Every utterance is made in a particular place and at a particular time, by a certain speaker to a certain audience. The deictic formatives 'orientate' them by reference to these contexts of situation. The Greek word deixis means 'pointing' : the deictic qualities of a sentence point to its location in relation to a spatio-temporalpersonal context. Take, for example, the following sentence, in which the tense of Aux and the meaning of the adverb join forces to achieve a temporal orientation, and the pronoun relates the topic of the sentence to a complex of in-context human participants:

(78) We went to the seaside yesterday.