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CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. Deixis in Semantics and Pragmatics
Semantics and pragmatics is the study of meaning in language. According to Kreidler, semantic is the study of how languages organize and
express meaning, and pragmatics is another branch of linguistics that is concerned with meaning.
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Meanwhile Levinson state that semantic is the study of ‗the relations of signs to the object to which the signs are applicable‘,
and pragmatics is the study of the relation of signs to interpreters.
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Pragmatics and semantics can be viewed as different parts, or different aspects, of the same general study. Both are concerned with people‘s ability to
use language meaningfully. While semantics is mainly concerned with a speaker‘s competence to use the language system in producing meaningful
utterances and processing comprehending utterances produced by others, the chief focus of pragmatics is a person‘s ability to derive meanings from
specific kinds of speech situations —to recognize what the speaker is referring
to, to relate new information to what has gone before, to interpret what is said from background knowledge about the speaker and the topic of discourse, and
to infer or ‗fill in‘ information that the speaker takes for granted and doesn‘t bother to say.
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Without some semantic knowledge of the language we wouldn‘t be able to explain the difference in meaning between I and you, but
7
Charles W. Kreidler, Introducing English Semantics New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 3-18
8
Stepen C. Levinson , Cognitive anthropology London: Cambridge University Press, 1995 p.1
9
Kreidler, 1998, op.cit, pp. 18-19
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without some pragmatic knowledge of context we would never be able to know who is being referred to.
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Deixis concerns the ways in which languages express features of the context of utterance or speech event in a different way. It concerns ways in
which the interpretation of utterance depends on the analysis of that context of utterance. Deictic information is important for the interpretation of utterance.
Deixis helps semantics to better analyze the context of an utterance. If semantics is taken to include all conventional aspects of meaning, then
perhaps most deictic phenomena are probably considered semantic in Levinson‘s point of view.
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Accoridng to explanation above, it can be conclude that deixis belongs to the domain of pragmatics, because it directly concerns the relationship
between the structure of languages and the contexts in which they are used.
B. Context
The term context is defined by Mey as the surrounding, in the widest sense, that enable the participants in the communication process to interact,
and that make the linguistic expressions of their interaction intelligible.
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Pragmatics which uses context, can describe the phenomenon of the language such as, deixis, implicatures, presupposition, and speech act. Context
10
Siobhan Chapman, Pragmatics New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 40
11
Levinson, 1995, op.cit, p. 34
12
F.X. Nadar. Pragmatik dan Penelitian Pragmatik. Yogyakarta: Graha Ilmu, 2009 p. 3
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