Deictic Categories Research Articles

한국어 종결어미 ‘-네’와 중국어 어기조사 ‘啊(a), 呢(ne)’의 대조연구

This paper aims to first confirm that in declarative sentences, the Chinese modal particles ‘啊(a)’ and ‘呢(ne)’ correspond to the Korean ‘-ney(-네)’ with a distinction: ‘啊(a)’ expresses the speaker's emotions, while ‘呢(ne)’ indicates the speaker's content, meaning that the speaker wants the listener to pay attention to what is being said. Additionally, the current Korean ‘-ney(-네)’ is discussed within the categories of evidentiality and mirativity based on its semantic functions. This paper intends to discuss the evidentiality and mirativity of Korean sentence-final ending ‘-ney(-네)’ separately, and to reveal that the corresponding Chinese Modal Particles ‘啊(a)’ and ‘呢(ne)’ also fall within the categories of evidentiality and mirativity in declarative sentences. Evidentiality refers to the observation of information, which varies depending on the observer and is related to the deictic category of person. The Korean sentence-final ending ‘-ney(-네)’ generally has a first-person subject, whereas this study seeks to confirm that the Chinese ‘啊(a)’ and ‘呢(ne)’ are restricted by a second-person subject.

DEIXIS ANALYSIS OF LABRINT’S SONG LYRICS

The purpose of this study is to investigate three different deixis types found in Labrinth song lyrics. Researcher used Labrinth’s album to analyze three types of deixis because it is one of the most famous album in the world. The three types of deixis with referential meaning make up the majority of a song. As a result, song lyrics can be examined through a practical perspective that emphasizes deixis. A quantitative descriptive methodology was used in this investigation. Numerical data must be collected and analyzed for quantitative research. Twenty songs from the Labrint album were used as data, which were then divided into various deictic categories. The findings show that three types of deixis, such as person deixis, spatial deixis, and temporal deixis are used in the song lyrics of Labrinth’s album. Based on the discussion and findings that have been researched it could be stated that all deixis is present in every song with personal deixis being the most prevalent (255 frequencies and 80.70% percentage). At the second position, spatial deixis (36 frequencies and a percentage of 11.39%), and at the third position, temporal deixis is the most commonly found (36 frequencies and a percentage of 7.91%)

Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond

AbstractNakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa language, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis/horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis.

Reportative evidentiality, attribution and epistemic modality: A corpus-based diachronic study of Latin secundum NP (‘according to NP’)

Based on data drawn from the Latin Library corpus, this paper discusses some previously under-researched meanings of the secundum NP construction and traces their evolution across a period of over 800 years. The discussion focuses on the meanings of reportative evidentiality and a new conceptual category called “attribution”, whose function consists in ascribing a proposition to someone's mental content (opinion, thought or belief). Two sub-categories of attribution are identified: other-attribution and self-attribution. Whereas the former is modal epistemic in nature, the latter is not. The data analysed in this paper suggest that the attribution and reportative meanings are distinct senses, as evidenced by their different semantic/pragmatic functions, development paths and preferences for different sets of arguments. Particular attention is paid to the spread of Christianity as a relevant socio-cultural context for the emergence of reportative constructions. From a pragmatic/interactional point of view, the notion of interpersonal evidentiality plays a central role in the emergence of the reportative evidential sense. Abstracting away from the case of the Latin secundum NP (‘according to’ NP) construction, this paper argues that both reportative evidentiality and attribution presuppose extended intersubjectivity and are deictic categories, even if they convey different meanings.

‘Out of the forest I come’: Lyric and dramatic tension in The World’s Wife

This article looks at lyric and dramatic modes of poetic expression in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife. The book is of particular interest because it is Duffy’s only volume devoted entirely to the dramatic monologue. In the opening sections of this article, lyric and dramatic modes are defined and discussed, and the work of Keith Green on deixis and the poetic persona is considered in relation to the dramatic monologue. Of particular use is Green’s elaboration on the traditional deictic categories of ‘time’ and ‘place’. Green incorporates the concepts of ‘coding time and place’ and ‘content time and place’ into his analysis of lyric poetry. These concepts are used here as tools to consider and describe the communicative contexts established in lyric and dramatic poetry respectively. Ina Beth Sessions’ early, taxonomic approach to defining the dramatic monologue, in particular her idea of ‘action in the present’, is also found to be useful in the identification of the ‘dramatic’. The next section of the article is a close analysis of two poems from The World’s Wife, ‘Little Red Cap’ and ‘Mrs Sisyphus’. Other poems, and the communicative context evoked by the collection as a whole, are also considered in the light of Green, Sessions and the lyric and dramatic traditions in poetry. The work of Duffy examined here is found to be more clearly rooted in lyrical and narrative than dramatic traditions. It is suggested that the indexicalisation of the symbolic elements of deictic terms is essential to the building of the dramatically realised coding environment necessary for a Browningesque dramatic monologue. A call is made for further work to be carried out in identifying the ‘dramatic’ in poetry, and for a more meaningful employment of the term dramatic monologue.

Person shift at narrative peak

Narrators like to highlight important events in their stories. In some languages, they may shift to first- or second-person pronouns to refer to third-person referents in order to do so. Such pronoun shifts show functional parallels with tense shifts like the historical present, as both highlight events through shifts in deictic categories. Longacre (1983:138–39) discusses the parallels between person and tense shifts in his account of narrative peak, that is, the formal marking of important narrative events. Labov (1972) analyzes similar strategies as internal evaluations. Person shifts constitute a phenomenon of the discourse-syntax interface and present a clear case of discourse structure influencing grammar. Both person shifts themselves and their motivation in narrative structure have been little investigated. The article reviews person shifts in a number of languages reported in the literature and analyzes in detail the characteristics of this discourse strategy in Saliba-Logea, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The study contributes to the growing body of research on pronouns and person markers, and on referring expressions more generally, by adding a new angle of investigation. Previous studies have tended to focus on the morphosyntactic choices of referring expressions and their motivations, that is, on the choices between lexical nouns, free vs. bound pronouns, and so forth. The present study focuses on the paradigmatic choices between different person forms within one and the same morphosyntactic expression type. In doing so it offers a new perspective on pronoun choice and the factors influencing it crosslinguistically. While some types of person shift appear to be rare, overall, the strategy of person shift at narrative peak seems to constitute a solid crosslinguistic phenomenon.

The ‘Jasmine Revolt’ has made the ‘Arab Spring’: A critical discourse analysis of the last three political speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia

The current article addresses person deixis in the last three speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia (OPT) from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and cognitive-pragmatics. It takes deixis to be individuated in the ‘indexical field’ by the deictic center, who fills them from within the social field at his/her discretion with ‘social roles’. The way the filling takes place is a function of social proximity to or distance from the deictic center, which manipulates the constructed categories either closer to the CENTER or to the PERIPHERY of the image schema. In particular, it is argued that the OPT as a deictic center has constructed in the first two speeches two deictic categories, which would be called ‘wandering WE’ after and a peripheral THEY, through which he tried to maintain the political status quo and blame responsibility for the events on others. However, in the last speech, the OPT constructed two indexical dyads, namely I-YOU and WE-THEY. This shift is explained as an effort on the part of OPT to reproduce social power abuse, dominance, and inequality by way of making political concessions. Despite this, the shift is not felt to have created communality and closeness with the addressees since the policy of exclusion, authority, and domination precluded these concessions from being persuasive enough for the ‘Jasmine Revolt’ in Tunisia not to resist this power and go for regime change.

The Use of Deictic Elements in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies

The phenomenon of deixis is still the dominant topic for investigation in the field of pragmatics. The study seeks to analyze distinct types of deictic categories in the medieval world heritage, namely Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. Deictic expressions are considered to be highly relevant for the research of these homilies as they perform a leading role in the connectivity of sermons. Moreover, incorrect use of deictic elements can give rise to misunderstanding and unsuccessful communication betwixt the speaker and the addressee. The search for deictic expressions which are encoded in pronouns or adverbs in the selection of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies has been assisted by an excessive use of Benjamin Thorpe’s English translation (1844). The context of sermons lets us determine and decipher the meaning of deictic expressions which change in distinct contexts with the speaker’s position either in time or space. The study uses the framework of deixis proposed by Stephen Levinson (1983) as well as a pragmatic approach for the analysis of distinct types of deictic elements in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies. The findings of the study reveal that the sermons exhibit various deictic categories, namely person, place, time, and discourse. Moreover, these categories as well as the predication clearly show the proximity or distance of the speaker to the referred object. As far as tense is concerned, it is a temporal deictic device. In Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, the present tense is the proximal form, whereas the past tense is the distal form.

Indexical pronouns: Generic uses as clues to their structure

This paper explores the idea that first and second person indexical pronouns have one common identical source based on an index. This approach derives the distinction between hearer and speaker by means of spatio-temporal anchoring of the indexical base to the utterance context. Accordingly, it is argued that the deictic category person is nonatomic but dependent on spatial (and temporal) deixes. Evidence is drawn from data concerning various types of second person pronouns and their interpretation. It will be shown that the generic use of second person pronouns available in a large number of languages underlies specific morphosyntactic restrictions that have so far remained undiscussed in the relevant literature that mainly sought a purely semantic account of the phenomenon (Alonso-Ovalle 2002; Malamud 2007). Based on a number of Indo-European languages, it will be shown that certain contexts require the indexical to be temporally anchored to the utterance context giving rise to a strictly indexical interpretation. Generic interpretations are available if the indexical is only spatially but not temporally anchored.

Cognitive motivation and pragmatic functions of the Greek deictics

AbstractThis paper is a study of the way in which native speakers of Modern Greek use deictic categories. Specifically, it provides a theoretical account of the cognitive procedures that motivate the choice of one deictic over its counter-part in a deictic contrast and the pragmatic effects that this particular choice seems to have in terms of the speech situation.

The expression of time in Spanish Sign Language (LSE)

Our aim in this paper is to describe and systematize the processes used to express time in Spanish Sign Language (LSE). The conception of time as a line, as well as its nature as a deictic category, are confirmed for both spoken languages and sign languages, although in the former time has been studied mainly as inflection, while other types of resources are common in the latter, particularly the expression of time by means of time lines. In our analysis we have focused mainly on the description of the lexical processes and the time lines that participate in time marking in LSE. We have also referred to an iconic process, which involves the use of so-called "classifier" predicates.

Constraining Inherent Inflection: Number and Nominal Aspect

Since Booij (1994, 1996) it has become increasingly clear that inflectional morphology can take part in lexeme formation and compounding. Booij (1994) recognized the need for substantive constraints on the ways inflection can feed derivation, and restricted its derivational use to deictic categories, including Number. Pursuing this search for constraints, I propose that Number is a single morphological category covering two abstract functions (cf. Beard 1995), and that it can be inherent only when it expresses the more lexical of those functions, and thus means more than the grammatical feature would. This lexical Number expresses properties of the lexeme but stands halfway between the lexical core and the properly inflectional categories. It encodes mereological (part-whole) properties of the noun's interpretation, thus paralleling the role of Aspect in the verbal domain, and like Aspect it can be integrated to different degrees in the grammatical system of a language. In some languages, this type of information has a specific morphological expression (so-called collective affixes). In others, it appears only as non-canonical semantics (and sometimes form) for Number inflection. Inherent Number, both as a component of lexeme-formation and as fixed Number value on certain nouns, consists in the expression of Nominal Aspect through the morphology of Number. Morphology is not split, but its uses are. Inherent inflection, specifically Number, arises in certain languages as a by-product of the separation of (morphological) form and meaning. The article develops these views by presenting first a relatively detailed exemplification from several sources (section 1), followed by some critical reflections on the peculiarities of these constructions, to the effect that inherent Number must be qualitatively different from inflectional Number (section 2). Section 3 sets out in detail the hypothesis that inherent Number is the inflectional expression of Nominal Aspect, an

On Definite Reference in World Englishes

AbstractDeixis, associated with the gestural dimension of language, connects all language use to context of situation. It governs a number of grammatical and epistemological categories, including topicalization, orientational mapping and definite and unique reference. The focus of this paper is on the category mentioned last in the previous sentence: definite and unique reference across world Englishes.The aim is to explore the uses of definite descriptions (Russell, 1919), i.e., noun phrases with the definite article the, to determine the nature and extent of differences across the varieties. Research on this topic is driven by two observations. The first is recent research findings in corpus linguistics. For example, Poesio and Vieira (1998) suggest that native speakers differ considerably from each other in their judgment of whether a definite noun phrase refers to an antecedent in the text, and if so, which noun phrase is the antecedent. The second is that it seems reasonable to assume that differences in the use of definite descriptions across varieties exist in view of the fact that English is in contact with other languages in different parts of the world. These languages utilize different categories to represent the same reality or imagined reality that are expressed in English by deictic categories. Research has shown that ‘conceptual situation’ and ‘conceptual event’ are largely language‐specifc (see, e.g., Pawley, 1987), and bilinguals and multilinguals transfer their ways of speaking and writing to their use of English. Use of definite descriptions, therefore, is very likely to differ in Englishes used in different parts of the world.In this paper I utilize insights from earlier theories of definite descriptions (e.g., Christophersen, 1939; Hawkins, 1978; Webber, 1979; Prince, 1981, 1992; Heim, 1982) to analyze data from several world varieties of English. I also discuss the implications of my findings to the teaching of grammar in the EIL context.

Deictic categories as mitigating devices

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Children's Comprehension of Deictic Categories in Oral and Written Language

THIS STUDY examined children's ability to understand the use of deictic terms in oral and written language. Three categories of words with deictic content were investigated: pronouns (e.g., I, you), locatives (e.g., this, here), and motion verbs (e.g., come, go). Three groups of second-grade students performed three types of tasks: oral-language tasks, written-language tasks, and picture-selection tasks. Planned comparisons indicated that written-language tasks were more difficult than comparable oral-language tasks, that motion verbs were more difficult for children to interpret, and that children found it more difficult to interpret deictic terms when they were observers than when they were participants in a conversation. Children had as much difficulty interpreting deictic terms in written texts addressed to the reader as in written texts representing quoted dialogue. Factors that contributed to the difficulty children had in interpreting words with deictic content are discussed.

A Principle of Text Coherence in Indonesian Languages

The logic of Indonesian subjectless and tenseless expressions appears to have cultural implications, just as the use of tenses in English scientific writing entails much more than grammatical minutiae. A. L. Becker has pointed out thattensein English functions in a “coherence system” that pervades and transcends grammar. A parallel coherence system is suggested for Indonesian, based not on tense but ontopic. Paul Ricoeur's distinction between LANGUAGE and DISCOURSE is the basis of the claim that Indonesian sentences cohere on the bond between grammatical subject and discourse topic. Examples are drawn from a number of contexts that call forth passive sentences in Indonesian. The article concludes on another suggestion by Becker. The Indonesian topic may be part of a larger deictic category ofperson, which may be related in discourse to orientation in space—both physical and social—of participants in the speech event. If this suggestion is correct, then the contrast between English and Indonesian coherence systems may be found in the opposition tense/time vs. person/space.

A REVIEW OF THE SO-CALLED -BE/-BA PAST TENSES OF ZULU

The aim of this paper is to give a semantic explanation of the verb groups with -be/-ba as a deficient verb stem and to account for elision within the deficient verb groups. The different types of complements will also be discussed. Having studied the findings of several grammarians on the so-called compound tenses of the African languages, it has become evident that they more or less have the same view of these verb forms in question. To them these forms constitute past tenses. Elision has been indicated but not exhaustively discussed. To them the semantic notion par-exellence is that of continuation of the action. As tense is a deictic category which relates the time of the action, event or state of affairs to the time of utterance, the forms containing -be/-ba as a deficient verb cannot be regarded as tense indicating. -be/-ba is used to indicate the shifting of the deictic centre from “now” to a new selected point in time. The deficient verb forms s/c + a + be, s/c + be, s/c + zo + ba/be and s/c + yo ...

Memory for deictic elements in sentences

The deictic elements of a language are the linguistic forms relating the utterance to a particular time, place, speaker, or discourse context. In the present study subjects memorized sentences containing words from one of five deictic categories (Deictic Place Adverbs, Demonstrative Adjectives, Articles, Deictic Verbs, Temporal Adverbs). When the sentences were presented in the usual experimental setting in which they are isolated from the actual time, place, person, and discourse context, the deictic words were much more difficult to remember than the nondeictic words. In sentences with appropriate context the deictic words were little different from the nondeictic words. The results support the hypothesis that deictic elements have limited meaning in sentences without deictic context and are therefore hard to remember.