EXERCISE: Lecture 1 - Context, Deixis

Exercise 1: Identify context

“Dispatcher: 911 What's the nature of your emergency?
Caller: My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart”
Dispatcher: Is this her first child?
Caller: No, you idiot! This is her husband!
Physical: on the phone
Epistemic: call 911 (have emegency => call 911 is common knowledge of the caller), ask the detail
before sending help (common act of the dispatcher)
Linguistic: this – the wife’s first prenancy, her – the wife
Social: strangers

Exercise 2: Correct mistakes in the following sentences

1. In spatial deixis, the proximal forms are ‘I’ and ‘you’. The distal forms are ‘he, she, it’. Each
person in a conversation shifts from being ‘I’ to being ‘you’ occasionally.
2. “here” is distal form. “there” is promixal form. Ngược lại
3. Location from speaker’s perspective sometimes refers to physical (X) mental location. This
is called deictic projection: “This is Anna’s number. I am not home at the moment. Could
you call back later?”
4. “to begin with, first, next, in the following paragraph, last but not least” are temporal (X)
discoursal deixis.

Exercise 3
Decide whether the following statements are True (T) or False (F)
1. Deixis is clearly a form of interpreting that is tied to the speaker’s context. T
2. People only use “then” as a distal form in the past tense. F
3. “Sunday, November 9th” is a form of deictic temporal reference.
4. People use temporal deixis with the aim of politeness in communication. T (vì verb tense
như could you help thì nghe lịch sự hơn)
5. The speaker + listener have to share the same context in order to be interpreted correctly. T

Exercise 4. Identify deictic expressions in the following sentences

1. He (person deixis) will go (spatial) there (spaticial) with me (person).
2. They (person) tried (temporal?) to hurt me (person), but (discoursal) he (person) came
(temporal + spatial) to the rescue.
3. She (person) was sitting over there (spatial).
4. It (personal) is raining out (spatial) now (temporal), but (discoursal) I (person) hope
(temporal) when you (person) read this (spatial – ko biết n là gì, chỉ biết là nó trong tầm tay
ng nói) it (person) will be sunny.
5. I (person) enjoy (temporal) living in this city (personal).
Exercise 5 . Decide types of deixis
1. Sunday? Ok. I (person) will see you (person) then (temporal)
2. Yesterday (temporal) she (person) went to school at 7am.
3. I (personal) had a holiday there (spatial) last summer. (temporal)
4. Here (spatial) is a good spot; it is too sunny over there. (spatial)

Exercise 6. Matching

1. Personal Deixis C A. demonstrated by some proximal forms some verbs of motion and
some location from speaker’s perspective
2. Spatial Deixis A B. Demonstrated by proximal form, temporal deictic expressions verb
tense and distal form
3. Temporal Deixis B C. Demonstrated by the pronouns for first person ‘I’, second person
‘you’, and third person ‘he, she, it, they’