Deixis

In linguistics, deixis (ˈdaɪksᵻs, ˈdeɪksᵻs) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence. Although this article draws examples primarily from English, deixis is believed to be a feature (to some degree) of all natural languages. The term's origin is deixis. To this, Chrysippus (c. 279 – c. 206 BCE) added the specialized meaning point of reference, which is the sense in which the term is used in contemporary linguistics. Charles J. Fillmore used the term "major grammaticalized types" to refer to the most common categories of contextual information: person, place, and time. Similar categorizations can be found elsewhere. Personal deixis, or person deixis, concerns itself with the grammatical persons involved in an utterance: (1) those directly involved (e.g. the speaker, the addressee), (2) those not directly involved (e.g. those who hear the utterance but who are not being directly addressed), and (3) those mentioned in the utterance. In English, the distinctions are generally indicated by pronouns (personal deictical terms are in italics): I am going to the movies. Would you like to have dinner? They tried to hurt me, but she came to the rescue. In many languages with gendered pronouns, the third-person masculine pronouns (he/his/him in English) are used as a default when referring to a person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant: To each his own.