PRAGMATICS

Deixis derives from Ancient Greek - (deîxis, “pointing, indicating, reference”) and (deíknumi, “I show”) and
forms an important part of linguistics and pragmatics, serving to interpret speech in context. The following
article will offer the definition of deixis, some deictic examples, but also the difference between some types of
deixis such as spatial deixis and temporal deixis.

Deixis refers to a word or phrase that shows the time, place or situation a speaker is in when talking.

Also known as deictic expressions (or deictics), they typically include pronouns and adverbs such as 'I', 'you',
'here', 'there', and tend to be used mostly where the context is known to both the speaker and the person
spoken to.

"I wish you'd been here yesterday."

In this sentence the words 'I,' 'you', 'here', and 'yesterday' all function as deixis - they reference a speaker and an
addressee, a location and a time. As we are outside of the context, we cannot know who 'I' is, where 'here' is,
nor can we be entirely sure when 'yesterday' was; this information is known to the speaker instead and is
therefore termed 'deictic'.

"Last week I flew over there for a quick visit."

In this sentence, 'last week', 'I' and 'there' are the deixis - referencing time, speaker and place.

We do not have enough contexts to completely understand the whole sentence, whereas the speaker and the
addressee do; they don't need to repeat or state the precise context. Instead, they use words and phrases that
refer to people, time and place and this function deictically.

'If you come over here I can show you where it happened, all that time ago.'

Firstly, we don't know who is speaking, or to whom; we also don't know where 'here' is, or what happened. Our
questions will tend to be 'where, who, what?' and probably also 'when?'. The speaker and his audience, however,
have no such problem; they are in the context, they know the topic, so they use deictic expressions or words to
reference (or 'show') what they are talking about.

There are several examples of deixis in the sentence we have just looked at, e.g: 'Here', 'you' and 'where'. These
are deictic expressions of place, person and location.

Let's now recreate the earlier example, starting from context:

'If you come over here I can show you where it happened, all that time ago.'

A tour guide is showing his group around an old fort where a famous battle took place a few hundred years ago.
He says to them: 'If you come over to this part of the castle, I can show you where the siege took place 500 years
ago.'

Here we have context: we know the speaker is a tour guide; we know he is speaking to a group of tourists; we
know where they are (the castle); we know what he is talking about (the siege) and when it took place (500
years ago).

Let's say we are now either the tour guide or the tourists. At this point, the tour guide starts to move over to one
of the ramparts of the castle, and instead of repeating all the above information, the guide can simply say: 'If you
come over here, I can show you where it happened all that time ago.' This avoids stating the obvious, it saves
time repeating information already given, and both the guide and his audience understand immediately what he
 PRAGMATICS

is referring to. At this point, a specific reference becomes an example of deictic reference, through the use of
words such as 'here', 'it', and 'that'.

Types of Deixis

Personal - relating to the speaker, or the person spoken to: the 'who'.

Temporal - relating to time: the 'when'.

Spatial, or Local - relating to place: the 'where'.

NOTE: the 1st and 2nd person pronouns (I, you, we) are typically active participants (in that they speak and hear speech); the
third person pronouns (she, he, they) refer to inactive, ie non-speech or narrated participants.

Looking at our earlier deictic examples again, we can now identify temporal deixis, spatial deixis and personal
deixis:

I wish you'd been here yesterday.

'I' and 'you' are examples of personal deixis, (people)

'Here' is an example of spatial deixis, (place)

And 'yesterday' is temporal deixis. (time)

Last week I flew over there for a quick visit.

'Last week', which relates to when, is the temporal deixis,

'I' refers to a person, and becomes the personal deixis,

'There' refers to location, and is the spatial deixis.

1. When he got there, he went straight to her.

2. We booked into this hotel last night; I think he's arriving tomorrow.

In the first deictic example, the speaker is referring to third-party inactive participants: 'he' and 'her'.
'There' refers to location, so it becomes location-specific, and therefore it is an example of 'spatial deixis'.

In the second deictic example, 'this' becomes the 'spatial deixis', while 'last night' and 'tomorrow' refer
to time, which is 'temporal deixis'. The second sentence is an example of both spatial deixis and temporal deixis.
 PRAGMATICS

Reference and Inference

You have already come across the notion of reference in the section on Semantics where it was contrasted to
sense, and defined as the relation between the linguistic expression and the entity in the real world to which it
refers. However, words themselves actually do not refer to anything but the people using them.
Those referring expressions can be:
1) proper nouns 'John L. Austin' 'Osnabrück'
2) definite noun phrases 'the philosopher' 'the city'
3) indefinite noun phrases 'a man' 'a place'
4) pronouns 'he, him' 'it'

Reference, as the act of the speaker/writer using a linguistic form to enable a listener/reader to identify
something, depends on the speaker's intentions (e.g. to refer to sth.) and on the speaker's beliefs (e.g. so the
listener can identify the speaker's intention).
Since successful reference does not only depend on the speaker but also on the listener, we have to include the
notion of inference, which denotes the process of decoding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. In order to
do so, the listener uses additional knowledge to make sense of what has not been explicitly said.
Have a look at the following three sentences and figure out the difference between the referring expressions set in
boldface:
a. There's a woman waiting for you.
b. She wants to marry a man with lots of money.
c. I'd like to see a unicorn.

Reference
- the word used to identify things indirect relationship to ‘that’ thing.
- Act in which speaker/writer use linguistic form for the hearer/readers to identify something
Inference
- Meaning making.
- Making meaning on what you have read.
- Ex: “Mr. Kawasaki has arrived” = means a person who always ride a Kawasaki motor
- Attribute use: Unknown entity. The use of ‘the’ ‘a’. Ex: “The girl is waiting for you” = who is the girl
- Referencial use: attach to a known entity. Ex: White cotton falling from the sky. = snow
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PRESUPPOSITION AND ENTAILMENT

PRESUPPOSITION: "a presupposition" is something assumed (presupposed) to be true in a sentence which
asserts other information"

In the following example, sentence (a) presupposes sentence (b).

a. The child sneezed again.
b. The child had sneezed before.
The first sentence presupposes the information in the second, and this is apparent in the fact that if the first
sentence is negated, the truth of the second remains unchanged:
c. The child did not sneeze again.

Thus, the negation of the sentence can be considered as one of the tests used to check for the presupposition
underlying the sentence, as in:
a. Mary's hat is red.
b. Mary's hat is not red.
Although these two sentences have opposite meanings, the underlying presupposition, 'Mary has a hat', remains
true (the same). This case is called by linguists as "constancy under negation", which is one of the properties
used in pragmatics for testing presuppositions

a. The King of England left for Peru yesterday.

b.There is a King of England.
Even if (2a) is negated, the presupposition holds:-
c. The King of England did not leave for Peru yesterday.
d. There is a King of England.
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a. I saw my father today.
b. I saw someone today.
c. I did not see my father today.
Here, (3a) entails (3b), but if (3a) is negated to form (3c), it no longer entails (3b). But with a presupposition pair,
the case is different.
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a. The mayor of Liverpool is in town.
b. There is a mayor of Liverpool.
When (4a) is negated, presupposition survives as shown in:
c. The mayor of Liverpool is not in town.
d. There is a mayor of Liverpool.

ENTAILMENT: Entailment is a term derived from formal logic and now often used as part of the study of
semantics. All the other essential semantic relations like equivalence and contradiction can be defined in terms of
entailment. Crystal (1998: 136) defines it as "a term refers to a relation between a pair of sentences such that the
truth of the second sentence necessarily follows from the truth of the first, e.g. I can see a dog entails 'I can see
an animal'

For instance, the sentence John is a bachelor entails three other sentences as follows:

a. John is unmarried.
b. John is male.
c. John is adult.