Deixis and distance

Introduction
 The more 2 speakers have in common, the less
language they will need to use to identify familiar
things
 This principle accounts for the frequent use of
words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ to refer to things in a
shared physical context (e.g. Would you like this
or that?)
 Exploring this basic aspect of language in use is
the study of deixis
Definition of deixis
 A technical term (Greek)
 It means: ‘pointing’ via language
 Any linguistic form used to accomplish this
‘pointing’ is called a deictic expression
 Deictic expressions are sometimes called
indexicals
 They are among the first forms to be
spoken by very young children
 They can be used to indicate:
 People (via person deixis): me, you
 Location (via spatial deixis): here, there
 Time (via temporal deixis): now, then
 All these expressions depend, for their
interpretation, on the speaker and hearer
sharing the same context
 Deictic expressions have their most basic
uses in face-to-face spoken interaction
where utterances are easily understood by
the people present, but may need a
‘translation’ for someone not right there
 E.g. I’ll put this here.
 Deixis is a form of reference tied to the speaker’s
context
 The most basic distinction between deictic
expressions being ‘near speaker’ vs. ‘away from
the speaker’:
 ‘near speaker’ (proximal terms): this, here, now
 ‘away from the speaker’ (distal terms): that, there,
then
 Proximal terms are typically interpreted in terms
of the speaker’s location (deictic centre)
 E.g. ‘now’ is generally understood as referring to
some point or period in time that has the time of the
speaker’s utterance at its centre
 Distal terms: ‘away from the speaker’
 BUT! in some languages, they can be used
to distinguish between ‘near addressee’ and
‘away from both speaker and addressee’
(e.g. Japanese)
 Person deixis
 Speaker (I) vs. addressee (you)
 To learn these deictic expressions, we have
to discover that each person in a
conversation shifts from being ‘I’ to being
‘you’ constantly (e.g. young children: ‘read
you a story’ when handing over a favourite
book)
 Person deixis operates on a basic three-part
division, exemplified by the pronouns 1st
person (‘I’- speaker), 2nd person (‘you’ -
addressee) and 3rd person (‘he, she, it’ -
other)
 In many languages these deictic categories are
elaborated with markers of relative social status
(e.g. addressee with higher social status vs.
addressee with lower status)
 Expressions which indicate higher status -
honorifics
 Discussions of the circumstances leading to the
choice of one of these forms rather than another:
social deixis
 A well-known example of social contrast encoded
within person deixis: distinction between forms
used for a familiar versus a non-familiar
addressee (the T/V distinction – Fr. Tu / Vous;
Germ. Du / Sie; Hun. te / ön, Rom. tu / Dvs.)
 The choice of one form will communicate sthg.
(not directly said) about the S’s view of his/her
relationship with the addressee:
 The higher, older, more powerful speaker will tend to
use ‘tu’ version to a lower, younger, less powerful
addressee by the ‘vous’ form in return
 exclusive ‘we’ (speaker + other(s), excluding
addressee), vs. ‘inclusive ‘we’ (speaker and addressee
included)
 We clean up after ourselves around here.
 General rule applying to the speaker + other(s)
 It’s up to the hearer to decide whether they consider themselves
to be a member of the community to whom the rule applies or
an outsider (what is that ‘more’ communicated than said)
 Spatial deixis
 In Contemporary English: two adverbs (here,
there);
 In older texts, and some dialects: a much larger
set of deictic expressions: yonder (more distant
from sp.); hither (to this place), thence (from that
place);
 Some verbs (come, go) retain a deictic sense
(used to mark movement toward or away from
the speaker)
 e.g. Come to bed! vs. Go to bed!
 Location from the speaker’s perspective can be
fixed mentally as well as physically
 Speakers temporarily away from their home location
continue to use ‘here’ to mean the (physically distant)
home location (as if they were still in that location)
 Speakers also seem to be able to project themselves
into other locations prior to actually being there (I’ll
come later = movement to addressee’s location)
 DEICTIC PROJECTION: e.g. accomplished via
dramatic performance: direct speech (to represent the
person, location, feelings of someone or something
else)
 E.g. a visit to a pet shop:
 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?’
 A truly pragmatic basis of spatial deixis is
actually psychological distance
 Physically close objects tend to be treated by the sp.
as psychologically close;
 Sthg. physically distant will generally be treated as
psychologically distant (e.g. ‘that man over there’)
 BUT! about a perfume: ‘I don’t like that’ (even if it is
physically close) – ‘that’ is invested with meaning in
a context, not a fixed, semantic meaning
 Temporal deixis
 The proximal ‘now’ indicates:
 The time coinciding with the speaker’s utterance
 The time of the speaker’s voice being heard (the
hearer’s ‘now’)
 The distal ‘then’ applies to both past and future
time relative to the sp.’s present time:
 November 22nd, 1990? I was in Scotland then. (past)
 Dinner at 8.30 on Saturday? OK, I’ll see you then.
(future)
 Free Beer Tomorrow.
The psychological basis of temporal deixis:
 We can treat temporal events as objects that move
toward us (into view) or away from us (out of
view)
 metaphor used of events coming toward the speaker
from the future (the coming week, the approaching
year) and going away from the speaker to the past (in
days gone by, the past week)
 We seem to treat the near or immediate future as
being close to utterance time by using the proximal
deictic ‘this’ (this weekend, this Thursday)
  Basic type of temporal deixis: choice of verb tense:
 Proximal form: present tense
 Distal form: past tense
 Past also used in conditional clauses (marking
events presented by the speaker as not being close
to present reality) – presented as deictically
distant from the speaker’s current situation (so
distant, that they actually communicate the
negative)
 If I had a yacht… (the speaker has no yacht)
 If I was rich… (the speaker is not rich)
 In temporal deixis the remote or distal form can be
used to communicate not only distance from current
time, but also distance from current reality or facts
(Had I known sooner…)