L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #332 Contextual meaning: time - not resolved by Logos coding

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #331 Logos tagging - contextual meaning. - Logos Forums

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Deixis

Definition

Deixis is reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the (usually) extralinguistic context of the utterance, such as
• who is speaking
• the time or place of speaking
• the gestures of the speaker , or
• the current location in the discourse .

Examples (English)

Here are examples of deictic expressions:
• I
• You
• Now
• There
• That
• The following
• Tenses

Kinds

Here are some kinds of deixis:
• discourse deixis
• empathetic deixis
• person deixis
• place deixis
• social deixis
• time deixis

Generic

Deixis is a kind of
• exophora

Sources

Crystal 1980: :103

Levinson 1983: :54–56

Mish 1991: :335

Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985: :1025

Time deixis is reference to time relative to a temporal reference point. Typically, this point is the moment of utterance.

Examples of what we see in the text that requires that we determine the time through the context:

• now
• then
• yesterday
• today
• tomorrow
• distinctions in verb tenses

We are usually oblivious to the fact that these words have fixed meaning only in a specific context. We therefore tend to ignore the interpretative step in which we assign meaning and whether there is ambiguity/opportunity for error in assigning the meaning.