This 42nd collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-
The meaning of deictic words is not in linguistic forms.
By using deictics, speakers flout the maxim of manner. Deictics are grammatical words with no lexical meaning to specify what the speaker means.
Deictics are anaphoric determiners.
Deictics never refer to real things. They have no referent.
If I say ‘This woman’ it results in lack of description of the woman because there is no adjective between this and woman, so it’s hard to deduce the exact woman.
With deixis, I must be back facing the speaker to understand what he means.
With deictics, the details can be substituted by pronouns like these, that and there.
Deictics like ‘there’ do not modify the position of their referents.
In ‘There is my wallet’, the referent of there is my wallet.
Deictics are difficult because we don’t know where the Determinants are pointing to.
There may be different innotation from the speaker. For example, ‘I want this book, now’ and ‘I want this, book now’. So it will have to depend on the innotation of the speaker in this context.
Determiners’ purpose in language is to indicate the location of objects relative to the speaker. These words are dexictic.
Deictics can substitute a string of words, for example ‘she’ can be my mother or my friend, so they are ambigious.
People who suffer from euphasia cannot use deictics.
More to come...