A pragmatic study of deixis in English

Abstract EN

It is generally acknowledged that perception of and orientation in space are determinant factors in human action and interaction.

As such, speech mainly depends on knowledge of the context: Where and When is a sentence uttered, and by Whom.

These three dimensions are traditionally seen as the so-called deictic center of all linguistic events, without which no linguistic expression can be properly interpreted.

With deixis we mean here all cues provided by a language that local-ized a speech event and its participants (Speaker, Hearer and narrated par-ticipant) in space and time.

Anderson and Keenan (1985) distinguish three major categories of deixis: person deixis, spatial deixis and temporal deixis.

The category linking social and psychological factors is tentatively labelled as'psychological' deixis at the workshop.