Unit : 7

Deixis and Distance

“The more two speakers have in common, the less language they’ll need to use
to identify familiar things”

Instructor: Dr.Shazia Akbar Ghilzai

Department of English
Quaid-e-Azam University
 Deixis

Deixis means “pointing via language”. Any linguistic

form used to do this “pointing” is called a deictic
expression. Words like here, there, this, that, now
and then, as well as most pronouns, such as I, we,
you, he, her and them are deictic expressions.

The linguistic forms of this pointing are called

deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic words;
they are also sometimes called indexicals.
 What is Deixis

Deixis is an important field of language study in its own

right - and very important for learners of second
languages.
But it has some relevance to analysis of conversation and
pragmatics because it directly concerns the relationship
between the structure of languages and the context in
which they are used.
It is often and best described as “verbal pointing”, that is
to say pointing by means of language.
 What is indexicals

In linguistics and in philosophy of language, an

indexical behavior or utterance symbolically points to
(or indicates) some state of affairs. For example, I refers
to whoever is speaking; now refers to the time at which
that word is uttered; and here refers to the place of
utterance.
 Deictic expressions include such lexemes (words)
as:
Personal or possessive pronouns (I/you/mine/yours),
Demonstrative pronouns (this/that),
(Spatial/temporal) adverbs (here/there/now),
Personal or possessive adjectives (my/your),
Demonstrative adjectives (this/that),
Articles (the).
Deixis is reference by means of an expression whose
interpretation is relative to the context of the
utterance, such as

• who is speaking

• the time or place of speaking

• the gestures of the speaker

• the current location in the discourse

• The topic of the discourse

Deictic centre: the time of the utterance’s time; the place of the utterance’s
place, the person just giving the utterance.

“Near speaker” — “away from speaker”

︱ ︱
Proximal distal
︱ ︱
This, here, now that, there, then
Proximal expressions are generally interpreted in relation to
the speaker's location or deictic centre.
For example now is taken to mean some point or period in
time that matches the time of the speaker's utterance.
When we read, “Now Barabbas was a thief.” we do not
take the statement to mean the same as “Barabbas was
now a thief” (i.e. he had become a thief, having not been
so before).
Rather we read it as ,“I'm telling you now, that Barabbas
was (not now but at the time in the past when these events
happened) a thief”.
 Deixis:

In verbal communication however, deixis in its

narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of
pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the
speaker means by a particular utterance in a
given speech context.
 (1) You’ll have to bring that back tomorrow, because they aren’t here now.

Out of context, we cannot understand this sentence

because it contains a number of expressions such as you,
that, tomorrow, they, here and now which depend for their
interpretation on the immediate physical context in which
they were uttered.
News narratives show many examples of deixis:
Example 1 - from a CBS Evening News broadcast.
1. The Americans arrested three suspects, but they made many
more enemies here,
2. when the soldiers shot back at the gunmen hiding in these
houses
“Here” and “these” are two deictic words.
These lines are a voice-over accompanying video footage of the
village in which the attack occurred.
Listeners (viewer and anchor) know that “here” does not mean
in their own living room, although that is the
point from which the television sound is emanating, but that
“here” refers to a location proximal to the speaker.
In the same manner, “these houses” is understood to refer to
the houses in the video footage.
 Examples:
1. I’ll be back in an hour.
Because we don’t know when it was written, we
cannot know when the writer will return.
2. suppose we find a bottle in the sea, and inside it a
message which reads:
3. Meet me here a week from now with a stick about
this big
We do not know who to meet, where or when to meet
him or her, or how big a stick to bring.
 More examples….

Suppose Harry just wanted to say the following

sentense,the power was suddenly off:
Listen, I’m not disagreeing with you but with you and
not about this but about this.
In the darkness, we cannot get any deictic information,
after hearing the sentence, we cannot understand what
is said.
 Essentially,

deixis concerns the ways in which language encode or

grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or
speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the
interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that
context of utterance.
 Primary and Secondary Deixis

Primary deixis: Reference to the context surrounding an

utterance is often referred to as primary deixis, exophoric
deixis, or simply deixis.
Secondary deixis : Contextual use of deictic expressions
is known as secondary deixis, textual deixis or
endophoric deixis.
Such expressions can refer either backwards or forwards
to other elements in a text.
Endophora is a term that means an expression which
refers to something, i.e. in the same text.
 Endophoric and Exophoric reference
Endophoric and exophoric references are both
important elements of cohesive writing, helping
readers understand the text by connecting ideas
within or outside the text.
Endophoric references are words/phrases used in
a text to refer to something within the text.
On the other hand, exophoric references are
words/phrases used in a text to refer to something
outside of the text.
Typically, an exophoric reference will rely heavily
on the context to be understood.
For example,
let's say we are given:
"I saw Sally yesterday. She was lying on the beach".
Here "she" is an endophoric expression because it refers
to something already mentioned in the text, i.e. "Sally".
Endophoric References: Endophoric references are
linguistic devices used to refer to elements within
the text itself. These references help maintain
coherence within the text by referring back to
previously mentioned words, phrases, or concepts.
Endophoric references are often explicit and rely on
the reader's familiarity with the text.
Example: In a story, the protagonist might be
referred to simply as "he" or "she" after their name
has been introduced. For instance, "John went to the
store. He bought some groceries." Here, "he" is an
endophoric reference that refers back to "John."
Exophoric References: Exophoric references, on
the other hand, refer to elements outside the text
itself. These references require readers to look
beyond the text to understand the meaning.
Exophoric references are often implicit and rely
heavily on context for interpretation.
Example: In a news article discussing a recent
political scandal, the phrase "the president" might be
used without specifying which president is being
referred to. Readers are expected to infer the
identity of the president based on their knowledge of
current events and the context provided in the
article.
By contrast,
"She was lying on the beach,“
if it appeared by itself, has an exophoric expression;
"she" refers to something that the reader is not told
about.
That is to say, there is not enough information in the text
to independently determine to whom "she" refers.
It can refer to someone the speaker assumes his
audience has prior knowledge of or it can refer to a
person he is showing to his listeners.
Without further information, in other words, there is no
way of knowing the exact meaning of an exophoric term.
 (1) A: Can I borrow your dictionary?
B: Yean, it’s on the table.

Here, word it refers back to the word dictionary.

The previous word dictionary is called the antecedent ,
and the second word it is called the anaphor or
anaphoric expression.
 Deictic expressions fall into three categories

(1) Person deixis: Any expression used to point to a

person: me, you, him and them.
(2) Time deixis: words used to point to a time: now, then,
tonight, last week and this year…
(3) Space/spatial/place deixis: words used to point to a
location: here, there and yonder
Two other types are added by some linguists:
1. Discourse deixis: any expression used to refer to
earlier or forthcoming segments of the discourse: in the
previous/next paragraph, or Have you heard this joke?
2. Social deixis: honorifics (forms to show respect such
as Professor Ali)
 Personal deixis
English does not use personal deixis to indicate relative
social status in the same way that other languages do (such
as those with TV pronoun systems).
But the pronoun “we” has a potential for ambiguity, i.e.
between exclusive we (excludes the hearer) and the hearer-
including (inclusive) we.
The T–V distinction is the contextual use of different
pronouns that exists in some languages and serves to
convey formality (or "polite" ) or familiarity. Its name
comes from the Latin pronouns tu and vos.
 PERSON DEIXIS HONORIFICS

Person deixis operates on a basic three part division, the

speaker (I), the addressee (you) and other(s) (he, she, it).
in many languages these deictic expressions are
elaborated with markers of social status Yule (1996) .
Expressions which indicate higher status are described
as honorifics (social deixis).
For example, in French and Romanian there are two
different forms that encode a social contrast within
person deixis, ‘tu’ (tu) and ‘vous’(dumneavoastra). This
is known as T/V distinction.
 PERSON DEIXIS
Using a third person form, where a second person would
be possible, is one way of communicating distance. This
can also be done for humorous or ironic purposes, as in:
‘Would his highness like some coffee?’
The distance associated with third person forms is also
used to make potential accusations less direct, as in:
Somebody didn’t clean up after himself.
There is also a potential ambiguity in the use in English
of the first person plural. There is an exclusive we
(speaker plus others, excluding addressee) and inclusive
we (speaker and addressee included), as in the following
possible reply to the accusation:
We clean up after ourselves around here.
 DEICTIC PROJECTION
Deictic projection= speakers being able to project
themselves into other locations, time or shift person
reference. Eg. via dramatic performances, when using
direct speech to represent the person, location and
feelings of someone else.
E.g.: I was looking at this little puppy in a cage with
such a sad look on its face. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m so
unhappy here, will you set me free?’ (taken from Yule,
1996:13)
All indexical expressions refer to certain world
conditions, either subjective or objective in nature. The
following story, borrowed from Levinson 1983:68) is
meant to illustrate the importance of having the right
point of view, and how one can anticipate the way
people will construe the world in terms of their point of
view.
 A Hebrew teacher, discovering that he had left his
comfortable slippers back in the house, sent a student
after them with a note for his wife.
The note read: “Send me your slippers with this boy”.
When the student asked why he had written ‘your’
slippers, the teacher answered: ‘Yold!(Fool)
If I wrote ‘my’ slippers, she would read ‘my slippers’
and would send her slippers. What could I do with her
slippers? So I wrote ‘your’ slippers, she’ll read ‘your’
slippers and send me mine.”
 TEMPORAL DEIXIS
One basic type of temporal deixis in English is in the
choice of verb tense, which has only two basic forms, the
present and the past (the proximal and the distal). The
past tense is always used in English in those if-clauses
that mark events presented by the speaker as not being
close to present reality.
E.g. If I had a yacht…(source: Yule, 1996:15)
The idea expressed in the example is not treated as
having happened in the past. It is presented as deictically
distant from the speaker’s current situation. So distant,
that it actually communicates the negative (we infer that
the speaker has no yacht).
 Temporal deixis
Psychological distance can apply to temporal deixis as well.
We can treat temporal events as things that move towards
us (into view) or away from us (out of view).
For instance, we speak of the coming year or the
approaching year. This may stem from our perception of
things (like weather storms) which we see approaching
both spatially and in time.
We treat the near or immediate future as being close to
utterance time by using the proximal deictic expression this
alone, as in “this (that is the next) weekend” or “this
evening” (said earlier in the day).
 Spatial deixis
The use of proximal and distal expressions in spatial
deixis is confused by deictic projection.
This is the speaker's ability to project himself or herself
into a location at which he or she is not yet present.
A familiar example is the use of here on telephone
answering machines (“I'm not here at the moment...”).
(My here is this room in this Faculty, while yours may be
this school café, this flat in Tripoli or this university in
Benghazi)
It is likely that the basis of spatial deixis is psychological
distance (rather than physical distance).
Usually physical and (metaphorical) psychological
distance will appear the same.
But a speaker may wish to mark something physically
close as psychologically distant, as when you indicate an
item of food on your plate with “I don't like that”.
 SPATIAL DEIXIS
The concept of distance is relevant to spatial deixis,
where the relative location of people and things is being
indicated.
Contemporary English makes use of two adverbs, ‘here’
and ‘there’, for the basic distinction.
Some verbs of motion, such as ‘come’ and ‘go’, retain
deictic sense when they are used to mark movement
toward the speaker (‘Come to bed’) or away the speaker
(‘Go to bed’).
 Conclusion

Deictic expressions are in the pragmatics

wastebasket
Why?
Because their interpretation depends on:
• the context,
• the speaker’s intention,
• and they express relative distance.
 Reflection

I.What are the deictic expressions in the

following utterance?

I’m busy now so you can’t do that here.

Come back tomorrow.
II. What are the anaphoric expressions in
the following utterance?
Dr. Dang gave Jane some medicine after
she asked him for it.