Webquest

Name : Dwi Amalia Putri

NIM : 2003512064

DEIXIS

• Phenomenon of deixis: the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of language themselves.
• Deixis concerns the ways in which language encode grammaticalize features of the context of utterances or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretations of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.
• The facts of deixis should act as a constant reminder to theoretical linguists of the simple but immensely important fact that natural languages are primarily designed, so to speak, for use in face-to-face interaction, and thus there are limits to the extent to which they can be analyzed without taking this into account.
• The importance of deictic information for the interpretation of utterances is perhaps best illustrated by what happens when such information is lacking.

          Example:
          I’ll be back later.

•  Because we don’t know when it was written, we cannot know when the writer will return.
• Deixis belongs within the domain of pragmatics, because it directly concerns the relationship between the structure of language and the contexts in which they are used.
• Deixis concerns the encoding of many different aspects of the circumstances surrounding the utterance, within the utterance itself. Natural utterance are thus ‘achored’ directly to aspects of the context.

• The topic of deixis, or as philosophers usually prefer, indexical expressions (or just indexicals), may be usefully approached by considering how truth-conditional semantics deals with certain natural language expressions.
• There has been considerable philosophical interest in expressions that have this context-dependent property, like demonstrative, first and second person pronouns, and morphemes indicating tense.
• Part of the philosophical interest in this are arose from the questions of whether (a) all indexical expressions can be reduced to a single primary one, and thence (b) whether this final pragmatic residue can be translated out into some eternal context-free artificial language. Rusell, for example, thought that the reduction in (a) was possible, by translating all indexicals (or as he preferred, egocentric particulars) into expressions containing this, where the latter referred to a subjective experience. Reichenbach argued, also in support of (a) and with an ultimate view to (b) that all indexicals involve an element of token-reflexivity, i.e. refer to themselves, so that, for example, I means ‘the person who is uttering this token of the word I’.
• From a linguistic point of view, the question in (b) whether ultimately deictic expression can be translated into context-independent terms without loss of meaning, is perhaps a philosophical red-herring. Natural languages after all, just do have indexicals, and it is the task of linguistic analysis to model these directly in order to capture the ways in which they are used.
• Pragmatics is logically prior to semantics; that is, the output of the pragmatic component of the theory is the input to the semantic component. However, it is clear that not all aspects of deixis can be treated truth-conditionally, and there are considerable problems even for the apparently tractable cases.

Descriptive Approach

• The traditional categories of deixis are person, place and time.
• Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event in which the utterance in question is delivered: the category first person is the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself, second person the encoding of the speaker’s reference to one or more addressees, and third person the encoding of reference to persons and entities which are neither speakers nor addressees of the utterance in question.

          Example
          I am going to the movies.
          Would you like to have dinner?
          They tried to hurt me, but he came to the rescue.

• Place deixis concerns th encoding of spatial locations relative to the location of the participants in the speech event.

          Example:
          I enjoy living in this city.

• Unless otherwise specified, place deictic terms are generally understood to be relative to the location of the speaker, as in

• Time deixis concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at which an utterance was spoken (or a written message inscribed). This includes time adverbs like "now", "then", "soon", and so forth, and also different tenses.

          Example:

• Tenses are generally separated into absolute (deictic) and relative tenses. So, for example, simple English past tense is absolute, such as in

          He went.
          He had gone.

• There are other types of deixis that are similarly pervasive in language use. These categories of deixis were first discussed by Fillmore and Lyons.
• Discourse deixis has to do with the encoding of reference to portions of the unfolding discourse in which the utterance (which includes the text referring expression) is located.

          Example:
          This is a great story.
          “this” refers to an upcoming portion of the discourse, and in

• Social deixis concerns the encoding of social distinction that are relative to participant-roles, particularly aspects of the social relationship holding between speaker and addressee(s) or speaker and some referent. 
• Deixis is organized in an egocentric way. That is, if (or the purpose of semantic or pragmatic interpretation) we think of deictic expressions as anchored to specific points in the communicative event, then the unmarked anchorage points, constituting the deictic centre, are typically assumed 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 tome or CT, (iv) the discourse entre 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 addressees or referents is relative.

1. Why do we need to learn about deixis? What is the advantage for us if we know about deixis?
2. Can we do a research about deixis? Please give an example of research related to deixis.