Talk:Deixis

Technological deixis

Technological deixis? The definition out of context makes no sense; secondarily, is this definition used any place other than the one source cited? I move to strike it as an insignificant usage. Orbis 3 (talk) 00:31, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

technological deixis is used often in the field of new literacies and technology. It may not be familiar to some readers, but it will be to others. Feel free to reorganize the article's structure or add a new article solely on deixis in linguisitics if you disagree. Please don't delete just because it the concept is unfamiliar to you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by TDWolsey (talk • contribs) 20:33, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

I suggest that someone explain what technological deixis is, and giv examples, and add information about it to this article as appropriate.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 07:11, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Linguistic and situational context

Deixis: linguistic and situational context
In my review sheet for my final this appears. What is the difference? --Nonymous-raz (talk) 13:50, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Deixis vs. exophora

It's aggressively unclear, from the articles on both topics as they currently stand, how deixis relates to exophora. This article says that

Deictic words are bound to a context — either a linguistic or extralinguistic context — for their interpretation.

but also says that

Deixis is a type of exophora.

And exophora is dependence on extralinguistic context. Is the word "extralinguistic" being used in two different ways? Why should all deixis be exophora, and, why shouldn't all exophora be deixis? Pi zero (talk) 12:06, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

No, extralinguistic (what I added to the article) means "outside of language". Deixis is not strictly exophoric although it commonly is. I removed the reference to exophora. Obviously, examples are needed here to demonstrate how linguistic and extralinguistic contexts are used to determine what the referent of a deictic word may be.

This article is not very good (like many linguistic articles). I'm thinking about adding stuff to improve it.

The exophora article should probably be merged with the endophora article as they can be profitably discussed together. – ishwar  (speak) 16:44, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Reverted TDWolsey's recent edits

This has come up before. The information (and external link) that User:TDWolsey occasionally reinserts into this article are of dubious notability, but more importantly represent an unrelated concept to the one discussed by the subject of this article, which is linguistic deixis. WP is not a dictionary: the fact that the term is used in other specific contexts does not mean that this article needs to have a section on it. TDWolsey, you are invited to create a "Technological deixis" article which explains the concept as it relates to your field. If you can demonstrate that it is sufficiently notable and build consensus for the change, we can add an {{other uses}} template at the top of the page or similar, helping users navigate to the page. And if you can demonstrate that technological deixis is equivalently notable to linguistic deixis, then we could even start talking about moving this page to "Deixis (linguistics)" and making "Deixis" a disambiguation page.

In the meantime, however, do not keep re-adding this material to this article. It has been removed now more than once, and (as you can see above) its relevance to the article topic questioned by other editors.

Furthermore, adding a paragraph of new information (that has previously been removed, and with an external link no less!) and marking the edit as "minor" is at the very best rude and at worst makes it look as though you are trying to sneak a previously rejected edit under the radar of editors who watch this page. Don't do that. Thanks Eniagrom (talk) 20:22, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Correct, however: I think User:TDWolsey should be WP:BOLD and create it himself, either as Technological deixis or preferrably on Deixis (technology). Stub articles are allowed to live for a while, so that they might be improved. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 21:52, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree completely -- he should create it himself. He has claimed elsewhere that the concept is relevant in his chosen field, in which case references to support its notability should be relatively easy to come by, and WP would likely be enriched by the addition. He seems to be somewhat confused about how articles on the WP work, however, in that he believes that because this article is named "deixis", a word with apparently several meanings, each meaning should be detailed in the article body, no matter how unrelated those meanings might be. To this end I invite him to read WP:PRECISION and also consider what WP:NOTDIC#Major differences has to say about homographs: "The same title for different things ... [in an encyclopedia] are found in different articles ... [whereas in a dictionary they] are to be found in one entry."

User:TDWolsey, please understand that it is not because we object in principle to your content that we have excised it from this article. It is furthermore not because we are trying to further the fiction that "deixis" (or virtually any other term) has only one meaning. Rather, it is because this article, even if its title does not indicate it parenthetically, is about the phenomenon in linguistics. You may be right that it should be named "Deixis (linguistics)", and for the record I would not be opposed to considering such a change, but as I said before you must demonstrate that "Deixis (technology)" is equivalently notable first.

Please do create Deixis (technology) (I agree with Rursus, that's a better title) and flesh it out. Get some help from others in your field, put in some refs, it doesn't need to be long, a well referenced stub will survive deletion. Thanks, Eniagrom (talk) 19:04, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Assessment

1. it's not a stub article, it definitely has more than that, 2. it lacks a Definition section with examples, so it's not better than start-class. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 21:52, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

On Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment#Quality_scale. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 21:53, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

No C. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 21:54, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Pronunciation

How is Deixis pronounced? Ndanielm (talk) 22:21, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

See en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deixis. Imerologul Valah (talk) 20:59, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

I believe providing a pronunciation guide after the first appearance of deixis would improve this article. Other articles, e.g., Anaphora (linguistics), have such guides. Grosbach (talk) 04:14, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Why the stress on Serbo-Croatian?

Is the Serbo-Croatian language all that unusual in respect to this subject? I find it odd that it's singled out twice in the article and then given three references at the bottom (notably all by the same author). French makes sense as an example given that it's one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. I could see also mentioning Spanish there (as it follows most of the same rules as French and is also pretty widely spoken). But as far as I know, Serbo-Croatian isn't spoken much outside of Serbia and Croatia. (Cherokee is probably even less widely spoken, but it's notable because it operates differently from most other languages.) If we were to list all the languages where these rules apply, the article would get pretty unwieldy. Knowing little about Serbo-Croatian, I can't say whether it's unusual enough with respect to the subject to warrant repeated mention, but if so, that should be made more clear. Otherwise, I'd say it doesn't need to be in the article at all. Lurlock (talk) 21:07, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Most likely, there's nothing special about Serbo-Croatian, and its inclusion in the article is more a result of a particular Wikipedia editor being either a speaker or otherwise familiar with that language. We do sometimes have trouble in linguistics articles with this sort of thing: an article on a particular feature of a language devolves into a long list of languages that have that feature, possibly with examples. (I did a fairly large refactoring of Clusivity as a result of this.) You're right that these long lists and examples add little to an article, and when they become unwieldy a clean-up is necessary, and sometimes that clean-up gets difficult politically, because advocates of particular languages all think theirs should be one of the ones retained.

This brings us to the crux of the problem: since we do want some examples, how do we decide which languages to choose? And I submit that your offhand criteria are not above criticism. Why should both French and Spanish be mentioned, when they're practically dialects of each other from a typological perspective? With few exceptions what's in one will probably be in the other. And you say "Cherokee operates differently from most other languages", but that's not really true, it's just not Indo-European and so appears exotic to speakers of Indo-European languages, which at the end of the day are all very similar to each other.

To me Serbo-Croatian is a totally uninteresting example, as is French, and Spanish, and more or less any other European language, because I see them all as very similar. Finnish, Chinese, Cherokee, Dyirbal, those interest me. But the article is not being written for me, it's being written for everyone, so my criteria are no better than yours. So honestly, as far as I'm concerned, Serbo-Croatian is fine in the article because (for the moment) there aren't so many examples that they overwhelm the content. It's true that the example is boring, but at the end of the day, does it really matter? We do want some examples and no one can agree on which, so within reason I think it's fine to let the editors who write the text decide. Eniagrom (talk) 10:34, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Very well-put, you have covered many bases at one go. 84.227.228.178 (talk) 11:36, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

• Examples should come from the languages that have been most used as examples in the literature on deixis, some of the main works on deixis are on English, Yucatec Mayan and Dyirbal. Then other works use examples from many different languages, and there we should choose the examples that we think illustrate best what we want to say regardless of what language they are in. What we shouldn't do is invent and analyze our own examples all examples should come from a source that is explicitly about deixis.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:42, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

My feeling is that emphasis should be placed on languages that are either a.) familiar enough to the largest number of readers that little other explanation is needed (thus providing easy context for the most people), or b.) unusual enough in relation to the subject to warrant specific notice (thus pointing out a noteworthy exception). French or Spanish satisfy the first criteria, as they are very widely known and thus more likely to be familiar to the average reader. Cherokee satisfies the second, as it is unusual with respect to most commonly spoken languages. (Granted, I have no idea how unusual it is - are there many other languages that default to the feminine pronoun for unknown or mixed groups?) Serbo-Croatian, on the other hand, is both not widely known and as far as I can tell not particularly unusual in regards to the subject, so it serves neither as an easy context nor an illustration of something unusual. I'll agree that Spanish is similar enough to French to be redundant, as are most European languages (possibly including Serbo-Croatian). I would like to see more examples of unusual cases, as that would make the article more interesting, and we've already gotten the easy-context examples out of the way by mentioning French. However, I'm honestly not overly invested in this, just thought it was a little unusual. Lurlock (talk) 16:44, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

The recent removal of Cherokee is of course correct as Cherokee indeed doesnt have a gender system. This is the problem when adding stuff from memory instead of from reliable sources.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:16, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Other languages

It says, "Although this article draws examples primarily from English..." I suggest adding more examples from languages other than English.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 07:10, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Apparent error

According to the article,

(2) those not directly involved (e.g. overhearers—those who hear the utterance but who are not being directly addressed),

is supposed to be exemplified by

Would you like to have dinner?

but this cannot be right. Since the title of the section is "traditional categories", I would think that definition (2) must be modified to correspond to the customary second person, i.e. to accord with the example. 84.227.228.178 (talk) 10:55, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Deictic projection examples?

Currently, there are two examples given of deictic projection:

"I am coming home now."

"I am not here; please leave a message."

Even after reading the explanatory details under each, I'm compelled to dispute both examples.

In the first sentence, the use of "coming" is perfectly compatible with its general definition, "to move from further away to nearer to". It is not necessarily implied by the verb "to come" that an object or person be moving towards the speaker, evidenced by "your package should come tomorrow." Out of context, this could technically mean that I'll be receiving a package sent by you tomorrow, although (at least in my dialect of North American English) it would more commonly be interpreted to mean that you'll be receiving a package tomorrow from an unspecified sender. It's not necessary to conceive of "I am coming home now" as a metaphorical extension of myself to my home, because it still reads fine as meaning I'm coming towards my house.

In the second sentence (contextualized as a pre-recorded phone message), "here" refers to the location where I, the speaker, was when I recorded it. Again, there's no metaphorical extension of myself to my home when it plays, since it is spatially consistent when recorded (although it would make a nice example of temporal deixis!). Alternatively, upon the time of listening, one could think of the message itself as doing the speaking, in which case "here" still refers to the place from which it's being transmitted and there's no deixis involved at all.

If something is amiss with my analysis, do tell! I'm only here to learn. I just don't think either of the provided sentences quite exemplify what the section is purportedly talking about. Etymographer (talk) 07:32, 30 July 2020 (UTC)