Transcript Deixis

Deixis
Lecture 7
Introduction
 Deixis concerns the use of certain linguistic expressions to
locate entities in spatio-temporal, social and discoursal
context.
 First and second person pronouns, demonstratives, tense,
certain place and time adverbials, verbs such as come, go,
bring, take, and fetch.
 Such deictic expressions encode specific aspects of the
speech event and cannot be interpreted unless contextual
parameters are taken into account.
Introduction
 I prefer apples to oranges.
 I’ll see you there/then.
 Besides, she is a very nice person.
 Linguists have tended to establish categories of
deictics according to their function and the
contextual parameters they define.
 A number of observations seem to point to the
grounding of deixis on human perception and
image schematic structure as well as on the
interactive character of communication.
Introduction
 Buhler (1982[1934]) advocated the fusion and
intersection of perceptual and linguistic processes.
Deictic expressions refer to a deictic field of
language whose zero point is fixed by the person
who is speaking, the place of utterance and the
time of utterance (I, here, now, respectively). The
symbolic field comprises naming words which
function as symbols of meaning.
Introduction
 He also feels his body in relation to his visual
orientation, and uses it deictically. His body
feeling representation stands in relation to the
visual space.
 Hanks (1992) makes reference to an image
schematic figure-ground relation characterizing the
identification of a referent (figure) in relation to an
indexical origo (ground). Deictic reference
“organizes the field of interaction into a foreground
upon a background, as figure and ground organize
the visual field.” (Hanks 1992)
A Descriptive Analysis
 Truth value
 A woman with a baby in her arms is ill.
 I am ill.
 The truth value of a sentence does not rely
solely on the sense of the words in it, but
also depends on context.
A Descriptive Analysis
 Traditionally, by deixis is meant
 The location and identification of person,
objects, events, processes and activities
being talked about, or referred to, in relation
to the spatiotemporal context created and
sustained by the act of utterance and the
participation in it, typically, of a single
speaker and at least one addressee.
A Descriptive Analysis
 Person deixis: those that are used to refer to speaker and
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addressee (I, you, we)
Place deixis: those that refer to spatial context (here, there)
Time deixis: these that refer to temporal context (now, then,
verb tense markers)
Discourse deixis: those that refer to parts of unfolding
discourse (however, furthermore)
Social deixis: those that encode aspects of the social
relationship between speaker and addressee (你，您)
Perceptual deixis: There’s Harry.
Delivery deixis: Here’s your pizza.
A Descriptive Analysis
 An essential characteristic of all categories of
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deixis appears to be their egocentricity.
The speaker constitutes the deictic center of the
speech event.
Two kinds of usage of deictic terms: gestural
usage and symbolic usage.
I don’t agree with you but with you. (gestural)
This room is badly lit. (symbolic, requiring
knowledge of context)
A Descriptive Analysis
 Deictic and non-deictic usages of deictic
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terms?
Jane kicked her shoes off and then she
picked up a paper.
There we go again.
Would Lady Jane like some tea?
Johnny must go to bed now.
A Descriptive Analysis
 Person and social deixis
 Person deixis makes refers to the speaker as the
deictic center of the speech event and the
addressee. It encodes speech roles.
 Mrs. Jones should apply by tomorrow the latest.
(addressee is the lawyer, Mrs Jones is the hearer)
 It’s now closing time. Thank you for your custom
and we hope to see you again soon.
A Descriptive Analysis
 We encodes the roles of both speaker and
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addressee
我们男孩子不怕疼。
我们年青人朝气蓬勃。
Why don’t we go to the cinema?
Now we are going to put our pyjamas on.
Motherese, pseudo-inclusive
A Descriptive Analysis
 Time deixis
 She arrived last month.
 She arrived in November 1998.
 Coding time (CT) and receiving time (RT)
 Today is a holiday.
 Johnny broke his plate today.
 She is in the office now.
 Today youngsters behave strangely sometimes.
A Descriptive Analysis
 Time deixis in English is expressed through
tense marking on the verbs of utterances.
 Metalinguistic tense (m-tense) and linguistic
tense (l-tense)
 Whales are whales.
 The whales are ill.
A Descriptive Analysis
 Place deixis
 Localism: spatial expression are grammatically
and semantically more basic than non-spatial
expressions, because they serve as the basis of
other expressions.
 Nearly every preposition or particle that is locative
in English is also temporal, while prepositions that
are temporal in Modern English, e.g. for, since, or
till, derive historically from locatives.
A Descriptive Analysis
 The post office is two kilometers from the
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school.
The post office is 500 meters away.
She doesn’t like this coffee-table.
That woman is the judge.
She came home for lunch.
She went home for lunch.
A Descriptive Analysis
 Discourse deixis: deixis in text
 Discourse deixis is expressed with terms
that are primarily used in encoding space or
time deixis.
 In the last section we considered place
deixis.
 In the next chapter more will be said about
space.
 Discourse deixis and text cohesion are
interrelated.
A Descriptive Analysis
 Now, what is that you want?
 What do you want, then?
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM)
 It is assumed that as a background that some
entity exists and is present at some location in the
speaker’s visual field, that the speaker is directing
his attention to it, and that the speaker is
interested in its whereabouts but does not have
his attention focused on it…The speaker then
directs the hearer’s attention to the location of the
entity (perhaps accompanied by a pointing gesture)
and brings it to the hearer’s attention that this
entity is at the specified location. (Lackoff 1987)
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 A deictic expression is one that builds a
mental space in which the speaker and the
addressee are co-present at a given point in
time.
 The propositional structure of the deictic
ICM consists of an agent, the speaker,
drawing the patient’s (the addressee’s)
attention to an entity in terms of its (spatial)
relation to the agent.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 In these terms deixis may also be described as a
speech act which is realized by various
grammatical constructions. The use of these
constructions by a particular speaker automatically
authorizes her as the deictic center, the source of
the act. In other words, deictic constructions
construct the speaker as the deictic center.
Moreover, directing the addressee’s attention to an
entity in space implies that it is not already
focused on it, and carries the presupposition of
existence and definiteness of this entity.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 The image-schematic structure of the deictic
ICM appears to be that of CENTER VS.
PERIPHERY. This schema is based on our
experience of our bodies as having centers
(e. g. the trunk) and peripheries (e.g. fingers,
toes, hair, etc.). Centers are viewed as more
important than peripheries, which depend on
the centers, while centers do not depend on
peripheries.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 Given a center and a periphery, a NEAR-FAR
schema is also experienced as stretching along
our perceptual or conceptual perspective.
 The center defines the identity of the individual in
a way that peripheral parts do not. The structural
elements of this schema, then, are a spatial
domain, a center and a periphery.
 The center is obviously the speaker, whereas the
periphery carries the object of deixis as an entity in
space.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
The analysis of social deixis in terms of place deixis is consistent
with and confirms the spatialization-of-form hypothesis, which
requires a metaphorical mapping from physical space onto a
conceptual space, e. g. social space in the case in point. Cognitive
structure is understood in terms of image schemas plus a
metaphorical mapping.
 Conceptual, social space is understood in terms of the CENTER VS.
PERIPHERY image schema and a metaphorical mapping of
properties of physical space on properties of experienced social
reality.
 A social hierarchy is spatially understood in terms of the UP-DOWN
schema, as shown in expressions like “climbing up the social ladder”
or “downward mobility”.
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Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 The metaphorical understanding of time in terms
of spatial experience has long been attested in the
relevant literature. In English, time is structure in
terms of the TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT
metaphor with the future moving towards us, as
shown in expressions like ‘the time will come
when …’, or ‘the time has long since gone when…’
among others. Because of this metaphor, time
also receives a front-facing towards us while it
moves towards us, as shown in expressions like ‘ I
can’t face the future’ or ‘Let’s meet the future
head-on’.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 When time is constructed as a moving
object, it is also moving towards or away
from the speaker. In ‘the time will come’, the
object is moving with the speaker as the
goal or the destination.
 When the moving object reaches its goal,
the time will be ‘now’, central time, or coding
time.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 The conceptualization of time as a moving object
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is paired with the conceptualization of time as a
fixed location with respect to which the observer is
moving.
Passing of time is understood as motion of an
object over a landscape, that is, motion of the
observer towards a time span.
He passed the time happily.
We’re getting close to Christmas.
Christmas is coming. / We are coming up to
Christmas.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 Both instances of come are temporal, but in
the first case the time is moving towards the
observer, while in the second the observer is
moving towards the time span.
 Time deixis is understood as place deixis in
terms of the LINEAR ORDER image
schema.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 ‘you’ may take a more general reading.
 You can never tell what youngsters actually want
nowadays.
 ‘we’ may be used to exclude the addressee, or
even the speaker.
 We’d like to set up a nursery school within the
premises.
 In this country, we vote for Parliament every four
years.
Cognitive Structure of Deixis
 Deixis is internalized in terms of a cognitive model
and metaphorical mappings that motivate the
construction of conmmunicatively and
socioculturally defined roles human being take in
the speech event. The use of English deictic
system contributes to the internalization of the
social roles of interlocutors and the definition of
self in terms of the basic level concept of space
and the physical distance between entities in
space.
Deixis
End of Lecture
Thank you for your attention!