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forms of temporal reference are learned a lot later than the deictic expressions like
‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘today’,’tonight’, ‘next week’, ‘last week’,’this week’.All these
expressions depend for their interpretation on knowing the relevant utterance time.If we
don’t know the utterance(i.e. scribbling) time of a note,as in[8], on an office door, we
won’t know if we have a short or a long wait ahead.
[8] Back in an hour.
Similarly, if we return the next day to a bar that displays the notice in[9], than we will
still be(deictically) one day early for the free drink.
[9] Free Beer Tomorrow.
The psychological basis of temporal deixis seems to be similar to that of spatial
deixis.We can treat temporal events as objects that move toward us(into view)or away
from us(out of view).One metaphor used in English is of events coming toward the
speaker from the future(for example, ‘the coming week’, ‘the approaching year’)and going
away from the speaker to the past(for example,’in days gone by’, ‘the past week’).We
also seem to treat the near of immediate future as being close to utterance time by
using the proximal deictic ‘this’, as in ‘this(coming)weekend’ or ‘this(coming)Thursday’.
One basic(but often unrecognized) type of temporal deixis in English is in the
choice of verb tense.Whereas other languages have many different forms of the verb
as different tenses, English has only two basic forms, the present as in[10a.], and the
past as in[10b.].
[10] a. I live here now.
b. I lived there then.
The present tense is the proximal form and the past tense is the distal
form.Someting having taken place in the past, as in [11a.], is typically treated as distant
from the speaker’s current situation.Perhaps less obviously, something that is treated as
extremely unlikely( or impossible) from the speaker’s current situation is also marked via
the distal(past tense) form, as in [11b.].
[11] a. I could swim (when I was a child).
b. I could be in Hawaii (if I had a lot of money).
The past tense is always used in English in those if-clauses that mark events
presented by the speaker as not being close to present reality as in[12].
[12] a. If I had a yacht,…
b. If I was rich,…
Neither of the ideas expressed in [12] are to be treated as having happened in
past time.They are presented as deictically distant from the speaker’s current situation.
So distant,indeed, that they actually communicate the negative(we infer that the speaker
has no yacht and is not rich).
In order to understand many English conditional constructions(including those of
the form ‘Had I known sooner…’), we have to recognize that, in temporal deixis, the
remote or distal form can be used to communicate not only distance from current time,
but also distance from current reality or facts.
Deixis and grammar
The basic distinctions presented so far for person, spatial, and temporal deixis can all
be seen at work in one of the most common structural distictions made in English
grammar- that between direct and indirect (or reported) speech. As already described,
the deictic expressions for person (‘you’), place(‘here’), and time(‘this evening’) can all
be interpreted within the same context as the speaker who utters[13a.].