for example, English pronouns – are deictic. deixis is
believed to be a feature (to some degree) of all natural languages.[2]
The term’s origin is Ancient Greek: δεῖξις, translate. deixis, lit.
'display, demonstration, or reference',
 Types of Deixis

 Person Deixis: Person deixis concerns itself with the grammatical

persons involved in an utterance, (1) those directly involved (e.g. the
speaker) where the pronoun “I” is used (2) those not directly involved
(e.g. overhearers—those who hear the utterance but who are not
being directly addressed) where the pronouns “he,she,they” are used
and (3) those mentioned in the utterance, where the pronouns
“you,we” are used, In English, the distinctions are generally indicated
by pronouns.
 English language unlike many language does not use deictic words to
refer to the social status.
 Types of Deixis

 Spatial Deixis: Place deixis, also known as space deixis, concerns itself
with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person
deixis, the locations may be either those of the speaker and addressee
or those of persons or objects being referred to. The most salient
English examples are the adverbs “here” and “there” and the
demonstratives “this” and “that”.
 Place Deixis can be clearly seen in the verbs of motion such as “go”,
which means motion away from the speaker, and “come” which means
motion toward the speaker.
 Types of Deixis

 Temporal Deixis: or time deixis, it concerns itself with the various times
involved in and referred to in an utterance. This includes time adverbs like
"now", "then", "soon", and so forth, and also different tenses. A good example
is the word tomorrow, which denotes the consecutive next day after every
day. For example: I drunk water. Here the past tense us used as a temporal
deixis relative to present tense in order to indicate a span of time earlier
than the span which includes encoding time (when the utterance is heard).
 Psychological distance can apply to time deixis as well. We treat the
near or immediate future as being close to utterance time by using
the proximal deictic expression “this” alone, as in “this evening” (said
earlier in the day).
 Types of Deixis

 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 contains the utterance — including the utterance
itself. For example, in:
This is a great story.
“this” refers to an upcoming portion of the discourse
 That was an amazing account.
“that” refers to a prior portion of the discourse
 Types of Deixis

 Social Deixis: Social deixis concerns those aspects of sentences which

reflect or establish or are determined by certain realities of the social
situation in which the speech act occurs.
 There are many aspects of language usage that depend on those
relations between the participants , but those usages only relevant to
the topic of social deixis in so far are polite pronouns and titles of
address.
Thank you for your attendance
and listening