Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of

English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

Lecture 2

• Context
• Deixis
• Reference

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1. Context
• Here are four subareas of context.
 physical context
 epistemic context
 linguistic context
 social context

Pragmatics 1
Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

Analyse the context: Example

• "Excuse me, could you please speak up
a bit more? I missed what you said."

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2. Deixis
• Deixis is a technical term (from Greek) which means
‘pointing’ via language.
• Any linguistic form used to ‘point’ is a deictic expression, or
indexicals.
• Deixis usually requires a speaker and a hearer sharing the
same context.
• The more two speakers have in common, the less
language they will need to identify familiar things.

Pragmatics 2
Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

Deixis
• In deixis, the speaker constitutes the deictic center
– ‘near speaker’ or proximal terms (this, here, now)
– ‘away from the speaker’ or distal terms (that , there, then).
• Deixis can be roughly categorized into five types
(Fillmore, 1971):
– deixis of person (personal deixis),
– deixis of place (spatial deixis),
– deixis of time (temporal deixis),
– deixis of discourse (discoursal deixis), and

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– deixis for social purposes (social deixis).

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Person deixis
• exemplified by the pronouns
– first person ‘I’, second person ‘you’, and third person ‘he, she, it, they’,
corresponding to three deictic categories of speaker, addressee and other(s).

• The proximal forms are ‘I’ and ‘you’. The distal forms are
‘he, she, it’.
• In English, there is no exclusive ‘we’ (speaker plus
other(s), excluding the addressee) and inclussive ‘we’
(speaker and addressee included) distinction.

Pragmatics 3
Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

Spatial deixis
• Proximal form: ‘here’. Distal form: ‘there’. Other examples:
here, there, this, that, up, down, north, inside, top, bottom …
• Some verbs of motion have a deictic sense, such as
‘come’ and ‘go’.
• Location from speaker’s perspective does not always mean
physical location. Sometimes it refers to mental location.
This is called deictic projection.
e.g. I’ll come later (movement to addressee’s location). I’m

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not here now. (telephone recorded message)

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Temporal deixis
• Proximal form: ‘now’. Distal form: ‘then’ (which applies to both past and
future). Other examples: yesterday, today, tonight, this week, next month,
from now on, in the future, last year....
• Calendar time and clock time are forms of non-deictic temporal reference.
In English, the choice of verb tense is a basic type of temporal deixis. The
• present tense the proximal form and the past tense is the distal form.
The distal form is used to communicate not only distance from current time,
but also distance from current reality or facts.
•

Pragmatics 4
Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

Discoursal deixis

• A discoursal deixis is self-explicit in that it is used

primarily in a discourse unit and for discoursal
purpose.
• Discoursal deixis employed a lot for textual
coherence or as a procedural indicators. For
instance, ‘to begin with, first, next, in the
following paragraph, last but not least, etc.’

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Social deixis
• In some languages (Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean), the
deictic categories of speaker, addressee, and other(s) are
elaborated with markers of relative social status.
– Expressions which indicate higher status are described as
honorifics.
– The discussion of the circumstances which lead to the choice of one of
these forms rather than another is described as social deixis.
• Apparently social deixis is for the sake of politeness in
social interaction.
– the French “tu” and “vous”.

Pragmatics 5
Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

3. Reference
• We use language to refer to persons and things, directly or
indirectly.
• Reference is the relationship that holds between a word or
expression and the objects it refers to (called referent).
• Reference is variable and utter-dependent.
• In other words, reference is a relationship between parts of a
language and things outside in the language (in the world). i.e.
by means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the
world (including persons) are being talked about.

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Reference
• Every expression that has meaning has sense,
but not every expression has reference.

• The reference of an expression vary according to

the circumstances (time, place, etc.) in which the
expression is used, or the topic of the conversation
in which the expression is used.

• Two different expressions can have the same

referent.

Pragmatics 6
Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

Types of reference
• There are two types of referenceHalliday and
Hassan (1976).
a. Endophora: textual
– Anaphora (anaphoric reference): to preceding text.
– Cataphora (cataphoric reference): to following text
b. Exophora (exophoric reference): situational.
e.g. - It is very nice. (It = the room)
- They are very active (They = The children)
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Anaphora - Anaphoric reference
• Anaphora is the use of a word or a group of words which refer
back to another part of the text.
E.g. The students were excited about their first encounter with a class.
They had prepared carefullty, but they still didn’t know how they would
cope in front of thirty hormonal teenagers.
• Anaphoric reference can be intrasentential (within a
sentence) or intersentential (across sentences)
– The President has set himself a difficult task
– The bill, which Daniel said he drafted personally
– Monte Brooks died on Thursday. He lived at 45 Elizabeth Street.

Pragmatics 7
Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS – VNU

Cataphora - Cataphoric reference

• Cataphora is the use of a word or a phrase which refer forward to
another word or phrase which will be used later in a text or
conversation.
E.g.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man possession of a
good fortune muat be in want of a wife.

My reasons are as follows. One, I am out of money ...

Here is the news. The Prime Minister has ....
• Anaphoric is more common that cataphoric.
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Pragmatics 8