Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

deixis: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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deixis1 CONSTRUCTDeixisBÜHLER · POINTING WORDS

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Linguistics and pragmatics

Words whose reference depends on the context of utterance

Karl Bühler's 1934 Sprachtheorie gave deixis its modern form, describing a deictic field (in his German, the Zeigfeld) that every utterance builds around an origo, the here-and-now zero point defined by who is speaking, when, and where. Charles Fillmore's 1971 lectures and Stephen Levinson's 1983 Pragmatics then established deixis as a standard category of linguistic pragmatics. Deixis is linguistic pointing: the use of expressions whose reference cannot be settled from the words alone but only by knowing the situation in which they are spoken, so that I, you, here, there, now, then, this, and that each pick out a different thing on each occasion of use. What makes deixis a landmark of the field is that it is one of the places where grammar directly encodes the speech situation itself, organised into person deixis (the participants), place deixis (locations relative to the speaker), time deixis (moments relative to the moment of speaking), and the further categories of discourse and social deixis.[1][2][3]

Unit
A category of linguistic expressions (pronouns, demonstratives, spatial and temporal adverbs, tense) whose interpretation is anchored to the speech situation
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Identified by testing whether an expression's referent shifts with the context of utterance (speaker, time, place), then classified into person, place, time, discourse, and social deixis

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Nearby constructs

reference3 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, three constructscontext4 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsimplicature1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. Bühler, K. (1934). Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Gustav Fischer.
  2. Fillmore, C. J. (1997). Lectures on deixis. CSLI Publications. (Original lectures delivered 1971) ISBN 9781575860077
  3. Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813313

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