2.

MICROPRAGMATICS
A. DEIXIS
B. B. IMPLICIT MEANING
(PRESUPPOSITIONS)
A melamed (Hebrew teacher) discovering that he
had left his comfortable slippers back in the house,
sent a student after them with a note for his wife.
The note read: “Send me your slippers with this
boy”. When the student asked why he had written
‘your’ slippers, the melamed answered: ‘Yold!
(Fool) If I wrote ‘my’ slippers, she would read ‘my
slippers’ and would send her slippers. What could I
do with her slippers? So I wrote ‘your’ slippers,
she’ll read ‘your’ slippers and send me mine.”
 DEIXIS
• It is the anchoring of language use in a real world by
pointing at variables along some of its dimensions
(indexicals):
• Person deixis (social deixis) – the speaker (I);
the addressee (you); the others (he, she, it)
• Time deixis ( with ‘now’ as the conventional
deictic centre)
• Spatial deixis (with ‘here’ as the conventional
deictic centre)
• Discourse deixis (cohesion and coherence devices
in a text)
 PERSON DEIXIS
HONORIFICS
• Person deixis operates on a basic three part division, the
speaker (I), the addressee (you) and other(s) (he, she,
it).
• in many languages these deictic expressions are
elaborated with markers of social status Yule (1996) .
Expressions which indicate higher status are described
as honorifics (social deixis).
• For example, in French and Romanian there are two
different forms that encode a social contrast within
person deixis, ‘tu’ (tu) and ‘vous’(dumneavoastra). This
is known as T/V distinction.
 PERSON DEIXIS
• Using a third person form, where a second person would
be possible, is one way of communicating distance. This
can also be done for humorous or ironic purposes, as in:
‘Would his highness like some coffee?’
• The distance associated with third person forms is also
used to make potential accusations less direct, as in:
Somebody didn’t clean up after himself.
• There is also a potential ambiguity in the use in English of
the first person plural. There is an exclusive we (speaker
plus others, excluding addressee) and inclusive we
(speaker and addressee included), as in the following
possible reply to the accusation:
We clean up after ourselves around here.
 DEICTIC PROJECTION
• Deictic projection= speakers being able to project
themselves into other locations, time or shift person reference.
Eg. via dramatic performances, when using direct speech to
represent the person, location and feelings of someone else.
E.g.: 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?’ (taken from Yule, 1996:13)
• All indexical expressions refer to certain world conditions,
either subjective or objective in nature. The following story,
borrowed from Levinson 1983:68) is meant to illustrate the
importance of having the right point of view, and how one can
anticipate the way people will construe the world in terms of
their point of view.
 TEMPORAL DEIXIS
• One basic type of temporal deixis in English is in the
choice of verb tense, which has only two basic forms,
the present and the past (the proximal and the
distal). The past tense is always used in English in
those if-clauses that mark events presented by the
speaker as not being close to present reality.
• E.g. If I had a yacht…(source: Yule, 1996:15)
• The idea expressed in the example is not treated as
having happened in the past. It is presented as
deictically distant from the speaker’s current situation.
So distant, that it actually communicates the negative
(we infer that the speaker has no yacht).
 SPATIAL DEIXIS

• The concept of distance is relevant to spatial

deixis, where the relative location of people and
things is being indicated. Contemporary English
makes use of two adverbs, ‘here’ and ‘there’, for
the basic distinction. Some verbs of motion,
such as ‘come’ and ‘go’, retain deictic sense
when they are used to mark movement toward
the speaker (‘Come to bed’) or away the
speaker (‘Go to bed’).
 TASK
Identify indexicals in the
following text
1. Debby: Go anywhere today?
2. Dan: Yes, we went down to Como. Up by bus, and back
by hydrofoil.
3. Debby: Anything to see there?
4. Dan: Perhaps not the most interesting of Italian towns,
but it’s worth the trip.
5. Debby: I might do that next Saturday.
6. Jane: What do you mean when you say perhaps not the
most interesting of Italian towns?
7. Jack: He means certainly not the most interesting…
8. Dan: Just trying to be polite.
 IMPLICIT MEANING
Study the following sign, appearing at selected private
parking sites throughout the Greater Chicago area
(Mey, 1993:15). What does this sign tell you
explicitly? And implicitly?
_________________________________________
ALL UNAUTHORIZED VECHICLES
WILL BE TOWED BY LINCOLN
TOWING SERVICE TO 4884 N.CLARK
FEE $80.00 CASH,
VISA & MASTER CHARGE ACCEPTED
PHONE 561-4433
 IMPLICIT MEANING

=what can be meant or communicated

beyond what is explicitly or literally said, by
means of presuppositions, implications and
implicatures
• Conventional means for conveying
implicit meaning:
PRESUPPOSITIONS
 PRESUPPOSITIONS
= implicit meaning that must be pre-supposed,
understood, taken for granted for an utterance to make
sense.
• a. Existential presuppositions :
Presuppose the existence, at a given place and/or
time, of entities in the real world (eg. possessives,
definite NPs
Eg: The King of France is talking to Napoleon
said at this time in history and using the present tense,
is devoid of real meaning because the existential
presuppositions carried by the referring expressions ‘The
King of France’ and ‘Napoleon’ are not satisfied.
b.Factive presuppositions

A number of verbs (know, realise, regret) or

phrases invoving be aware, be glad
Eg:
• She didn’t realise he was ill. (He was ill)
• We regret telling him (We told hem)
• I wasn’t aware that she was married. (She was
married)
• I am glad that it’s over (It’s over).
 c. Non-factive
presuppositions
• I dreamed that I was rich (I wasn’t rich)
 d. Lexical presuppositions
The use of one form with its asserted
meaning is conventionally interpreted
with the presupposition that another
(non-asserted) meaning is understood.
Eg. manage (presupposing tried)
• He stopped smoking (He used to smoke)
• They started complaining (They weren’t
complaining before)
 e. Structural presuppositions

Some sentence structures conventionally

presuppose that part of the structure is
already assumed to be true.
Eg. wh-constructions
• When did you leave (You left)
• Where did you buy the bike (You bought
the bike).
 TASKS
Analyse the following utterances in terms of
presuppositions:
• I regret the year of prosperity and peace has
ended.
• The UN managed to bring about peace.
• A time of prosperity and peace will return.
• What the UN did was to bring about peace in
Bosnia.
• 1996, which was a year of prosperity and peace,
will be remembered forever.