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“then”).All these expressions depend, for their interpretation, on speaker and hearer
sharing the same context.Indeed,deictic expressions have their most basic uses in face-
to-face spoken interaction where utterances such as[1] are easily understood by the
people present,but may need a translation for someone not right there.
[1] I’ll put this here.
(Of course, you understood that Jim was telling Anne that he was about to put an
extra house key in one of the kitchen drawers.)
Deixis is clearly a form of referring that is tied to the speaker’s context, with the
most basic distinction between deictic expressions being “near speaker” versus “away
from speaker”.In English, the “near speaker”, or proximal terms, are “this’, “here”, “now”.The
“away from speaker”, or distal terms, are “that”,”there”,”than”.Proximal terms are typically
interpreted in terms of the speaker’s location, or the deictic center, so that “now’ is
generally understood as referring to some point or period in time that has the time of
the speaker’s utterance at its center.Distal terms can simply indicate “away from
speaker”,but, in some languages, can be used to distinguish between “near addressee”
and “away from both speaker and addressee”. Thus, in Japanese, the translation of the
pronoun “that” will distinguish between “that near addressee” “sore” and “that distant from
both speaker and addressee” “are” with a third term being used for the proximal “ this
near speaker” “kore”.

Person deixis
The distinction just described involves person deixis, with the speaker (“I”) and
the addressee (“you”) mentioned.The simplisity of these forms disguises the complexity
of their use.To learn these deictic expressions, we have to discover that each person in
a conversation shifts from being “I” to being “you” constantly. All young children go
through a stage in their learning where this distinction seems problematic and they say
things like “Read you a story”(instead of ‘me’) when handing over a favorite book.
Person deixis clearly operates on a basic three-part devision, exemplified by
the pronouns for first person(‘I’), second person(‘you’), and third person(‘he’,’she’, or ‘it’).In
many languages these deictic categories of speaker, addresse, and other(s) are
elaborated with markers of relative social status( for example, adderessee with higher
status versus addressee with lower status).Expressions which indicate higher status are
discribed as honorifics.The discussion of the circumstances which lead to the choice of
one of these forms rather than another is sometimes described as social deixis.
A fairly well-known example of a social contrast encoded within person deixis is
the distinction between forms used for a familiar versus a non-familiar addresse in
some languages.This is known as theT/V distinction,from the French forms”tu”(familiar)
and “vous” (non-familiar), and is found in many languages including German(‘du/Sie’) and
Spanish(‘tu/Usted’).The choice of one form will certainly communicate something(not
directly said) about the speaker’s view of his or her relationship with the addressee. In
those social contexts where individuals typically mark distinctions between the social
status of the speaker and addressee, the higher,older, and more powerful speaker
will tend to use the ‘tu’ version to a lower younger, and less powerful addressee, and
be addressed by the ’vous’ form in return. When social change is taking place, as for
xample in modern Spain, where a young businesswoman(higher economic status) is
talking to her older cleaning lady(lower economic status),how do they address each