Deixis!
Hey everyone! Welcom back to Vox. Hope you guys had a great spring break. I thought the deixis conversation was really interesting yesterday but I don't get all of it. So... here's some practice. Let me know what you think.
The Carnival cruise I went on last week had a talent show at the end of our vacation and my friend Sally played Madonna.
Deixis:
I, our, Sally, Madonna person deixis
went on
temperal deixis (past tense)
played
temperal deixis (past tense)
last week
extended spacial deixis
end
spacial deixis
One question I have is, would Madonna be considered person deixis or
does it have to be able to be replaced with a pronoun? Although,
I guess you could replace that with her, if it was in responce to
someone else's comment. Are there any I missed and do you
all agree with the ones I acknowledged?
Comments
I would not say proper names (Sally/Madonna) are deictic. Deictic words are ones in which you have to have a context to figure out their referents. Even though there are tons of Sallys in the world, you need less information/context to figure out what 'Sally' refers to than you do when someone just says 'she'. I'd consider 'last week' to be temporal deixis, since it's referring to a specific point in time, not space (though maybe referring to things as 'first' or 'last' is actually based on a spatial metaphor). I wouldn't say 'end' is deictic here. As used, you don't need context to know that it means the 'terminus, conclusion, finish'.
Deictic words are like 'wild cards' in uno. They can mean a whole lot of things and their meaning depends on when their played (context).