Reflection: Spatial deixis and comparisons with today’s English

Today, English deictic spatial expressions are part of a two-term system. However, English used to have a three-term system. In addition to the adverbs here and there, English had the expression yonder, and, in addition to the demonstratives this and that, it had the expression yon. For example, Geoffrey Chaucer writes around 1386 Whos is that faire child that stondeth yonder? (Man of Law’s Tale). These items were used for entities at some distance from the deictic centre but still within sight; they are a kind of medial stage between proximal and distal. Modern Spanish is an example of a language with a three-term system (este, ese and aquel) based on similar lines.

Other languages differ from English with respect to the number of terms used and the kind of relationship captured. Modern German is a case in point. While modern spoken German has an adverb contrast with hier (“here”) and dort (“there”), it does not have a demonstrative contrast of the type achieved in English by this and that. Demonstratives occurring with nouns are comprised of dieser and stressed der, die, das. The unstressed latter items are usually considered definite articles. However, as Diessel (2008) points out, what makes all these items demonstrative-like rather than definite article-like is their pragmatic function: “like distance-marked demonstratives, these expressions are commonly used to focus the hearer’s attention on entities in the surrounding situation, which is not what speakers usually do with definite markers”. Readers will note some similarity here with Old English, as discussed above. Some languages mark even more degrees of distance. Malagasy apparently uses seven demonstrative adverbs and six demonstrative pronouns to mark increasing degrees of distance from the speaker (Anderson and Keenan 1985: 292–294).

English has a spatial deictic system based on degrees of distance between the speaker as deictic centre and the referent. Some languages have a different kind of relationship as their basis, one that is less egocentric and not based on degrees of distance. Japanese is an example of the language that factors in nearness (or not) of the referent to the speaker, the hearer and the speaker and hearer. Thus, it has kono (near the speaker), sono (near the hearer) and ano (away from the speaker and hearer) (Kuno 1973: 27, cited in Diessel 2008). If one remembers the notion of deictic projection, as introduced above, one can see how this might work: for example, with sono the speaker projects the deictic centre onto the hearer. Such deictic systems have been described as person-based systems as opposed to distance-based systems (Anderson and Keenan 1985). Finally, we briefly note here that some Austronesian languages do not take any speech participants as deictic centres but orientate towards absolute geographical location points, such as seaward versus landward, or even simply co-ordinates like north, south, east and west.

The final category in Table 2.2, temporal deixis, concerns expressions which can convey relations over time. As far as English is concerned, they typically express a relationship between a deictic centre and the time of the speaker’s utterance. Now refers to a span of time encompassing the speaker’s utterance; the use of the present tense as opposed to the past can mark the speaker’s current time of speaking (and auxiliary verbs such as will, shall, going to, etc. can mark some point in the future); tomorrow, next week, yesterday, ago, etc. indicate a span of time in relation to the speaker’s current utterance.

Deictic expressions, as we have seen, are usually taken as referring to entities in the extralinguistic world. Some scholars have also distinguished discourse or textual deixis, which involves making a connection with a segment of discourse. Consider these (reconstructed) words said by a tutor at the end of a lecture in the UK:

That points back to the preceding discourse (i.e. the lecture); here points to upcoming discourse. Given that we are now dealing with textual links, this category of deixis is not so pure. It also overlaps with the notion of anaphora, which we will discuss in the following section, though it is in principle distinguishable on some counts, as we will note.

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