Deixis

Personal deixis Spatial deixis Temporal deixis

The term 'Deixis' comes from the Greek deiktikos (=“able to show”). This is related to Greek dèiknymi (dyke-nimmy) meaning “explain” or “prove”. The standard pronunciation has two syllables (dyke-sis) while the adjective form is deictic (dyke-tik).
According to Stephen Levinson:
“Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode...features of the context of utterance ... and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.”
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. It is often and best described as “verbal pointing”, that is to say pointing by means of language. The linguistic forms of this pointing are called deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic words; they are also sometimes called indexicals.
Deictic expressions include such lexemes as:
• Personal or possessive pronouns (I/you/mine/yours),
• Demonstrative pronouns (this/that),
• (Spatial/temporal) adverbs (here/there/now),
• Other pro-forms (so/do),
• Personal or possessive adjectives (my/your),
• Demonstrative adjectives (this/that),
• Articles (the).
Deixis refers to the world outside a text. Reference to the context surrounding an utterance is often referred to as primary deixis, exophoric deixis or simply deixis alone. Primary deixis is used to point to a situation outside a text (situational deixis) or to the speaker's and hearer's (shared) knowledge of the world (knowledge 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:
• Anaphoric deixis is backward pointing, and is the norm in English texts. Examples include demonstrative pronouns: such, said, similar, (the) same.
• Cataphoric deixis is forward pointing. Examples include: the following, certain, some (“the speaker raised some objections...”), this (“Let me say this...”), these, several.
Deictic expressions fall into three categories:
• Personal deixis (you, us),
• Spatial deixis (here, there) and
• Temporal deixis (now, then).
Deixis is clearly tied to the speaker's context, the most basic distinction being between near the speaker (proximal) and away from the speaker (distal).
• Proximal deictic expressions include this, here and now.
• Distal deictic expressions include that, there and 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” (John 18.40) 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 St. John's writing, “I'm telling you now, that Barabbas was (not now but at the time in the past when these events happened) a thief”.
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.
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...”).
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”.
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).

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Pragmatics waste-basket

Mey( 2001) gives us a full account of how pragmatics developed from the “waste-basket of semantics” into an independent and important domain of the linguistic research.
At the beginning, the semantics was called the “waste-basket of syntax”. In the late fifties and early sixties, linguists tried to make linguistics a science. Thus they applied many mathematical methods to the linguistic study. Linguistics was ideally considered as an algebra of language. In the mid-fifties, Chomsky developed his famous theory of generative-transformational grammar. Although he knew the domain of his research is somewhat limited, he concentrated his attention on grammar and pay no attention to the study of meaning. In this way, semantics came to be called the “waste-basket of syntax”. In the early seventies, some linguists began to try to turn the study of meaning into the foundation of the linguistic study instead of syntax. Semantics mainly concerns about the conditions under which a sentence could be true or false. In the semantic research, linguists found that many language phenomena could be explained by semantic theory, but these phenomena didn’t attract much attention at that time. All their unsolved questions were thrown into a new basket, pragmatic basket. Some natural language does make sense, but we can’t prove it to be true. These problems kept bothering the linguists, but were left to be unnoticed. Later these unsolved questions became the main items of the pragmatic study. In this sense, pragmatics became the waste basket of semantics.  
“In the Chomskyan linguistic tradition, well-formedness plays the role of the decision-maker in questions of linguistic ‘belonging’: a language consists of a set of well-formed sentences, and it is these that ‘belong’ in the language; no others do.”(Mey, 2001:25). In 1968, Lakoff published an article, entitled “Presupposition and relative well-formedness”. Lakoff , for the first time, publicly rejects in writing the formal-logic criterion of syntactic “well-formedness”. Chomsky considers this criterion as the ultimate standard to judge a linguistic production. However, what we perceive as correct in the real communication often collides with the correctness as prescribed by some grammarians. For example, according to English grammar we should us who when we are dealing with a noun which is human (and naturally animate), whereas we use which for a noun-human (possibly also non-animate) referent (Mey, 2001:25). But sometimes we don’t obey the rule in the ordinary language. For example, we usually use who to refer to our motherland or our pet. If not, it would be unacceptable.
The semantics and pragmatics may be somewhat alike in terms of the subject of the research. Both of them deal with the meaning, but what the semantists only concern about is whether the sentence is true or false. Then some problems arise. Some sentences don’t have true value, but it does make sense in the natural language in a certain situation. Some sentences have the same ‘true conditions’(that’s to say they are logically equivalent), but these sentences clearly don’t have the same meaning. Some semantists noticed these problems, but they just left them unsolved. Only when we take the language user and the context into consideration, can we find the answers to these questions. Later, these unsolved questions became the main issues of the pragmatic study.
Concerning the relationship between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, semantics was once regarded as the waster-basket of syntax, while pragmatics was once called the waster-basket of semantics. From syntax to pragmatics, the domain of the linguistic research is enlarged step by step and the study becomes more and more practical. In fact, syntax is the foundation of syntax, and pragmatics is based on the research of syntax and semantics. And linguistics gradually develops into a versatile subject covering almost every aspect of knowledge concerning language.