Definitions of Deixis
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Domingos Tolentino Saide DtsDefinitions of Deixis
Uploaded by
Domingos Tolentino Saide DtsAbdala Selemane Abdala
Aidar Amade Assane
Edvaldo Roberto António Botão
Domingos Tolentino Saide Daniel
Loyce Mbuluma Juanga
Deixis and sense properties (sense relation)
Degree in English Teaching Course
Universidade Rovuma
Extensão de Cabo Delgado
2020
Abdala Selemane Abdala
Aidar Amade Assane
Edvaldo Roberto António Botão
Domingos Tolentino Saide Daniel
Loyce Mbuluma Juanga
Deixis and sense properties (sense relation)
Semantic work to be submitted to the
department of Language, Science,
Communication and Art, in partial
fulfilment- English Course yaer 5.
Lecturer: dr. Selemane Mitilage
Universidade Rovuma
Extensão de Cabo Delgado
2020
Definitions of Deixis:
Deixis is one of the most important notions in general linguistics and is a vital link between
the real-life environment around us (time frame, physical location, people involved, etc) and
what we actually say (the linguistic terms used). Deixis has always been at the heart of
reference research as widely known literature in semantics and pragmatics demonstrates.
Being fundamental, it is in the common focus on several disciplines: Cognitive Science,
Linguistics and Psychology.
In literature, there have been three traditionally recognized categories of deixis based on three
axes, namely, spatial-socio-temporal axes. Spatial deixis is based on spatio-axes, (e.g., this,
that, here, and there). Personal 68 deixis is based on socio-axes (e.g., I and you). Temporal
deixis is based on temporal axes (e.g., now, today, and yesterday) but not including before or
earlier (Fillmore 1982: 35, 38, Jarvella and Klein 1982: 2). Levinson (1983), following Lyons
(1968, 1977a), and Fillmore (1975), adds to them social deixis, that is, honorific and
discourse (or text) deixis.
Deixis stands at the crossroads of two major fields, namely, semantics and pragmatics. Lyons
(1977:636) has used the term deixis to cover the function of personal and demonstrative
pronouns, of tense and of variety of other grammatical and lexical features which relate
utterances to the spatiotemporal co-ordinates of the act of utterance.
Deixis and Anaphora
Anaphora, as a term, is used in two ways in the literature : (a) as a general description of
coreferential process, where one element refers back to another;(b) in the restrictive and
‗technical‘ sense of anaphoric binding, where the ‗anaphor‘ is restricted to necessarily
referentially dependent noun phrase (Lebeaux, 1992).
Anaphora is sometimes characterised as the phenomena whereby the interpretation of an
occurrence of one expression depends on the interpretation of an occurrence of another or
whereby an occurrence of an expression has its referent supplied by an occurrence of some
other expression in the same or another sentence.
Sense relations
The different types of sense relations can be described with the help of the logical operations
of implication and contradiction.
A logical implication is a metalinguistic relation between two propositions p and q: q
logically follows from p (i.e. p implies q), if every semantic interpretation that makes p true
automatically makes q true. This concept of implication plays a crucial role in describing the
semantic relations of synonymy and hyponymy.
Synonymy is the semantic relation between two words that have the same (or nearly the
same) meaning. Referring to the definition of logical implication, synonymy corresponds to a
bilateral implication or equivalence: Two expressions A and B in the same syntactic position
are synonymous if A implies B and B implies A (e.g. movie-film). Thus, synonymy
presupposes the substitutability of the given expressions in all contexts.
These expressions share the same denotational and connotational meaning and are referred to
as complete synonyms. However, most synonyms are partial synonyms and differ with
regard to their connotations. In contrast to synonymy, hyponymy corresponds to a unilateral
implication: Two expressions A and B in the same syntactic position are hyponyms if A
implies B and the converse does not hold (e.g. tulip-flower).
Thus, hyponymy can be viewed as the semantic relation of subordination, i.e. the specification
of semantic content: An item A is a hyponym of B, if the meaning of A is included in the
meaning of B, but not vice versa. The superordinate term is referred to as hyperonym, while
hyponyms that share the same hyperonym are called co-hyponyms.
Besides hyponymy, a second important hierarchical sense relation is calledmeronymy.
Meronymy refers to part-whole relationships that hold between words on different
hierarchical levels (e.g. hand-arm). Whereas hyponymy involves a relationship of inclusion
between different classes, this is not the case with meronymy.
Synonymy and hyponymy contrast with various types of semantic opposites. The most
important sense relations that are based on the logical relation of contradiction are antonymy,
complementarity, conversion, and incompatibility. The term complementarity (binary
antonymy, nongradable antonymy) refers to an either-or relationship between the two terms of
a pair of semantic opposites. It is a binary relationship in which the meaning of one lexeme is
equivalent to the negation of the other lexeme (e.g. dead-alive). In contrast to this binary
relation, gradable antonyms are restricted to gradable expressions that usually correlate with
opposite members of a continuum (e.g. good-bad).
This type of relationship is strongly connected to the notion of comparison, i.e. some
normative relative term is needed (a small elephant is a large animal). The third and fouth
type of semantic opposites are characterized by a reciprocal semantic relationship between
pairs of words: While converses (relational opposites) describe the same situation from
different perspectives (e.g. doctor-patient),reversives (directional opposites) involve a change
of direction, especially a motion in different directions (e.g. open-shut).
Finally, the notion of incompatibility refers to a non-binary semantic opposition of two
expressions that are semantically similar yet differ in a single semantic feature and are thus
incompatible (e.g. red-blue). Since in most cases co-hyponyms are semantically incompatible
in a given context (e.g. tulip-rose), the relationship between them is also referred to as
incompatibility.
