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refer to any particular entity on all occasions of use, but it is a place-holder for some particular entity given by the context e.g. by a gesture.
Fillmore 1975 in Levinson 1983: 54 states that the importance of deictic information for the interpretation of utterances is best illustrated by what happens
when such information is lacking. Consider, for example, finding the following note on someone’s table:
For those who intend to consult their thesis, meet me two hours later.
From the example above, it can be said that because those who intend to consult their thesis don’t know when it was written, they cannot know when they
should consult their thesis. After all, most deictic phenomena are considered semantic since deixis is so
deeply grammatical. However, deixis belongs to the domain of pragmatics since it directly concerns the relationship between the structure of languages and the contexts
in which they are used. In “Pragmatics: A Multidiscuplinary Perspective”, Cummings 2005: 22
points out four forms of deixis namely person and social deixis, time deixis, place deixis, and discourse deixis.
a. Person and Social Deixis
According to Yule 1996: 10, person deixis operates on a basic three- part division namely pronouns for the first person ‘I’, second person ‘you’,
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and third person ‘he’, ‘she’. In many languages, these deictic categories of speaker, addressee and others are elaborated with markers of relative social
status. With the features such as social status, an attribute of the person, an account of social deixis must include some mention of person deixis
Cummings, 2005: 22. In other words, it can be said that person deixis relates to social deixis
since the person deixis is elaborated with markers of social status. The speaker which is included as person deictic category should pay attention to
whom heshe speaks to or whether the addressee has lower or higher status. The deictic function of vocative expressions is all too apparent –
language that is used to call, to summon or to address someone locates a particular referent within the spatiotemporal context of an utterance
Cummings, 2005: 22. To sum up, the vocative expressions deal with the particular referent
within the context of time and space in an utterance. Furthermore, the vocative expressions can also be shown to be socially constructed and hence
dependent on social deixis. Consider the following utterance: Hey, you fool, out from this place
The vocative expression “you fool” encodes a number of features of the social relationship between the speaker and the addressee. It is clear that
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the speaker in this case has some authority over the addressee. The speaker’s assault on the addressee’s intelligence suggests that the speaker possesses
power that the addressee lacks. Moreover, the use of the vocative indicates a lack of social distance between speaker and addressee. More details about
person deixis will be explained in part D of this chapter.
b. Time Deixis
Time deixis is most often encoded in English in adverbs such as “now” and “then” and in calendrical terms terms based around the calendar
like “yesterday”, “today”, and “tomorrow” Cummings, 2005: 24. Yet even as these terms encode different units of time, they can do so in a way that
refers to larger or smaller parts of those units. In short, the same time deixis may mean larger or smaller parts depending on the context of the utterances.
For examples, in the utterances: Yesterday was a busy day.
The ceremony was held yesterday.
The term “yesterday” constitutes a 24-hour unit of time. However, the “yesterday” of the first utterance refers to most, and probably all, of this 24-
hour unit, while the “yesterday” of the second utterance refers only to minutes within this unit. For other time adverbials, which do not encode a set unit of
time, reference can still be made to smaller or larger stretches of time.
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c. Place Deixis
