Lecture 2: Deixis, Speech acts, Illocutionary acts
Pragmatics and Cognitive Semantics
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Lexicon | Philosophical glossary | Relevant bookmarks | Semiotic terms | Webster | WordAnalysis | Word-online | Thesaurus | | Back to main page |
Biljana Martinovski,biljana@ling.gu.se,
DEIXIS
Definition:
Reference by means of an expression whose
interpretation is relative to the linguistic or extralinguistic
context of the utterance, such as who is speaking,to whom,
what status does the intereaction partcipants have, what
relation do they have,
the time or place of speaking, the gestures of the speaker, or
the current location in the discourse. Another word for deixis
is indexicality. All deictic expressions are indexical
but not all indices are deixis. It was the philosopher Charles
Sanders Pierce who intoduced a fundamental taxonomy of sign relations
and sign types, including indices.
According to his taxonomy there are 3 main types of signs:
1. INDEX - a sign based on existential and contiguity relation with the thing
it is a sign of.
One may extend this relation to language and and using the analogy
with the above examples say that in the utterance " I am here." the words,
or sounds 'I' and 'am' are
existencially and contiguously related with the person uttering the
sentence and 'here' is in the same type of a relation with the location
in which the utterance is made.
2. SYMBOL - a sign which has a conventional relation to that which it is
a sign of.
3. ICON - a sign which resembles that which it is a sign of.
These distinctions are very basic. They are applicable to all phenomena in
the world, not only to language. Thus they are describing semiotic signs.
Most signs are a mixture of these three sign relations. Thus a linguistic expression
may be both symbolic and indexical. And this is the case of deixis. It is different
from semantic reference because by uttering "I love PhiPhi islands."
i am not transported to PhiPhi islands directly and i am not even existentially
or contiguously related to them. I am simply referring to them and we don't have to
know anything else about my relation to PhiPhi islands or my or their location
but only that
there are such islands and in fact we don't even have to know that.
In a sense, it is not surprising that generative grammar with its
syntactical approach was developed in the English-speaking world because
English and for that matter Swedish have relatively poor grammaticalized
deictic categories. But if we take some other languages such as Italian
or Tagalog, we will immediately understand that it is impossible to
learn the langauge without learning the complicated system of pronouns
and verb forms all of which carry complex information about social, spatial/time-
and discourse relations plus gender and number.
In some languages one has to learn complicated
kinship structures in order to communicate successfully. Thus, in general,
one may conclude that languages world wide rely to a great extent on deictic
expressions, on the indexical relation between humans and other entities.
Deictic center is the notion describing the encoded point of view of the speaker.Thus
the utterence "Come there now" sounds odd because the concept 'come' encodes
movement towards the speaker (there are other readings as well) and the concept 'there'
encodes location different from the speaker's. In this sense, the juxtaposition
of these two words results in an impossible movement on the earth -
towards the speaker and to another place than the speaker. However, if we shift the
deictic center this expression wouldn't be difficult to understand.
Another interesting deictic device are VOCATIVES, which can be calls, such as greetings,
used gesturally
addresses, such as titles, used symbolically. Many languages have grammicalized
vocatives, morphological inflection for vocatives used only gesturally, that is for
calling somebody, getting attention or underlining an argument. In Serbian "Ivane,
ela ovde!" meaning "Ivan, come here" the name of the addressee is in vocative with the
special vocative, masculinum morpheme '-e'. These vocatives can be used also for expression of
emotional attitude and relation to the addressee, that is, of emphatetic deixis.
Time deixis is grammaticalized mainly in the tense system of the particlar language.
The tense does
not consist only of deixis but included also aspecutal features (i.e. evidential
information if the person has been witness of described event or not), modal and other features,
such as distinctions between light and dark, day and night as in Amahuacan.
In poorly inflected languages like Chinese
there is no grammatical realization in paradigms of morphological entities but
the time deixis is build in the concepts and/or created by the context of the
utterance .
Ex.: The tracks of a car
left on a sandy road are indicies of the existence of a car and of
its contact with this particular sand surfice. Also your movement with
the help of the mouse to a particular object on the screen and the clicking
on it and thus activating it is a typical index.
Ex.: Language in general is a symbol. Only cases of onomatopeia are not.
Ex.: a photograph, mirror image; onomatopoeitic expressions in language, etc.
If i
say "Klia mig paa ryggen!" i am referring to my back by using a symbolic sign,
the word "back" which looks very different in different languages and it is
this word i have to know in order to understand the meaning of the utterance.
But if i say "Klia mig haer!" it is of crucial importance to know the
immediate context of the utterance since 'haer' may refer to any particular and unique
place on my body and it does't denote it symbolically.
This fact in itself proves that language is mainly a communicative instrument
and especialy a face-to-face communication instrument. Thus deixis has
the function of relating langauge to the immediate context as well as economy function, i.e.,
reducing repetition and redundancy in language.
Examples:
personal pronouns and predicate agreements: "I", "you"etc.;
aspects of definiteness="the", "a";
demonstratives diectic adverbs: "there", "that","here/there";
honorifics: "Herr", "Fru", "Professor Allwood",;
temporal pronouns, expressions and grammatical components: "now", "later" and all tenses;
spatial pronouns and expressions: "below",
"the following".
dicoursive expressions:
"however", "as well as", "consequently", etc.
diverse lexical expressions:
"tjŠna", "god afton", "limo", etc.
Make a search on each of the following terms:
discourse deixis,
empathetic deixis,
person deixis,
place deixis,
social deixis,
time deixis.
SPEECH ACT
Definition:
Any of the acts that a speaker performs when
making an utterance, including:the general act (illocutionary act) that a speaker
performs, analyzable as including the uttering of words (the utterance
acts), making reference and predicating (the propositional acts),
and having a particular intention in making the utterance (the
illocutionary force of the utterance),
or any act involved in the illocutionary act, including
the utterance acts and propositional acts,
or the production of a particular effect in the addressee
(the perlocutionary act).
Make a search on:
illocutionary act,
perlocutionary act,
propositional act,
utterance act.
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