Indexicality has been taken up with great energy to explain processes of identity and identification (cf., Anderson, 2008; Johnstone, Andrus, & Danielson, 2006), but for this sake of this article I would like to limit my discussion to a tangible and familiar indexical,
deictics. Deictics--spatial, temporal, and pronomial--are a common form of indexical, and words like there, now, and we all point to things within the speaking situation itself in order to be understood.
(7) So, for example, the deliberate use of
deictics and prepositional phrases in these sonnets become formal devices that reflect a physical encounter of subject and beloved object as well as a speaker's struggle to coordinate her position in relation to a present other.
In the richest and most challenging possible use of the syntheses embodied by
deictic language, "Requiem" expresses the speaker's hope for incorporating death into life and so reconciling her life with her mother's death.
(Compare figure 4 with figure 2: In red, "art" expresses a feeling; in green, "art" designates things; of course, "art" does both at once.) As designators, nouns are analogous to the
deictics "this" or "that": They behave like pointing fingers.
The subject of enunciation can be simultaneously identified explicitly in the filmic discourse through
deictic marks.
In sentence 1), the use of the near temporal
deictic expression "now" ("aknun") accompanied with the back shifted tenses are signs of FID.
Personal
deictics like he, him, me, I, they, you have no referential value in themselves but only in what can be determined from context.
Deictics are words like "here" and "now" or "I" and "you" whose meaning depends on the identity of the speaker and his position in time and space.
Chapter Five continues this study of narrative strategies, this time focusing on Sor Juana's use of personal
deictics in the Primero Sueno, which reveal that, far from obscuring the identity of the central narrative voice, attest to its constant presence throughout the poem.
Among Lavukaleve demonstratives there are paradigms of demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative modifiers, locative
deictics, and a very rare set of demonstrative identifiers.
We first built up patterns for word classes:
deictics (today, yesterday, etc.), units (hour, day, etc.), days (Monday, Tuesday, etc.), months, temporal adjectives, temporal adverbs, and so on.
Make students focus on the opening sentences of "That Tree"--since they seemingly forebode the figure of an apparently external narrator adopting an ironic distance from the main character--and make them reflect upon the use of
deictics.
This article examines the nature and function of
deictics in a prose text.
