ABSTRACT
As discussed in Chapter 1, the term pragmatics is often used in linguistic research to refer to the study of the interpretation of meaning. Although it has proven difficult to determine an exact definition for the term pragmatics (Levinson discusses the issue over more than 50 pages in his influential 1983 work Pragmatics), a user-friendly definition is that suggested by Fasold (1990: 119) as ‘the study of the use of context to make inferences about meaning’. In this definition, inferences refer to deductions made by participants based on available evidence (Christie, 2000). As we mentioned in Chapter 1, this available evidence is, according to pragmaticists, provided by the context within which the utterance takes place. Therefore, because, according to Levinson (1983: 54), ‘the single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves, is through the phenomenon of deixis’, deixis is integral to the study of pragmatics. Derived from the Greek word for ‘pointing’ or ‘indicating’ (deiktikos: ‘apt for pointing with the finger’), deixis refers to the way in which speakers orientate both themselves and their listeners in relation to the context of a conversation. Deixis enables interlocutors to refer to entities in context, thereby allowing them to identify people and things in relation to the space they are operating in at the moment at which they are speaking. There are a number of grammatical items that encode deixis, for example, the demonstratives, this, that; first and second person personal pronouns, I, you, we; adverbs of time such as now, then; adverbs of space such as here, there; motion verbs such as come, go; and a variety of other grammatical features such as tense markers. These grammatical items that encode deixis are commonly referred to as deictics.
