Deixis and Distance

Deixis and distance

Deixis and distance

 BASIC CONCEPTS I 

 BASIC CONCEPTS I 

The phenomenon of deixisdeixis ('pointing/in('pointing/indicating' via language) constitutes dicating' via language) constitutes the singlemostthe singlemost obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in thethe structure of languages themselves

structure of languages themselves

any linguistic form used to accomplish this pointing is

any linguistic form used to accomplish this pointing is called acalled a deictic expressiondeictic expression (or (or 

indexical sign

indexical sign))

-- among the famong the first forms to irst forms to be used by be used by very young very young childrenchildren

-- used in face-to-face spoken used in face-to-face spoken interaction, to be easily understointeraction, to be easily understood by the people present od by the people present (but(but difficult for someone not right there and then or in

difficult for someone not right there and then or in darkness).darkness).  I'll put this here.

 I'll put this here.

 Meet me here a week from now with a

 Meet me here a week from now with a stick about this bigstick about this big  Listen, I’m not di

Deixis and distance

 BASIC CONCEPTS II 

If the semantic content of a sentence is identified with its truth conditions, then utterances with deictic elements cannot be assessed (without context information)

 I am the mother of Napoleon There is a man on Mars

How should indexicals be accomodated so that the notion of logical consequence can be applied to them?

a. John Henry McTavitty is six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds b. John Henry McTavitty is six feet tall

c. I am six feet tall and weigh 200 pounds d. I am six feet tall

while b. can be inferred from a., the only way for d. to be a valid inference from c. is if  they were uttered by the same speaker (need for pragmatic indices or reference points)

Deixis and distance

THE DEICTIC CENTER

• proximal vs.distal

there is a basic distinction between things 'near' or 'away from' the speaker 

 proximal terms: this, here, now distal terms: that, there, then

These terms are defined in relation to the deictic center: - central person is the speaker 

- central time is the time of utterance production

- central place is the speaker’s location at utterance time

- disourse center is the point which the speaker is currently at in the production of his/her utterance - social center is the speaker’s social status to which the status of the adressee(s)/referent(s) is relative

the structural distinctions between direct and indirect (reported) speech are reflected in the switch from proximal to distal forms

other languages may have more distinctions than English:

e.g., in Japanese demonstrative pronouns (‘this’ / ‘that’) will distinguish between 'that near the addressee' (<sore>) and 'that distant from both speaker and addressee' (<are>) with a third term being used for the  proximal 'this near the speaker' (<kore>)

Deixis and distance

 DEICTIC USAGE

gestural: terms used in gestural deictic way can only be interpreted with reference to an

audio-visual-tactile, and in general a physical, monitoring of the speech event This one’s genuine, but this one’s fake (with selecting gesture)

 He’s not the Duke. He is. He’s the butler.

Voici! (Presentative in French)

symbolic: symbolic usages of deictic terms require for their interpretation only knowledge

of the basic spatio-temporal parameters of the speech event (and occasionally  participant role, discourse and social parameters)

This city is really beautiful (general location is sufficient) You can all come with me if you like (set of potential addressees) We can’t afford a holiday this year  (general time)

!! deictic expressions can be used in a non-deictic function !!

Oh, I did this and that  There we go

Deixis and distance

 DEICTIC USAGE: EXERCISE

Identify whether the deictic expressions in the following utterances are used gesturally, symbolically or on-deictically

1 You, you, but not youare dismissed gestural

2 I met this weird guy the other day non-deictic

3 Let’s go now rather than tomorrow symbolic

4 This city stinks symbolic

5  Now that’s not what I said non-deictic

6 Move it from here to there gestural

7 This finger hurts gestural

8 What did yousay? symbolic

9 Hello, is Harrythere? symbolic

Deixis and distance

 PERSON DEIXIS I 

• each person in a conversation constantly shifts from being 'I' to being 'you'

 –  Children may go through stages of acquisition where this is problematic: Read you a story! • basic three-part division speaker, addressee, others (1., 2., 3. person)

• markers of relative social status, so-called honorifics, may be used (see also social deixis)  –  T/V distinction: familiar vs. non-familiar addressees (tu - vous, du - sie, tu- usted)

 –  higher status, older, more powerful speakers tends to use the familiar form toward a lower  status, younger, less powerful addressee.

 –  on-familiar forms express distance, are often of 3rd person origin

Would his highness like some coffee? Somebody didn't clean up after himself.

Deixis and distance

 PERSON DEIXIS II 

Inclusion/exclusion distinction:

• speaker and others without addressee vs. speaker and addressee included 'we'

 Let’s go to the movies

?Let’s go to see you tomorrow

 –  some languages grammaticalize this distinction, e.g. Fijian

'keimami'  we excl.

'keda'  we incl.

Vocatives (special address forms for names, titles, kinship terms) are noun phrases that refer 

to an addressee, but are not syntactically or semantically incorporated as the arguments of a  predicate (they are also set apart prosodically)

call/summons:  Hey you, you just scratched my car with your frisbee! address: The truth is, Madam, nothing is as good nowadays

summons: utterance/conversation-initial, independent speech acts (gestural)

Deixis and distance

SPATIAL DEIXIS I 

• locations can be specified relative to other objects or fixed reference points The station is 200 yards from the cathedral

Kabul lies at latitude 34 degrees, longitude 70 degrees

• locations can be deictically specified relative to the location of participants at the time of  speaking

 It’s 200 yards away

Kabul is 400 miles west of here

•  basic distinction: here/there - additional older/dialectal forms: yonder, hither, thence (the latter two including the notion of motion toward or away from the speaker)

• other languages:

 –  Tlingit has demonstratives for ‘this one right here’, ‘this one nearby’, ‘that one over there’, ‘that one way over there’

Deixis and distance

SPATIAL DEIXIS II 

Yet other languages do not organize demonstratives in this way (i.e., distance in concentric circles from a fixed deictic center), but with respect to contrasts between participant roles: • Latin: ‘hic’ (close to speaker), ‘iste’ (close to addressee), ‘ille’ (remote from speaker and

addressee)

• Turkish: ‘bu’ (close to speaker), ‘şu’ (close to addressee), ‘o’ (remote from speaker and addressee)

• Samal has a four-way distinction based on four kinds of participant role: (i) close to speaker, (ii) close to addressee, (iii) close to audience (other members of the

conversational group), (iv) close to persons present but outside the conversational group • In Australian and New Guinean languages there are also systems that produce large

arrays of demonstratives (‘upriver/downriver from speaker’, ‘visible/not visible to speaker’, ‘above/below/at level with the speaker’)

 some verbs of motion, e.g., come/go, retain a deictic sense when they are used to mark  movement toward ('Come to bed') or away from the speaker ('Go to bed')

Deixis and distance

SPATIAL DEIXIS III 

• location from the speaker's perspective can be fixed mentally as well as physically. Speakers temporarily away from their home location will often continue to use 'here' to mean the physically distant home location.

• Speakers are also able to project themselves into other locations prior to actually being in those locations, as when they say 'I'll come later' (= movement to the addressee's location)

Deictic Projection

 –  The phrase 'I am not here now' should be nonsensical. It is of course possible to say this on your answering machine, projecting that 'now' will apply to any time somebody calls and not to when the words are recorded (projecting one's presence into the future and a different location).

 –  Similar effect of indirect speech ('here' is not the actual location of the person telling the story)  I was looking at this little puppy in a cage with such a sad look on its face. It was like

'Oh, I'm so unhappy here, will you set me free?

Psychological Distance as the pragmatic basis of spatial deixis

 –   physical and psychological distance often correlate with each other, but deictic elements can  be used to express psychological distance (empathetic deixis) only ('I don't like that smell')

Deixis and distance

TEMPORAL DEIXIS I 

•  proximal 'now' indicates both the time coinciding with the speaker's utterance and the time of the speaker's voice being heard (the hearer's now)

• distal 'then' applies to both past and future time relative to the speaker's present time  November 22nd, 1963? I was in Scotland then.

 Dinner at 8:30 on Saturday? Okay, I'll see you then

• non-deictic temporal reference like calendar and clock time islearned later than deictic references such as ‘tomorrow’, ‘today’, ‘tonight’, ‘this week’

• all deictic expressions depend on knowing the relevant utterance time (Fillmore 1971).  –  time the utterance was made = coding time (CT)

 –  time the utterance is heard/read = receiving time (RT)

Deictic Simultaneity: CT = RT (normal verbal utterance situation)

 –  complication in written messages and pre-recordings of media programs  Back in an hour 

Free beer tomorrow

In this case a decision has to be made about whether the deictic center remains on the speaker  (and CT) or is projected on the addresse (and RT)

Deixis and distance

TEMPORAL DEIXIS II 

• the psychological basis of temporal deixis is similar to that of spatial deixis. Temporal events can be treated as objects that move toward or away from us ('the coming week', 'the approaching year' --- 'in days gone by', 'the past week')

This program is being recorded today, Wednesday April 1st , to be relayed next Thursday This program was recorded last Wednesday April 1st, to be relayed today

 I write this letter while chewing peyote  I wrote this letter while chewing peyote • choice of verb tense expresses temporal deixis

 –   present tense is proximal: 'I live here now'

 –   past/future are distal: 'I lived there then / I will be in London by then'  –  conditional/unlikely event also treated as deictically distant

Deixis and distance

 DISCOURSE DEIXIS

Discourse or text deixis (Fillmore 1975, Lyons 1977) deals with expressions within an

utterance that refer to portions of the unfolding discourse in which the utterance is located. Pff, pff, pff: that is what it sounded like

This is what phoneticians call creaky voice This sentence is not true

This subject will be addressed in the next chapter   I bet you haven’t heard this story

That was the funniest story I’ve ever heard 

Also included in disccourse deixis are expressions which signal an utterance’s relation to surrounding text (e.g., utterance-initial ‘anyway’)

CAUTION: a discourse-deictic expression refers to a linguistic expression or chunk of  discourse itself, but not to the same entity as a prior linguistic expression (see anaphor)

 A: That’s a rhinoceros  B: Spell it for me  A: That’s a rhinoceros  B: I like it 

Token Reflexivity

Discourse-deictic use of ‘it’

Deixis and distance

SOCIAL DEIXIS I 

Social Deixisdeals with the encoding of social distinctions that are relative to participant roles,

 particularly aspects of the social identities of and the relationship between speaker and addressee(s) or  speaker and some referent

Relational Social Deixis

(i) speaker and referent (e.g. referent honorifics) (ii) speaker and addressee (e.g. addressee honorifics) (iii) speaker and bystander (e.g. audience honorifics) (iv) speaker and setting (e.g. formality levels)

Honorifics: describing a relation concerninh relative rank or respect (Comrie 1976)

- other grammaticalized relationships: kinship relations, totemic relations, clan membership

Referent honorifics: respect conveyed by referring to the target of respect - T/V distinction (tu – vous etc.)

Addressee honorifics: respect conveyed without (necessarily) referring to the target

- Japanese/Korean: ‘the soup is hot’ with choice of linguistic alternates, e.g., for ‘soup’ to express respect for the addressee

complex speech levels (anything one says is sociolinguistic)

Audience honorifics: respect conveyed for participants in audience role or non-participating overhearers - Dyirbal alternative vocabulary in the presence of taboo relatives

Formality levels: different language use in particular formal settings

Deixis and distance

SOCIAL DEIXIS II 

authorized speakers: only certain typed of speakers may use particular words/morphemes

- Thai: ‘khráb’ politeness particle only used by men, ‘khá’ only by women - Japanese first pronoun only used by the emperor 

authorized recipients: only certain types of addresse may be addressed with certain words/morphemes titles of address (‘You Honor’, ‘Mr. President’)

- Tunica: pronouns differing with sex of addressee, e.g. two words for ‘they’ depending on whether one is speaking to a man or a woman

socially deictic information can be encoded anywhere in the linguistic system

lexicon (alternates/suppletives): e.g., Japanese (also weakly in English ‘elevated’ terms, e.g.

‘residence’ for ‘home’, ‘dine’ for ‘eat’, ‘lady’ for ‘woman’, ‘steed’ for  ‘stallion’

morphology (affixes, particles): Thai

 phonology (segmental, prosody): Basque, Tzeltal (honorific falsetto) mixtures of all elements: Javanese, Tamil, Madurese