1

Currently, I'm writing a thesis on deixis and I ran into trouble while dealing with some rather borderline cases in my corpus. I would appreciate your opinions on the utterances below.

After, such as in (1) is traditionally considered a deictic expression of time deixis, right? I don't know why but to me it seems to be rather non-deictic, given the context of the utterance "after the workout" does not really change its meaning in different contexts, than what's deictic about it?

(1) I eat immediately after the workout, and usually get some more caffeine at that point as well.

Similarly in (2) currently and when should be expressions of temporal deixis, too.

(2) Currently on a bulk. When I was cutting it was maybe ~$80.

My second question concerns the difference between anaphora and discourse deixis. Is it in sentence (3) below anaphoric or discourse deictic? The speaker is answering the question concerning spendings on food: "Curious what everybody spends on food specialy you big rigs"

(3) Buying most in bulk and looking for the best deals, i'd say somewhere around $150 or so for the month. I try to keep it low if I can.

since there is no nominal antecedent explicitly present, I would label it as a discourse deictic, answering the question i.e. spendings on food.

Shannon Scott Schupbach
  • 404
  • 2
  • 8
HaQ
  • 27
  • 3
  • I don't understand what is being asked about. There are several sentence (2)'s. And sentence (1) is generic, not deictic; we're talking about a repetitive activity, not one focussed on the speech event. – jlawler Feb 17 '20 at 22:48
  • I don't see any anaphora in your examples. Perhaps you mean something else? – CJ Dennis Feb 19 '20 at 05:36
  • @jlawler That's what I meant. It is not deictic since the meaning does not change. I was confused because some authors claim that before is deictic. – HaQ Feb 23 '20 at 15:38
  • @CJ Dennis What about "it" in the sentence (2)? It does not seem to be a non-referential part of a fixed idiomatic phrase, nor prop it. Therefore it must be anaphoric. – HaQ Feb 23 '20 at 15:42
  • @HaQ Perhaps you should explain what you understand anaphora to mean? – CJ Dennis Feb 23 '20 at 21:45
  • Sentence (2) is completely incomprehensible outside local context. Certainly the it had a value of approximately eighty dollars, but what, if anything, it refers to, if it refers to anything and is not a dummy, is unknown. – jlawler Feb 23 '20 at 22:53
  • @jlawler it refers to "spendings on food" mentioned in the main thread question - "Curious what everybody spends on food specialy you big rigs". Since there is no direct noun phrase to which "it" can refer, it should probably be treated as discourse deictic. I was just interested in your opinions on that classification. – HaQ Feb 24 '20 at 11:12
  • It's simple coreference if there's a coreferent in the discourse. The coreferent doesn't have to be an official Noun Phrase as long as it's meaningful. This works better, of course, at some distance from the pronoun. Discourse deixis involves demonstratives that have some deictic sense, like this and that; pronouns like it are basically just little things you throw in to make the grammar taste better. – jlawler Feb 24 '20 at 16:43
  • @jlawler coreference basically means anaphora, right? Anyway, so such expression will probably be treated as a grammatical fixed phrase or somehow vague reference (because we cannot clearly identify the antecedent, yet we understand the message). – HaQ Feb 25 '20 at 09:55
  • @CJDennis to me anaphora is a means of endophoric reference where one expression refers/points to another which is previously mentioned (mainly pronominals and demonstratives but also anaphoric definite articles and some adverbs such as then when used to point to successive events after previous/further events mentioned in one's narration.) – HaQ Feb 25 '20 at 10:02
  • Merriam-Webster: anaphora There are two definitions there. I thought you meant the first one. I don't see how deixis is different from the second definition. Merriam-Webster: deixis The whole point of pronouns is to refer to different things in different sentences. – CJ Dennis Feb 25 '20 at 10:08
  • Pronouns aren't always used that way. And complete sentences aren't as common on the ground as one might think. As for the meaning of deixis, I notice nobody has mentioned Fillmore yet. Perhaps a look at the source will clarify things. – jlawler Feb 25 '20 at 15:49
  • @jlawler thank you for the source, I know Fillmore's lectures and deixis itself is not so problematic for me. I'm more perplexed by non-deictic pronoun use. – HaQ Feb 25 '20 at 18:57
  • @CJDennis I know and that seems to be the problem. Deixis and anaphora are not the same thing and in my student's thesis I need to analyse them both separately. – HaQ Feb 25 '20 at 18:58
  • Third person is anaphora. First and second persons are deixis. – jlawler Feb 25 '20 at 19:16
  • @jlawler Unfortunately, it appears not to be that simple. – HaQ Feb 25 '20 at 23:17
  • 1
    https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2308/445 – Alex B. May 01 '20 at 19:49

1 Answers1

1

I would argue that most of the examples provided in your question are not actually deictic usages as deixis refers to features of the context of the speech event encoded in the speech event itself.

given the context of the utterance "after the workout" does not really change its meaning in different contexts, then what's deictic about it?

In (1) "after the workout" has no relation to when the utterance occurred. A deictic usage of "after" would be:

(4) I'm doing something right now. I'll clean up after.

In (4) the interpretation of "after" is dependent on the temporal context of when the sentence was uttered. "after" is tricky because its meaning is always dependent on a relationship to something else. You can't do something after nothing. "After" entails that something comes before. But whether it's functioning deictically depends on whether its relationship is to the context of the utterance.

In (2) "currently" is functioning as a deictic adverb as it is a synonym for "now". The meaning of "currently" changes based on when the sentence is used. But "when" is like "after". It functions to anchor one event to another, but not necessarily to the speech event itself.

(5) "When I was 11 I went to Six Flags for the first time."

In (5), "when" always refers to the same time whether I said it 10 years ago or say it 10 years from now. Just as in (2) "when I was cutting..." refers to a specific time in the past irrespective of the time of utterance. I suppose an argument could be made that there were multiple periods of time "when I was cutting", in which case the time of utterance would have a bearing on which of those time periods is being referred to. But in this case, the sentence implies that the time in question was a single, specific time period.

Is it in sentence (3) below anaphoric or discourse deictic?

In (3) there is no discourse deixis present. "It" refers to an implied noun phrase: "the amount I spend per month". Additionally, discourse deixis in English is almost always accomplished through "that" (anaphoric) or "this" (usually kataphoric, but can also be anaphoric). The only context I can think of where "it" would be classified as functioning as a discourse deictic would be something like:

(6) I caught a fish THIS BIG. It's true, I swear!

Shannon Scott Schupbach
  • 404
  • 2
  • 8