122049 PS Proseminar Linguistics 2 (2013W)

Deixis is a pervasive phenomenon in language structure. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "pointing" or "indicating". When we use language, we constantly point to various entities. We point to persons (person deixis grammaticalised by personal pronouns, like I (the current speaker), you (the addressee), and he/she/it the so-called "non-person", since s/he does not participate in the language situation. We also point to places (place deixis grammaticalised by adverbs of place: here/there), and to points in time (grammaticalised as now/then). The crucial notion in deixis is its egocentricity, i.e. the distance of an entity from the speaker, who is at the center of the language situation (the so-called Origo). Therefore, all deictic terms point to objects close to the speaker (proximal, e.g. I/here/now) as opposed to objects away from the speaker (distal, e.g. you/there/then). These distinctions are present in every language, i.e. are universal, and deixis is a pervasive language phenomenon (over 95% of our utterances are deictic in nature, i.e. have deictic elements in them).
Apart from the three basic deictic distinctions of person, place and time deixis, which are obligatory categories, there are also optional or "speaker-dependent" deictic uses. These include: social deixis (ways of referring to persons by means of pronouns, the so-called T/V distinction like German du/Sie or Middle English thou/you), discourse deixis (referring to a portion of discourse by means of a demonstrative, e.g. This was a funny story) and emotional deixis (making the text more emotional by using demonstrative pronouns, e.g. And this guy into this bar and looks at this woman…).
In this course we will look at various types of deixis (including sign language and finding your way in spaces) as realised in different languages and cultures. A variety of data collection techniques is encouraged: written and spoken sources (e.g. literary works, everyday conversation), the language of the media (newspapers, film, TV), the language of the internet, etc.