Deixis in Modern Linguistics and Outside

Abstract

In many ways modern linguistics is one of the most remarkable and successful scientific innovations of the twentieth century. It is related only to linguistic studies, but to other disciplines as well such as: philosophy, cognitive psychology, anthropology and literary studies. And to the present day modern linguistics is held up as a model of scientific innovation to other disciplines in the humanities. Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation. It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social status between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit. Deixis belongs within the domain of pragmatics because it directly concerns the relationship between the structure of language and the context in which they are used. (Levinson 83, p. 55). 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 fall into three categories: Person deixis (you, us etc), spatial deixis (here, there), and temporal deixis (now, then).

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2012.v2n4p87