John Cainoy

Reporters are expected to cover the following subtopics in detail:

• Core definition of deixis and its role in linking language to context.
• Types of deixis: person, spatial, temporal, discourse, and social.
• Indexicality and context dependence in interpretation.
• Deictic shifts in narratives and reported speech.
• Multimodal deixis (gesture, gaze, visuals) in face-to-face and digital communication.
• Deixis in digital discourse (e.g., “here” in online spaces, temporal deixis in asynchronous chats).
• Research potential: deixis as a tool for analyzing interaction in multimodal, cross-cultural, and digital contexts.

• Define deixis and show how it grounds meaning in context.
• Discuss the different types of deixis and their interaction with grammar and pragmatics.
• Highlight the role of deixis in shaping reference, perspective, and interaction.
• Show how multimodal and digital environments complicate deictic reference.

• Fillmore, C. J. (1997). Lectures on Deixis. CSLI Publications.
• Levinson, S. C. (1983). Deixis. In Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
• Sidnell, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2016). Deixis and the Interactional Foundations of Reference. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 217–239). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.27

• Deixis, Indexicality
• Person Deixis (I, you, we)
• Spatial Deixis (here, there, this, that)
• Temporal Deixis (now, then, today, tomorrow)
• Discourse Deixis (in this paper, as mentioned above)
• Social Deixis (titles, honorifics, politeness markers)
• Deictic Shift

• Classification of deixis types in data.
• Contextual analysis of indexicals.
• Deictic shift theory for narrative analysis.
• Multimodal coding of gesture, gaze, and speech.

• Person deixis: “I am tired” → interpretation depends on speaker.
• Spatial deixis: “Put it there” → “there” varies by context.
• Temporal deixis: “See you tomorrow” → relative to utterance time.
• Discourse deixis: “As I said earlier…”
• Social deixis: “Your Honor,” “Professor,” honorifics in Japanese.
• Digital deixis: “Click here” (no physical space, only online location).

• How does deixis reveal the relationship between language and context?
• How does multimodality (gestures, visuals) expand our understanding of deixis?
• In what ways does digital communication transform spatial and temporal deixis?

• Analysis of deixis in classroom interaction (teacher vs. student perspective).
• Deictic shifts in narrative fiction or online storytelling.
• Multimodal study of deixis in video conferencing or vlogging.