M.

Wisnu Faruq Al /1611600076

DEIXIS

Deixis is the study of deictic or indexical expressions in language, like You, now, today.
Deixis is pointing, showing, indicating, displaying, demonstrating, or referencing. So, deixis
introduces subjective, attentional, intentional and of course context-dependent properties into
natural languages. It can be thought about as a special kind of grammatical property, in turn
instantiated in the more familiar grammatical categories of person, tense, (deictic) place, and so
on. According to Yule (1996: 9), “ Deixis is a technical term…for one of the most basic things
we do with utterances…(,namely,) ‘pointing’ via language. Deixis is used for pointing something
. By deixis, we mean pointers or something that points to other things. In a sense, deixis can be a
synonym of language expressions.

According to Levinson (2004: 2), “there is the distinction between indexicality and
deixis, namely indexicality will be used to label the broader phenomena of contextual
dependency, and deixis the narrower linguistically-relevant aspects of indexicality”. Indexicality
is an essential part of their adaptive role in an evolutionary perspective on communication-
animal squeak and squawk because they need to draw attention to themselves or to some intruder
as stated by Hauser in Levinson (2004: 2). Deictic expressions is also called as indexicals or
indexical signs. As stated by Levinson (1983: 54), “ Deictic expressions is grammatical features
tied directly to the circumstances of utterance”. Deictics may contain both descriptive properties
and contextual variables in the one expression. For example, in Every time a visiting soprano
comes, we sing duets. The pronoun ‘we’ denotes a set consisting of the speaker and a variable
(Nunberg 1998). In addition, based on Levinson (2000: 177ff), “ Nearly all deictics are heavily
dependent on pragmatic resolution – “Come here” may mean come to this sofa or come to this
city according to context”. There are some examples of deictic expressions :
– Demonstratives : this, that
– 1st/ 2nd person pronouns : I, me, we, us, you
– Tense : present, past, future
– Specific time and place adverbs : now, then, soon, here

For instance, if I say “This is the largest walnut tree on the planet”. So, I could be
pointing to a tree some distance away, or we could just be standing underneath it, or I could be
touching a picture in a book, or if you were blind I could be running your hand over the bark, or I
could be telling you what we are about to see as we walk over the hill. So, deictic expressions is
language features that refer to the who, where and when of language. Words such as “you, here,
now”…describe the speaker’s position in space and time. It is words whose meanings change…
depending on the time or space in which they are uttered. According to Yule ( 1996: 16),
“Deictic expressions is expressions whose interpretation depend on the context, the speaker’s
intention, and that express relative distance”.
The interpretation of deictic expressions based on Yule (1976: 9) :
1. Depends on speaker and hearer sharing same context ;
2. Have their most basic use in face to face interaction ;
3. Most basic distinction :
– Proximal terms (near speaker) : this, here, now
– Distal terms (away from speaker) : that, there, then

The deictic centre is the speaker’s location. For example the word ‘now’. ‘Now’ is some
point or period in time with the time of the speaker’s utterance as it’s reference point.

The analysis of demonstratives is much complicated by their multi-functional role in

language – they are often used not only to point things out, but to track referents in discourse and
more generally to contrast with other referring expressions. Levinson (1983) and Diessel (1999)
stated that it has become traditional to distinguish amongs at least some of the following uses.
The relations between these uses are probably more complex than this taxonomy suggests, but it
is clearly not sufficient to distinguish simply between exophoric (deictic) and endophoric (non-
deictic) as the highest branch as both Levinson (1983: 68) and Diessel (1999: 6) assumed, since
discourse deixis is intra-text but deictic, and empathetic and recognitional uses are extra-text but
non-deictic. The following examples hopefully will show the distinction amongs them :
– “Give me that book” (exophoric: book available in the physical context)
– “I hurt this finger” (exophoric gestural: requires gesture or presentation of finger)
– “I like this city” (exophoric symbolic: does not require gesture)
– “I broke this tooth first and then that one next” (gestural contrastive)
– “He looked down and saw the gun: this was the murder weapon, he realized”. (transposed)
– “You are wrong. That’s exactly what she said”. (discourse deictic)
– “It sounded like this: whoosh”. (discourse deictic)
– “The cowboy entered. This man was not someone to mess with”. (anaphoric)
– “He went and hit that bastard”. (empathetic)
– “Do you remember that holiday we spent in the rain in Devon ?”. (recognitional)

Levinson (1983: 62) stated that there are three main types of deixis, namely person
(pronominal deixis), place (spatial deixis), time (temporal deixis).
1. Deixis of person (pronominal deixis) is the role of participants in the speech event in which
utterance is delivered. It refers to a person pointer or assigner. For example : I, you, He, She, etc.
There are tripartite system in Person Deixis (Pronominal Deixis) :
a. Speaker = I
b. Addressee = you
c. Other = he, she, it
2. Deixis of place (spatial deixis) is the encoding of spatial locations relative to the location of
the participants in the speech event. It means that it denotes a place pointer. For example : here,
there, come, go, this, that, up, down, north, inside, top, bottom, etc.
3. Deixis of time (temporal deixis) is the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the
time at which an utterance was spoken. It refers to the time pointer. For example: now, then,
tomorrow, tense, last year, in the future, etc.

There are the other types of deixis based on Levinson (1983: 62-63), namely discourse/
text deixis, empathetic deixis, and social deixis.
1. Discourse or text deixis is the encoding of reference to portions of the unfolding discourse in
which the utterance is located. It is self-explicit in that it is used primarily in a discourse unit and
for discourse purposes. For example: moreover, besides, anyway, well, to begin with, first, next,
last, etc. It is used to smooth the transitions or connections between different parts of a textual
unit.
2. Emphatic deixis is use of deictic expressions to show empathy. Example : I hate that !
3. Social deixis is the encoding of social distinctions that are relative to participant roles. It is for
the sake of politeness in social interaction. For example : Honorifics in Italian, ‘tu’= ‘you’ is
used for informal honorifics, ‘Lei’= ‘you’ is used for formal honorifics; in Central Java, ‘kue’=
‘you’ is used for the same age people or older to younger people, ‘njenengan’ = ‘you’ is used for
younger to older people.
For the status especially in social deixis is used to indicate higher or lower status relation
between speaker and addressee.
The examples of the status distinction :
– French : du, vous
– Italian : tu, Lei
– German : du, Sie
– Spanish : tu, Usted
– Javanese : njenengan, kue
Speaker with the higher social status, older, more powerful uses tu, du, njenengan with addressee
of lower social status, younger, less powerful.
Speaker with lower social status, younger, less powerful uses vous, Lei, Sie, Usted, kue with
addressee of higher social status, older, more powerful.

The questions and analysis:

1. What is the difference between anaphora and deixis ?
Answer : – Anaphora is a lower expenditure of cognitive effort for recovering the conceptual
content of the co-referring expression (more efficient) – the identity of the content is made plain
in advance. The Anaphora, in the linguistics sense, makes use of deictic expressions. For
example : “Sam went home because he was tired”. “He” is the anaphora expression referring to
“Sam”, but it’s also a deictic expression, i.e. it changes according to the context/subject.
– Deixis, on the other hand, is not necessarily related to anaphora. For example, there’s no
anaphora in this sentence. For example : “ You, you, and you come over here”. Those are just
deictic expressions referring to 3 different subjects, but no anaphora.
 2. What happens when the speaker is of higher social rank but younger ?
Anwser : According to Yule (1996: 11), in Spanish age wins. But in fact, in our country, it means
in Indonesia, the higher social rank wins. Although he or she is younger but has the higher social
rank, almost people will more respect her/ him rather than the older people that has the lower
social rank