M. A. I english P. C3 & C6 Modern Linguistics title pmd

9.1 
Discourse Deixis and Social Deixis 
Discourse deixis is involved whenever a form of expression points at earlier, 
simultaneous, or following discourse. In other words, it concerns the use of 
expressions within some utterance to refer to some portion of the discourse that 
contains that utterance. For example, the demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’ (normally 
used as place deixis) can also be used to refer to a forthcoming portion of the 
discourse as in 
I bet you haven’t heard this story. 
and to refer to the preceding portion, as in 

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That was the funniest story I’ve ever heard. 
(Discourse deixis is different from anaphora, which concerns the use of a pronoun to 
refer to the same referent as some prior item, as in 
Harry is a good boy; he is so considerate.) 
Social deixis anchors language into its immediate interactional context of 
use. In other words, it concerns that aspect of utterances which reflect or establish 
or are determined by certain realities of the social situation in which the speech act 
occurs. Typical examples are the choices available in many languages between 
formal and informal second-person forms of address, such as ‘tu’ versus ‘vous’ in 
French, ‘du’ versus ‘sie’ in German, ‘tum’ versus ‘aap’ in Hindi and ‘tumhi’ versus 
‘aapan’ in Marathi. The social deixis is also called ‘attitudinal deixis’. 
10. 
Discourse
In semantics, discourse is a linguistic unit composed of several sentences 
(conversations, arguments, speeches) linked by cohesive devices like substitution, 
ellipsis, tense sequence, etc. In sociolinguistics, discourse is looked at as ‘a process 
by which we create, relate, organize and realize meaning’. In other words, meaning 
emerges through social interaction. It can also be treated as an observable instance 
of communicative behaviour, verbal or non verbal.
According to Foucault ‘Discourse is a practice not just of representing the 
world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning’ 
(Michel Foucault in Politics and the Study of Discourse (1991)). Foucault called 
discourse as ‘discursive formation’ i.e. communication that involves specialized 
knowledge of various kinds. It is in this sense that the word is used most often in 
academic studies. Discourse is any meaningful interaction between or among 
interlocutors. In simple words, a discourse can be considered to be an 
institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a 
specific topic.

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