Deixis

Partial source: www.sil.org 

1.  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

·         I

·         You

·         Now

·         There

·         That

·         The following

·         Tenses

2.  Person deixis is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as  

             the speaker, the addressee, and referents which are neither speaker nor addressee. 

        Person deixis is commonly expressed by the following kinds of constituents: 

             Pronouns--first person, second person, and third person

             Possessive affixes of nouns

             Agreement affixes of verbs

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

 Examples 

             Temporal adverbs

·         now / then

·         yesterday / today / tomorrow

·         Distinctions in tense

4.  Spatial deixis localises both the Speech participants and narrated participants in space.

                Examples

·         Here

·         Above

·         Over there

·         Left

5.  Discourse deixis is deictic reference to a portion of a discourse relative to the speaker's current location in the discourse. 

 Examples (English)

             Use of this to refer to a story one is about to tell in:

·         I bet you haven't heard this story.

·         Reference to Chapter 7 of a book by means of in the next chapter or in the previous chapter, depending on whether the reference is made from Chapter 6 or 8.

·         Use of this in a creaky-voiced utterance of:

                                  This is what phoneticians call a creaky voice.