Deixis

Deixis (from Greek deiktikos, "pointing") refers to words and expressions whose interpretation depends entirely on the context of utterance — who is speaking, to whom, when, and where. The sentence I'll meet you here tomorrow is meaningful only if you know who "I" is, who "you" is, where "here" is, and when "tomorrow" is. Levinson (1983, Pragmatics) provides the standard taxonomy.

Types of Deixis

Person deixis — I, you, we, they, my, your. These shift reference with every change of speaker. A major source of confusion in reported speech: "I will help you" becomes She said she would help him.

Place (spatial) deixis — here, there, this, that, come, go. This and that encode proximity to the speaker. Languages differ in how many spatial distinctions they encode (English: two; Japanese: three; some languages: more).

Time (temporal) deixis — now, then, yesterday, tomorrow, ago, next week. These anchor events relative to the moment of speaking. Tense itself is deictic — past tense locates events before the speech moment.

Discourse deixis — this, that, the following, the above, as I said. These point to parts of the discourse itself. This can refer forward (cataphoric) or backward (anaphoric): This is what I mean: ... vs I was late. That annoyed my boss.

Social deixis — encoding of social relationships: tu/vous (French), T/V distinctions, honorifics, titles. English has limited grammatical social deixis but extensive pragmatic social deixis (register choice, politeness strategies).

Challenges for L2 Learners

• Person deixis in reported speech — shifting pronouns and tenses when converting direct to indirect speech is one of the most persistent error sources at intermediate level.
• Spatial deixis — come/go and bring/take encode speaker-oriented perspective that differs across languages. A Vietnamese speaker may say "I will go to your house" where English expects "I will come to your house."
• Temporal deixis — tense-aspect systems vary radically across languages. Learners from tenseless L1s (Chinese, Vietnamese) must learn to encode temporal deixis grammatically rather than lexically.
• Discourse deixis — this vs that for referring to preceding text involves subtle pragmatic choices. Academic writers must master discourse-deictic reference: This suggests..., These findings indicate...

Deixis connects to Pragmatics (context-dependent meaning), Cohesion (reference as a cohesive device), and Anaphora and Cataphora (textual pointing).