Identification of the Problems

2. Scopes of Pragmatics

There are some scopes studied under the area of pragmatics. They include deixis, cooperative principle, implicature, presupposition and speech acts. a. Deixis According to Levinson 1983: 54, deixis essentially concerns the way in which languages encode or grammaticalise features of the context of utterance or speech event. Thus, the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance. Meanwhile, Yule 1996: 9 states that the term deixis comes from Greek used for one of the basic things people do with utterances that is pointing to an entity via language. To accomplish this ‘pointing’, one uses any linguistic form called a deictic expression. It is important to remember that this kind of referring is tied to the speaker’s context. Furthermore, Yule 1996: 9-14 divides deixis into three categories; person deixis, spatial deixis and temporal deixis. 1 Person Deixis Person deixis is used to indicate people and it operates on a basic three- part division, exemplified by the personal pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘we’, and ‘they’. There is a case that these deictic expressions are used to indicate relative social status. Expressions used to indicate higher social status are described as honorifics. The use of honorifics is influenced by the circumstance where the conversation takes place. This leads to the choice of using one of the forms rather than another which is known as social deixis. The TV distinction from French that contrasts the form used for familiar versus a non-familiar addressee is an example of social deixis. 2 Spatial Deixis Spatial deixis is related to the concept of distance. This type of deixis is used to point to a location where an entity being referred to is in the context. The demonstrative adverbs ‘here’ and ‘there’ are such examples of spatial deixis as well as the demonstrative adjectives ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, and ‘those’. To understand how to use spatial deixis is related to the speaker’s ability to project himself or herself into a location at which he or she is not yet present. A fairly well-known example is the use of “here” on telephone answering machines: “I’m not here at the moment”. Moreover, location from the speaker’s perspective can be fixed mentally as well as physically although it is believed that the basis of spatial deixis is psychological distance. Normally, physical and psychological distance will be treated the same. Physically close objects will generally be treated by the speaker as psychologically close. On the other hand, something that is physically away from the speaker will tend to be treated as psychologically distant. However, sometimes the speaker may wish to treat something that is physically close as psychologically distant. For example, when one sniffs a perfume and says “I don’t like that”. 3 Temporal Deixis The last type of deixis is temporal deixis. This deixis is used to indicate time. ‘Now’, ‘then’, ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘yesterday’ are examples of