Person Deixis

Overview

Person deixis is a type of deixis concerned with the identification of the participants in a communication event. These are words that point to the speaker, the addressee, or other people involved in the situation being described.

Key Concepts

The core elements of person deixis involve pronouns and other expressions that establish who is speaking, who is being spoken to, and who is being spoken about. These include:

• First-person deixis: Refers to the speaker (e.g., ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’).
• Second-person deixis: Refers to the addressee (e.g., ‘you’, ‘your’).
• Third-person deixis: Refers to individuals other than the speaker or addressee (e.g., ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘they’, ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘them’).

Deep Dive

Person deixis is crucial for grounding language in the immediate context of utterance. It creates a ‘speaker-hearer’ orientation. The meaning of deictic terms is dependent on the context of their use, specifically the identity of the speaker and listener, and the time and place of utterance.

Applications

Understanding person deixis is vital in linguistics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics. It helps in:

• Discourse analysis: Tracking referents and conversational turns.
• Machine translation: Accurately translating pronouns and their references.
• Natural language processing: Enabling machines to understand context.

Challenges & Misconceptions

A common misconception is that person deixis is limited to pronouns. However, possessive determiners and even certain verb forms can carry deictic force. The complexity arises in differentiating between direct reference and idiomatic or metaphorical uses.

FAQs

Q: What is the primary function of person deixis?
A: To identify and distinguish the participants in a conversation or narrative.

Q: Are there other types of deixis?
A: Yes, including spatial (place), temporal (time), and social deixis.