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Deixis as 
a Significant Element 

of Human Communication

The continued interest in deixis as a linguistic andcognitive phenomenon proves the fact of its being
in the mainstream of linguistic thought. It is widely
recognized among linguists that this linguistic category plays
a paramount role in the use and understanding of everyday
language. Given the great importance of deixis in
psychological, philosophical and linguistic approaches to the
analysis of language, there has been surprisingly little
descriptive work in the area; hence the lack of adequate
theory and framework for analysis.

The linguistic phenomenon of deixis is a fundamental
element of human communication. Language is directed

towards the other. There are two basic speech act roles, the current speaker and
hearer/addressee. They are opposed to the others, which are opposed to a negatively
defined non-person category. The deictic system grammaticalizes the roles of
participants by different means and primarily by pronouns: typically a first person
singular pronoun is used for the speaker, second person pronouns for addressee(s) and a
third person pronoun for a category 'neither-speaker-nor-addressee(s)'. Speakers use
pronouns in order to direct the attention of the addressee to something or someone.
Usually this act of reference is an integral part of a speech act, or more generally of a
communicative exchange. 

The main function of the classes of deictic words in a linguistic system is that of
indexing specific aspects of the communication act. Deixis concerns the encoding of
many different aspects of the circumstances surrounding the utterance with the utterance
itself. Deictic elements link two different kinds of situations: the so-called denotational
situation, i.e. what is said in an utterance, to the speech situation, i.e. when, where and
by whom they are used, thus encoding both the pragmatic and semantic functions of
language.The correlation of these two kinds of situations along different parameters has
been repeatedly pointed out by different scholars. 

We can say that 'deixis' is the name given to categories of lexicon and grammar
that are controlled by certain details of the communicative situation in which the
utterances are produced. These details traditionally include the identity of the
participants (the speaker and the hearer) in the communicative act, their location and
orientation in space, and the time at which the utterance containing the deictic
expression is produced. 

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Yelena Yerznkyan



While interacting speaker and hearer share a jointly established aim. For
understanding to be successful between communicating partners both the speaker and
the addressee need to be simultaneously engaged in cognitive processess within which
they must be similarly oriented. Deixis assumes a special function in the coordination of
cognitive representation: it can be understood as a communicative procedure in which
the speaker focuses the attention of the addressee by means of verbal expressions and
gestures. 

The idea that utterances are basically rooted in the actual speech situation was first
systematically developed by Karl Bühler in his classical work on the psychological and
linguistic foundations of the theory of deixis (Bühler 1934: 113). In this pioneering work
K.Bühler maintains that deictic expressions refer to what he calls the indexical field of
language (Zeigfeld der Sprache), whose zero point - the 'origo' in his terminology - is
fixed by the person who speaks, by the place of utterance, and by the time of utterance.
What deictic expressions refer to is determined by the presently relevant 'origo'. 

In recent years the semantics and pragmatics of deixis has become much clearer
especially as a result of papers by Charles Fillmore (1966, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1982,
1997) and John Lyons (1975, 1977) and others. All contemporary works on deixis are
founded on the opposition of the so-called naming words (Nennwörter) and indexing
words (Zeigwörter), introduced by Bühler. The significance of his works in the field
cannot be overestimated. Still, in our view, K.Bühler's main assumption, that deictical
expressions referring to what he calls "indexical field" where the reference point (origo)
is fixed by the person who speaks, can be revised. 

The most immediately obvious examples of deictics such as pronouns you, this,
that, temporal and locative adverbs now, then, here, there, overthere, today, yesterday,
tomorrow, such verbs as come and go, bring and take etc. as well as tense forms of the
verb speak of the fact that deixis is all-pervasive in the vocabulary and the grammar of
natural languages. The principal deictic nature of these words reflects the cognitive
representation of the speech event, i.e. the relation between two individuals in a
conversation exchange. In order to interpret these elements in a piece of discourse, it is
necessary to know (at least) who the interlocutors are, and the time and place of the
production of the utterance. Thus, deictics proper constitute the deictic field of language
with its three subdivisions of personal deixis, spatial deixis and temporal deixis. Still
there is much in language that goes beyond this framework. A great variety of language
units, mostly with very abstract meanings have been found to share deictic
characteristics although they do not fit into the interlocutors-place-time-of-utterance
format (see for details Yerzinkyan 1988).

The characteristic feature of deictics is that they encode a certain type of relation,
the relation between the 'origo' and an intended 'referent'. Every act of such reference,
i.e. pointing, presupposes a commonly established ground, from which the pointing
starts. It is the default assumption that the 'origo' of a pointing act coincides with the
speaker of the speech act. However, the 'origo' may be shifted to some other person (or
other point in space and time), a process which then has to be marked by certain
linguistic means. 

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In our research we argue for an extension of Bühler's concept according to which
the centre of the deictic field is too narrowly associated with the speaker. Regarding
deictic words the main complication to be aware of is that they can also operate relative
to a reference point which is not necessarily the actual situation of utterance nor
obligatorily the speaker.

Assuming that the 'deictic centre' - the origo - is not always the speaker, deixis is
dealt with here from a much broader point of view and covers a far wider range of
phenomena including all the notional parts of speech. This can be readily illustrated by
analysing the meaning of such lexical units as former, current, remote, distant, late,
early, soon, nowaday, prewar, postdate, prepay, contemporary, ex-political and the like.
The group of words is not homogeneous, but all of them share the deictic feature of
being "situationally anchored", though to a different extent. One may go even further
and assume that every language sign may have a potential deictic component. Thus,
deixis in its broad sense is "a marking off point" in relation to which persons, objects
and events of reality are characterised. The "point of orientation" concept is expanded
to take into account the distinct situation of utterance. This "marking off point" (centre
of orientation or reference point, or 'origo' in Bühler's terminology) is the central issue
in the semantics of deixis. It means that the reference of deictic expressions
systematically depends on contextual factors such as the position of the speaker in
space and time, etc. At the same time, it should be noted that the centre of orientation
of the utterance, based on the speaker's point of view, may be shited in different ways
to convey certain meanings.

The meaning of deictic signs is of a very special nature. They are not "empty signs"
which acquire sense merely in speech. Deictics have meaning of their own, which is
independent from that of non-deictic signs. Personal pronouns "I" and "you", for
instance, have a constant and definite meaning, a specific semantic content, i.e. the
speech act roles, relating to the speaker and the hearer respectively and constantly
alternating with each other. Similarly, "here" is largely determined by the context of the
utterance as it usually refers to a place that can be identified in relation to the speaker
and the hearer. 

The meaning of deictic expressions is very general, broad, abstract, but very
definite. Deictics have a stable lexical meaning regardless of the context in which they
appear. Their specific abstract meaning is "concretised" in speech by being "anchored"
to some reference points in particular contexts. A speaker who uses deictic expressions
like "yesterday", "recently", "overthere", "left", "current", "later", etc. refers to certain
denotata. The hearer who wants to understand this utterance has to identify the
specifically intended denotata of deictics. Solving the identification problem in deictic
reference involves primarily the setting of a basic reference point.

Sentences like "I'll come to see you tomorrow" seem to have an open slot that is
filled by contextual information. This contextual information may be given by prior
verbal expression (anaphora), by succeeding verbal expression (cataphora), by common
perception of the actual speech situation, etc. Thus, what deictics refer to is determined
by a presently relevant origo which is revealed either on the basis of its "presence" in the

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speaker's or hearer's common perceptual field or of its occurrence in the preceding or
following contexts.

What is important about deictics is that they are used to refer to items in a linguistic
and non-linguistic context. For instance, "now" and "here" as deictics proper refer more
often than not to the "now" and "here" of the time and place of speaking; still they can
also be established in terms of times and places referred to in a discourse. Thus, if we
are to look for contexts to state the meaning of deictics we have to look at both linguistic
and non-linguistic contexts: both are specified as relevant contexts for deictic
expressions. However, there are good reasons for a commensurate limitation of linguistic
contexts: firstly, the relation between a lexical item and extralinguistic contexts is often
mediated by purely linguistic contexts; secondly, any aspect of an extralinguistic context
can be in principle mirrored linguistically.

Thus, the main characteristics that distinguishes deixis is its inherent indexical
property. That is, this class of language units is distinguished by the fact that the
complete and explicit semantic interpretation must include a reference to some point of
orientation in the context. Once this is understood, it becomes clear that the basic
problem of deixis is the specification of this point of orientation, the latter being the
central issue involved in the semantics of deixis. The specific nature of this language
phenomenon makes it necessary to establish a consistent method of studying it. The
approach that we consider to be appropriate here is a variety of contextual approach: it
is assumed that the semantic and pragmatic properties of a lexical item are fully reflected
in appropriate aspects of the relations in contrast with actual and potential contexts. be
mirrored linguistically.

Proceeding with the establishment of a consistent method of deictic analysis it
should be noted that the information conveyed in grammars and dictionaries is far from
always being exhaustive. This may be explained by rather complicated character of
deictic semantics. That is why we think it necessary for the deictic analysis to carry out
experiments in order to find out the semantic and pragmatic conditions, to observe
language use in context, varying experimentally the relevant context and to find out
which are the situational factors that enter into the rules of use of deictic expressions and
which are inherent in their semantics.

To sum up, let us state once again that deictic elements are distinguished by the
fact that they can only be completely defined if the relationship of these elements to
some point outside of themselves, which is considered to be a deictic centre, is taken
into account. This particular class of signs is peculiar in that the reference of each
occurrence of a deictic sign is an obligatory part of its semantics. Thus, the meaning
of each occurrence of a deictic sign is unique, whereas for non-deictic signs the
meaning is normally constant for all occurrences. In most natural languages the
majority of utterances are deictically anchored, i.e. they contain linguistic expressions
with inbuilt contextual parameters whose interpretation is relative to the context of
utterance. Successful deictic reference is embedded in a specific speech event and
depends on the participants' (interlocutors') awareness of its constituents. Place, time
and person (participant roles) are the constitutive elements of the speech act and all

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languages have deictic means to refer to these entities, though there are differences in
the way each language conceptualises and encodes these local, temporal and personal
entities. 

Languages also vary with respect to the degree to which they grammaticalise or
lexicalise social, spatial, and temporal deixis. It is important to realise that even
superficially similar languages may differ considerably in various details.

While the general outline of the semantics of deixis seems clear, each language is
to be separately examined in the light of variables affecting the big picture. Only then,
will more specific universals concerning the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of deixis
come to light.

References:

1. Bühler, K. (1934) Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena:
Fischer.

2. Clark, H. (1996) Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Fillmore, Ch. (1966) Deictic Categories in the Semantics of "Come" // Foundations

of Language. Vol. 2, N 3. 
4. Fillmore, Ch. (1971) Towards a Theory of Deixis // Working Papers in Linguistics.

Vol. 3, N 4.
5. Fillmore, Ch. (1973) May We Come in? // Semiotica, Vol. 9, N 2.
6. Fillmore, Ch. (1975) Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis. Indiana University Linguistic

Club, Mimeo.
7. Fillmore, Ch. (1982) Towards a Descriptive Framework for Spatial Deixis //

Speech, Place and Action.   Chichester, etc.: John Wiley& Sons.
8. Fillmore, Ch. (1997) Lectures on Deixis. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI Publ.
9. Fuchs, A. (1993) Remarks on Deixis. Heidelberg: Groos.
10. Weissenbom, J.; Klein W. (ed.) (1982) Here and There: Cross-linguistic Studies in

Deixis and Demonstration. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.

11. Lyons, J. (1975) Deixis as the Source of Reference // Formal Semantics of Natural
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12. Lyons, J. (1977) Semantics. London, etc.: Cambridge University Press. Vol. 1-2
13. Rauh, G. (ed.) (1983) Essays on Deixis. Turingen: Gunter Narr.
14. Green, K. (ed.) (1995) New Essays on Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature.

Amsterdam: Rodopi.
15. Yerzinkyan,Y. (1988) Deikticheskaya semantika slova. Yerevan: Izd. yerevanskogo

gos. universiteta. 

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