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
Present Tense Future Tense
Yesterday Now
Tomorrow The past week
That time The coming week
In days gone by This time
The approaching year
Many languages in fact have no absolute deictic tenses
25
, although languages may pick up deictic interpretations by implicature. Yet other languages,
for example, Malay or Chinese, have no tenses at all.
26
In English, the present tense is the proximal form and the past tense is the distal form. Something having
taken place in the past, as in 1, is typically treated as distant from the speaker’s
current situation. Perhaps less obviously, something that is treated as extremely unlikely or impossible from the speaker’s current situation is also marked via the
distal past tense form, as in
27
2 1
I live here now. 2
I lived there then.
24
Laurence R. Horn, et.al. The Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
25
Bernard Comrie. op.cit., p. 63.
26
Levinson 2004, op.cit., p. 40.
27
Yule, op.cit., p. 15.
Table 7: Indonesian Temporal Deixis
28
2 1 0 1 2 3 4 Kemarin
dulu Kemarin Sekarang Besok
hari besok
lusa Tulat,
langkat Tubin,
tungging
d. Social Deixis
Social deixis is concerned with aspects of sentences, which reflect or establish or is determined by certain realities of the social situation in which the
speech act occurs. Levinson describes social deixis as the predetermination of social differences that are relative to participant-roles, mainly aspects of the social
correlation that is possessed between the speaker and addressees or the speaker and some referents.
29
Social deixis, however, truly cannot be separated from the concept of honorifics. Furthermore, honorifics is concerned with the relative rank or respect
between speaker, referent, and also bystander. Social deixis is sometimes encoded in person deixis, and it is related to the different social status higher and lower
between speaker and addressee. Moreover, it also deals with familiar and non- familiar addressee in some languages.
30
Social deixis has to do with the marking of social relationships in linguistic expressions, with direct or oblique reference to the social status or role
of participants in the speech event. Special expressions exist in many languages,
28
Bambang Kaswanti Purwo, loc. cit.
29
Levinson 2004, op.cit., p. 50.
30
George Yule, op.cit, pp. 10-11.
including the honorifics well known in the languages of S. E. Asia, like Thai, Japanese, Korean, and Javanese.
31
A fairly well-known example of a social contrast encoded within person deixis is the distinction between forms used for a familiar versus a non-familiar
addressee in some languages. This is known as the TV distinction, from the French forms ‘tu’ familiar and ‘vous’ non-familiar, and is found in many
languages including German ‘duSi’ and Spanish ‘tuUsted’. The choice of one form will certainly
communicate something not directly said about the speaker’s view of his or her relationship with the addressee. In those social contexts where
individuals typically mark distinctions between the social status of the speaker and addressee, the higher, the older, and more powerful speaker will tend to use
the ‘tu’ version to a lower, younger, and less powerful addressee, and be addressed by the ‘vous’ form in return. When social change is taking place, as for
example in modern Spain, where a young businesswoman higher economic status is talking to her older cleaning lady lower economic status, how do they
address each other? I am told that the age distinction remains more powerful than the economic distinction and the older woman uses ‘tu’ and the younger uses
’Usted’.
32
The Spanish non- familiar version ‘Usted’ is historically related to a form
which used to refer to neither first person speaker nor second person addressee, but to third person some other. In deictic terms, third person is not a direct
participant in basic I-you interaction and, being an outsider, is necessarily more
31
Levinson 2004, op.cit., pp. 50-51.
32
George Yule, op.cit., pp. 10-11.
distant. Third person pronouns are consequently distal forms in terms of person deixis. using a third person form, where a second person form would be possible,
is one way of communicating distance and non-familiarity.
33
e. Discourse Deixis
Levinson stated that discourse or text deixis concerns the use of expressions within some utterance to refer to some portion of the discourse that
contains that utterance including the utterance itself.
34
In other terms, discourse deixis is an expression used to refer to certain discourse that contains the utterance
or as a signal and its relations to surrounding text. In English, the deictic terms used by this deixis are “this” that refers to a forthcoming portion and “that” to a
preceding portion. In Ind onesia, “ini” refers to a forthcoming portion and “itu”
refers to a preceding portion. It can be seen from the following example: Indonesia-English translation
SL : O kalo gitu udah ini dong, lancar.
TL : Oh, in that case he’s already this, fluent in English.
Here the “proximal” demonstrative ini is used as a placeholder for the adjective lancar. The placeholder demonstratives in Indonesian may stand in for nouns and
adjectives or even verbs or parts of terms, not shown here, and that these placeholder “repairs” may be produced fluently without any indication of term
formulation trouble aside from the use of the demonstrative.
35
.
33
George Yule, op.cit., pp. 10-11.
34
Stephen C. Levinson, op cit, p. 85.
35
Nicholas Williams. Toward Anthropological Account of Deixis in Interaction: Ini and Itu in Indonesian Conversation Boulder: University of Colorado, June 2009 vol. 22, p. 9.
