Table 5: Example of Indonesian Spatial Deixis
17
Locative Sini
Situ Sana
From the table above we can see that Indonesian spatial deixis can be found from three terms, they are sini, situ, and sana. Sini as a term that indicates
proximal to the speaker; but situ and sana as terms that indicate distal from the speaker.
c. Temporal Deixis
Temporal deixis is also called time deixis. The use of the proximal form ‘now’ as indicating both the time coinciding with the speaker’s voice being heard
the hearer’s ‘now’, the distal expression ‘then’ applies to both past and future time relative to the speaker’s present time. It is usually grammaticalized in deictic
adverbs of time, such as now, then, this week, this afternoon, yesterday, today, and many more. In other terms, time deixis refers to an expression that point to
certain period when the utterances produced by the speaker. All these expressions depend for their interpretation on knowing the relevant utterance time.
18
Time deixis is divided into some categories. According to Cruse, three kinds of time deixis are: before the moment of utterance, at the time of utterance,
and after the time utterance.
19
These three kinds have relation with grammatical features. The grammatical categories called tenses usually encode a mixture of
deictic time distinctions and aspectual distinctions, which are often hard to
17
Bambang Kaswanti Purwo, Deiksis dalam Bahasa Indonesia, Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1984
18
George Yule, op.cit., p.14.
19
Alan Cruse, Meaning in Language, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 321.
distinguish. In English, there are present tense as specifying that the state or event holds or is occurring during a temporal span including the coding-time; the past
tense as specifying that the relevant span held before coding-time; the future as specifying that the relevant span succeeds coding-time; the pluperfect as in He
had gone as specifying that the event happened at a time before an event described in the past tense; and so on.
20
All human languages have ways of locating events in time, even though they may difference from one to another.
21
The speakers of all languages are always at the center, as it were, of the situation of utterance. It should also be
observed that the participants in a situation of utterance not only assume the roles of speaker and hearer.
22
The principal reference point for temporal deixis is the present, the contextual time at which the utterance occurs. Time deixis consists of adverb of
time in the sequence “…yesterday…now…tomorrow….” The adverb also has function. It indicates to a specific time. The term
“yesterday” indicates to a day before today. The term
“now” indicates when the speaker says the utterance in the speech event. The term
“tomorrow” indicates to a day after today.
23
In written or recorded uses of language, it can distinguish that coding time from receiving time, and in particular languages there are often conventions about
20
Levinson, Deixis and Pragmatics, for Handbook of Pragmatics, Norway: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2004, p. 39.
21
Bernard Comrie. Tense Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 8.
22
John Lyons. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 275.
23
William Frawley. Linguistic Semantics, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992 p. 187.
whether one writes “I am writing this today, so you will receive it tomorrow” or something more like “I have written this yesterday so that you receive it today.”
24
Table 6: Examples of Temporal Deixis Past Tense
