Lecture 8 Deixis Discourse Analysis Lecture Notes

DEIXIS; DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Deixis. Deictic and non-deictic reference.

Deixis – the type of immediate environmental reference where signs in the text refer the addressee to
situational factors and circumstances inside the area of sense perception which the speaker and
hearer share.
- Deictic elements (deictic references or, in logic, indicators; also called indexicals) are context-
dependent linguistic signs.
- The specific reference of a deictic sign is difficult or impossible to make out if the decoder is
outside the deictic context.
- Deictics - words and phrases whose reference relies entirely on the circumstances of the
utterance and can only be understood in the light of these circumstances.
- The deictic centre is the speaker at the time and place of the utterance (speaker’s here-and-
now. The "zero co-ordinates" of the deictic centre of any discourse are I, here and now.
Ex. I’ve finished this book just now.
- The organization of deixis is reflected in language; for instance, in the use of personal pronouns,
tense of the verbs and deictic adverbs of time and place.
In reported speech, the speaker’s here-and-now corresponds to the reporter. Consequently, deictic
expressions undergo changes:
-Direct speech: Yesterday Mary said: I finished your dress a week ago.
-Indirect reported speech: Yesterday Mary said that she had finished my dress a week before.
Five types of deixis
- person deixis is basically marked by the first and second person personal, possessive and
reflexive pronouns
- first and second person pronouns (my, mine, you, your, yours, we, ours, us) are always
deictic because they are free pronouns and their reference is entirely dependent on context.
Third person pronouns are deictic if they are free. If they are bound, their reference is
known from preceding co-text.
- time deixis – expressions such as this man, these children, are deictic, for they require
pragmatic information in order for the listener to make a "referential connection".
- place deixis – expression of place deixis require contextual information about the place of the
utterance
- The most obvious place deictic terms in English are: the adverbs here and there and the
demonstratives this, that, these and those.
- social deixis – the T/V distinction, honorifics, vocatives with different degrees of politeness
- discourse deixis coincides with discourse anaphora (less often cataphora) and involves the
choice of expressions that refer to the ongoing discourse
- discourse deixis includes: discourse markers (expressions such as chapter, section in written
discourse), some expressions of spatial or temporal deixis
Deictic and non-deictic uses of deictic expression
-gestural uses: the deictic expression can be interpreted only with reference to a physical monitoring
of the speech event:
Ex. This one is genuine, but this one is a fake. (pointing with finger)
-symbolic uses: the knowledge of the basic spatio-temporal parameters of the speech event is
sufficient to interpret them:
Ex. This city is really beautiful. (the city where the speech event occurs)
Discourse Analysis
- Discourse analysis is an umbrella term for all those studies within applied linguistics which
focus on units/stretches of language beyond the sentence level. In discourse analysis the
highest unit of language is the text, and language is studied in its context.
- Discourse analysis considers language in its full textual, social, and psychological context.
- Discourse analysis is relevant to language teaching since learners have to learn how to
produce and comprehend texts not only sentences (discourse competence).
- Discourse analysis involves questions of style, appropriateness, cohesiveness, rhetorical
force, topic/subtopic structure, differences between written and spoken discourse, planned and
unplanned discourse etc.
What is a text?
text a segment of spoken or written language that has the following characteristics:
1 it is normally made up of several sentences that together create a structure or unit, such
as a letter, a report, or an essay (however one word texts also occur, such as DANGER!
on a warning sign)
2 it has distinctive structural and discourse characteristics
3 it has a particular communicative function or purpose.
4 it can often only be fully understood in relation to the context in which it occurs
A text is "a communicative occurrence which meets […] the standards of textuality" (de
Beaugrande & Dressler, 1983).
Standards of textuality:
1. Cohesion "[...] concerns the ways in which the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual
words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence.
2. Coherence "[...] concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world, i.e. the
configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible
and relevant". Coherence is the outcome of cognitive processes among text users (see below).
3. Intentionality "[...] the text producer’s attitude that the set of occurrences should constitute a
cohesive and coherent text instrumental in fulfilling the producer’s intentions, e.g., to distribute
knowledge or to attain a goal specified in a plan.”
The study of cohesion includes discussions of reference, connectives, ellipsis and substitution, and
lexical organisation
endophoric relations form cohesive ties in the text:
endophora (i) anaphoric: Look at the sun. It's going down quickly.
(It refers back to the sun.)
(ii) cataphoric: It's going down quickly, the sun. (It refers forward to the sun.)
- Anaphoric co-reference is realized by : repeated form, partially repeated form, lexical
replacement, various pronominal forms (see person deixis)
- Pronouns may be used as cohesive devices in place of noun phrases or may be used to refer
to an entity presumably known to the discourse participants.
Ex. It seems that the man loves the woman. Many people think he loves her. What is the
interpretation of “he” and “her”?
Semantic rules of varying complexity establish whether a pronoun and some other noun phrase in
the discourse may be interpreted as coreferential. A minimum condition of co-referentiality is
that the pronoun and its antecedent have the same semantic feature values for the semantic
properties of number and gender.
- a pronoun is bound to an NP antecedent => bound pronoun
- a pronoun is free or unbound => pronoun refers to some object not explicitly mentioned
in the discourse
Ellipsis - the omission of elements normally required by the grammar which the
speaker/writer assumes are obvious from the context
Ellipsis is distinguished by the structure having some 'missing' element.
Performance discourse conventions permit speakers to “violate” many of the rules of grammar in
regular ways.
- rules of grammar and rules of discourse combine with contextual knowledge to fill in
missing gaps and make the discourse cohere.
In ellipsis cases the 'missing' element is retrievable verbatim from the surrounding text.
English has broadly three types of ellipsis: nominal, verbal and clausal.
a. Nominal ellipsis often involves omission of a noun headword:
Ex. Nelly liked the green tiles; myself I preferred the blue ______
Ellipsis of the Article - to be clearly distinguished from the zero article. It is a stylistically marked
form used in:
- journalese
- stage directions
- quick, colloquial language
b. Ellipsis within the verbal group -
Echoing - repeats an element from the verbal group:
A: Will anyone be waiting?
B: Jim will, I should think.
Auxiliary contrasting - the auxiliary changes:
A: Has she remarried?
B: No, but she will one day.
Whole stretches of clausal components may also be omitted:
Clausal ellipsis - individual clause elements may be omitted; especially common are subject-
pronoun omissions ('doesn't matter', 'hope so', 'sorry, can't help you', etc.
Other languages will require at the very least some kind of substitute for the main verb and an
object pronoun.

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DEIXIS; DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Deixis. Deictic and non-deictic reference.

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