Deixis

In linguistics, deixis refers to words and phrases that cannot be fully understood without additional
contextual information (words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational
meaning is varied depending on person, time and/or place).

Deixis means 'pointing' via language. Any linguistic form used to accomplish this 'pointing' is called a
deicitic expression. When you notice a strange object and ask, 'What's that?' , you are using a deictic
expression in the immediate context. Deixis is a “speaker-centric notion.” That is, a speaker uses deixis
and deictic elements while producing language. These deictic elements’ meaning comes from the
speaker and his or her location, time of speaking the utterance and position of the utterance in the
discourse. Deictic words’ meaning changes depending on the speaker or writer.

It has an important role in studying pragmatics. It helps people to interpret the meaning of a certain
sentence based on its context. It is supported by Steven Levinson (1983) defining the deixis into five
types, they are:

i. person deixis,

ii. place deixis,

iii. time deixis,

iv. social deixis

v. discourse deixis

(i) Person Deixis

Person deixis refers to who the speaker is. So it refers to personal pronouns such as I, you, he, and they.
When a speaker produces the word I that pronoun refers to that specific speaker. For example, if you
were to say the sentence “I went shopping yesterday,” the I in the sentence would refer to your name.

All personal pronouns work like this with the most obvious pronouns being I and you,

(ii) Place Deixis

Place deixis refers to where the speaker is. Place deixis, also known as space deixis, concerns itself with
the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person deixis, the locations may be either
those of the speaker and addressee or those of persons or objects being referred to. The most salient
English examples are the adverbs “here” and “there” and the demonstratives “this” and “that” -
although those are far from being the only deictic words. Place deixis is also useful for verbs such as
come and go. If I say the word come, I am referring to pointing to a direction towards my current
location. This is similar to the word go.

(iii) Time Deixis

Time, or temporal, deixis concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in an
utterance. This includes time adverbs like "now", "then", "soon", and so forth, and also different tenses.
A good example is the word tomorrow, which denotes the consecutive next day after every day. The
"tomorrow" of a day last year was a different day from the "tomorrow" of a day next week. Time deixis
refers to the current time in when the utterance is spoken.

(iv) Social Deixis

Social deixis is reference to the social characteristics of, or distinctions between, the participants or
referents in a speech event. Examples include

the distinction, found in many Indo-European languages, between familiar and polite second person
pronouns is an expression of social deixis. It has two subtypes:

(a) Absolute Social Deixis: It refers to some social characteristic of a referent (especially a person)
apart from any relative ranking of referents.

Often absolute social deixis is expressed in certain forms of address. The form of address will include no
comparison of the ranking of the speaker and addressee; there will be only a simple reference to the
absolute status of the addressee. For example: Mr. President, Your Honor.

(b) Relational Social Deixis: It refers to social relationship between the speaker and the addressee
in the extrlinguistic context. For example: Distinctions between the French second person pronouns tu
and vous and Speech levels of Southeast Asian languages that depend on the relative status of the
speaker and addressee.

(v) Discourse Deixis

Discourse deixis is often found in written text. For example, when reading an essay you may come across
a sentence like “At this point I would like to discuss, X, Z, and Y.” The phrase at this point is an example
of discourse deixis. The notion of ‘this point’ can only be obtained by knowing where this point is.

Conclusion

Deixis is an important aspect when it comes to meaning in semantics and pragmatics. Deictic elements
are often used and in order to fully understand the meaning of deictic elements, you will need to know
more information than what is in the utterance alone.

Presupposition

In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption
about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in
discourse. Examples of presuppositions include:

• Jane no longer writes fiction.

o Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction.

• Have you stopped eating meat?

o Presupposition: you had once eaten meat.

• Have you talked to Hans?

o Presupposition: Hans exists.

A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance
to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the
utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can be associated with a specific
lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance.

Crucially, negation of an expression does not change its presuppositions: I want to do it again and I don't
want to do it again both presuppose that the subject has done it already one or more times.
Presupposition is distinguished from entailment and implicature. For example, The president was
assassinated entails that the president is dead, but if the expression is negated, the entailment is not
necessarily true.

Pragmatic Presupposition

A pragmatic presupposition associated with a sentence is a condition that a speaker would normally
expect to hold in the common ground between discourse participants when that sentence is uttered.

Implicature

“Implicature” denotes either (i) the act of meaning or implying one thing by saying something else, or (ii)
the object of that act. Implicatures can be part of sentence meaning or dependent on conversational
context, and can be conventional (in different senses) or unconventional. Figures of speech such as
metaphor, irony, and understatement provide familiar examples. Implicature serves a variety of goals
beyond communication: maintaining good social relations, misleading without lying, style, and verbal
efficiency. Knowledge of common forms of implicature is acquired along with one's native language at
an early age.

Many forms of conversational implicature occur frequently in everyday speech and literature, with a
wide variety of sentences and in all known languages. They are common ways of both using and
understanding language. The forms are differentiated by the relationship between what is said and what
is implicated, and in some cases by the purpose for or way in which it is implicated. Knowledge of them
is an essential component of our linguistic competence, and is acquired at an early age.

The most widely recognized forms of implicature are the figures of speech. Irony, overstatement
(hyperbole), understatement (meiosis and litotes), metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor have been
known at least since Aristotle. They are taught in school as elements of style. The figures and modes of
speech are common, socially useful practices. They perpetuate themselves through precedent following,
social acceptance, individual habit.

Speaker Implicature and Intention

If theories that seek to derive conversational implicatures from general conversational principles all
have outstanding problems, what alternatives are there for explaining conversational implicatures, and
describing how they are understood? That depends on whether we are concerned with speaker
implicature or sentence implicature.

For a speaker to implicate something is for the speaker to mean something by saying something else. It
seems clear that what a speaker means is determined by the speaker's intentions. When Steve utters
“Kathryn is a Russian teacher,” whether Steve means that Kathryn is a teacher of Russian nationality or a
teacher of the Russian language, and whether he is speaking literally or ironically, depends entirely on
what Steve intends to convey. What “convey” means precisely is a matter of considerable debate that
we can ignore here.[41]

We most commonly explain why people do one thing A with the intention of something something else
B by explaining why they believe they will do B by doing A, or why they want to do B. We can explain
why speakers intend to convey a thought by uttering a sentence that says something else in the same
ways. Why do speakers believe they can convey thoughts by means of the various figures and modes of
speech. Because they have seen others doing so. Knowledge of the common forms of implicature and
other forms of indirect speech is acquired along with knowledge of the semantics and syntax of our
native language. Speakers pick up figures and modes of speech from other speakers, as they learn
vocabulary and grammar. Knowledge of both figures and modes is as tacit as our knowledge of syntax
and semantics. It is not knowledge of facts that define a language, but of how a language is used and
understood. Since the figures and modes do not depend on a particular language, they can be used with
any language.

Why do speakers want to engage in implicature? The main reasons are the reasons they make
statements: to communicate, express themselves, and record their thoughts. These goals may serve to
cooperate with others, or to oppose them. What goals are served by implicating rather than saying
something? One is verbal efficiency (Levinson 2000: 28–31; Camp 2006: 3) through implicature we
express two or more thoughts by uttering just one sentence. Another is to mislead without lying (Horn
2010). People often wish others to believe things that are false, and not only in situations of conflict and
competition. And they nearly always prefer misleading to lying. Given that speaker meaning is a matter
of speaker intention, it follows that speaker implicatures can be recognized or predicted by any of the
methods we use to infer intentions from behavior. While the existence of conversational implicatures
does not depend in any way on the assumption that the speaker is observing conversational principles,
they may play a role in the recognition of implicatures. Indeed, the Cooperative Principle and associated
maxims, along with the Principles of Style and Politeness, seem to play the same indirect role in
implicature recognition that known tendencies or goals play in inductive inference generally. Since
speakers tend to observe the Cooperative Principle, and hearers know this in a vague and tacit sort of
way, hearers tend to assume that particular speakers are cooperating, in the absence of evidence to the
contrary. If the hypothesis that S is implicating p fits better with the assumption that S is being
cooperative than the hypothesis that S is not, the hearer may then conclude that S is implicating p, by
abduction. The hypothesis may be confirmed after the fact by S's testimony. Further support for the
hypothesis may be provided by the recollection that S and other speakers have implicated similar things
in similar circumstances before. The existence of an applicable implicature convention would be
especially powerful evidence. Recognition of unconventional forms of implicature is more difficult, but
no more difficult than recognizing when a speaker is using a sentence with an unconventional meaning.
When S is being uncooperative, we have to use other generalizations. We are familiar, for example, with
the ways in which defendants manipulate language in an effort to avoid self-incrimination. When trying
to infer what such a speaker is implicating, we use something other than Grice's working-out schema. In
general, we need to distinguish contextual clues to what a speaker intended from contextual
determinants. As is the case with mental phenomena generally, the evidence we use to detect
implicatures is not what makes them exist.

What a speaker says is also dependent on the speaker's intentions. Whether a speaker using “There is a
large bank on Main Street” says that there is a snow bank or a commercial bank on Main Street depends
on what the speaker means by “bank” on that occasion. Meaning “bank” involves the intention to
convey not a belief or thought, but rather a concept. It is unsurprising, therefore, that conversational
principles play much the same role in inferring both what is said and what is implicated.

While figures and modes of speech are ways of using any sentence to implicate, sentence implicatures
are facts about particular sentences or sentence forms. English differs from Polish, French, and Tamil in
its tautology implicatures. English today has different metaphorical implicatures than it had just a few
years ago. Knowledge of sentence implicatures is a crucial component of the linguistic competence of
speakers and hearers (Lepore & Stone forthcoming: Part II). Speakers who are unaware of them are
likely to mislead their audience. Imagine the possibilities if an oblivious speaker said Your husband saw a
woman to the subject's wife. Unknowing speakers may feel compelled to say what could safely go
unsaid, making their speech long-winded. Hearers (and natural language processors) without such
knowledge are likely to either misinterpret or fail to fully understand the speaker. Sentence
implicatures, both semantic and conversational, resemble idioms and the customary forms of speaker
implicature in being picked up by native speakers from other speakers in the course of learning the
language. Sentence implicatures thus perpetuate themselves from one generation to the next. Recent
metaphors are special in being picked up by adults, and are liable to become idioms if they pass on to
new generations.

The universality of scalar implicatures is not surprising on the Gricean view that sentence implicatures
can be derived from general conversational principles. But the extent to which sentence imlicatures are
arbitrary and vary from language to language makes that view untenable. Conversational principles do
specify common interests that conversational implicature conventions serve: communication of
information, politeness, style, and efficiency. Since conventional practices sustain themselves by serving
socially useful purposes, the fact that speakers strive to be cooperative, polite, stylish, and efficient
sustains implicature conventions. We also noted earlier that conversational principles can serve as
generalizations used in the process of inferring implicatures, and we can add that flouting a principle
often serves as a signal that an implicature convention is in play