DEIXIS AND ANAPHORA

There are many words in the language that cannot be interpreted alone without being put in a context. This paper discusses how to interpret the meaning of words by studying the features of deixis and anaphora.

1. Deixis
Deixis is a Greek word for pointing or indicating. Kreidler (1998:144) states that in order to understand the referents in the utterance, the speaker and the hearer have to share the same context or situation in which the referents are used. Deixis concerns the ways in which language express features of the context of utterance or speech event in different way.
(1) I will be back in an hour is written on a piece of paper on someone’s office door. Because the reader was not present when the note was written, the reader does not know when it was written and when the writer will be back.
Saeed (2003:182) points out that every language has a word or phrase which relates an utterance to time, place or person. In addition, deixis is clearly tied to the speaker’s context. According to Cruse (2004:332) referent is located using the current speech event or one or more of its participants as reference points. Therefore, (2) Lee is over there contains a dietic locative expression. Lou is located with respect to the speaker. Lee is relatively distant from the speaker. This enables the hearer to pick out the referent (Lee) correctly.

1.2 Spatial Deixis
Spatial deixis specifies the location relative to the speaker and the addressee. Kreidler (1998:145) uses the term locative expression which designate space close to the speaker or farther away. Spatial deixis concerns the locations relative to anchorage points in the speech event (speaker = center). There are two basic ways of referring objects: by describing or naming them and locating them. Locations can be specified relative to other objects (3) The station is two hundred yards from the cathedral. Locations can be specified relative to the location of participants (4) It’s two hundred yards away. There are some pure place-deitic: here/there (adverbs) and this/that (demonstrative pronouns). Take the examples below:
(5) Bring that red chair here and take this blue chair there.
The word here refers to the location near the speaker (proximal) while there refers to the location away from the speaker (distal). In addition to this, the word that indicates that the object (red chair) is close to the speaker’s location whereas the word this indicates that the object (blue chair) is beyond the speaker’s location.

1.3 Person Deixis
Person deixis is any expression used to point to a person. Saeed (2003: 187) mentions that person deixis concerns with the roles of participants: the first person, the second person and the third person. Cruse (2004:333) argues that person deixis involves the speaker (the first person), the addressee (the second person), and neither speaker nor hearer (the third person). When Koko says (4) I missed the train, the word I refers to Koko. When Lulu says (4) I missed the train, the word I refers to Lulu. If the two persons do not only refer to themselves while talking, there is a third person (= the person they are talking about), which do not have to take part in the conversation (5) Harry broke up with his girl friend.

1.4 Social Deixis
Social deixis concerns social relationship between participants, their status, and relation to the topic of the discourse (Cruse 2004:336). The pronoun system used depends on the relationship of the participant of the conversation (Saeed 2003:188). The honorific form is used to show respect (6) Good evening, Mr. President.

1.5 Temporal Deixis
Cruse (2004: 334) asserts that “temporal deixis locates points or intervals on the time axis, using the moment of utterance as a reference point.” He further explains that there are three major divisions: before the moment of utterance, at the time of utterance, and after the time of utterance. The sentence (7) The meeting will be held next week was written on the notice board by Mr Smith, the Marketing Manager. Next week is a deitic expression which means the week after the speaker or the writer is in at the time of utterance. As a result, if A reads the notice on Monday, next week for A is next Monday. If B reads the notice on Wednesday, next week for B is next Wednesday.

1.6 Discourse Deixis
Discourse deixis is any expression used to refer to earlier or forthcoming segment of a discourse. Cruse (2004:336) points out that discourse deixis concerns the use of expressions referring to apart of the discourse. In discourse deixis, there are many words and phrases in English that indicate the relationship between utterance and prior discourse such as: but, therefore, in conclusion, to the contrary, however, besides, after all, etc.
(8) The boy stole a bike. Therefore, he was arrested yesterday.
Therefore functions as a connecting word between the utterance he was arrested and the prior sentence The boy stole a bike.

1.7 Gestural and Symbolic Deixis
Gestural deixis can only be interpreted with reference to an audio-visual tactile, and in general a physical, monitoring of the speech event. The hearer has to be able to see the speaker and their gesture (Cruse, 2004: 337) Instances would be demonstrative pronouns used with a selecting gesture, as in (9) You, you, but not you are dismissed or a second third person pronouns used with some physical indication of the referent, as in (10) He’s not my son, he is. He’s my nephew.
Cruse (2004: 338) says that symbolic deixis requires for their interpretation only knowledge of the basic temporal parameters of the speech event. Thus, it is sufficient to know the general location of the participants in order to interpret (11) This city is beautiful. Another example is to know when the interaction is taking place in order to know which calendar year is being referred to (12) We can’t afford a holiday this year.

2. Anaphora and Cataphora
According to Kreidler (1998: 145), anaphora is an instance of expression referring to backward utterance. Consider the sentence below:
(12) Mary and her sister live with their aunt in Bali.
Mary and her sister is termed antecedent and the pronoun their is termed anaphoric pronoun. Antecedent and anaphor must agree with respect to number, person and gender. This relationship of indirect reference is called anaphora (Saeed 2003:198). Thus, Mary and her sister and their are co-referential. On the contrary, cataphora is the coreference of one expression with another expression which follows it. The following expression provides the information necessary for the interpretation of the preceding one. In other words, cataphora is an expression referring forward to another expression, for example:
(13) If you need some, there’s some milk in the fridge. [some refers forward to some milk]

References

Cruse, Allan. 2004. Meaning In Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics.
(2nd edn) Oxford: University Press.
James R. Hurford, Brendan Heasly, and Michael B. Smith, (eds.). 2007. Semantics as a
Course. (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kreidler, James W. 1998. Introducing English Semantics. London: Routledge.
Saeed, John I. 2003. Semantics. (2nd edn). New York: Blackwell.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS PROJECT

This paper focuses the analysis on style and register found in the data. Holmes says that people’s speech style is influenced by many factors, such as age, gender, social roles, and occupation (p. 236). According to Trudgill (1992) styles are seen “as varieties of language viewed from the point of view of formality". For example, a secretary uses formal style when talking to her boss. She should show her respect because her boss has higher status. However, she uses casual style to her best friend in that office when sharing about her personal problem. It is done to minimize distance.

In this data, it is found that the respondents use informal speech style. They use informal Indonesian, such as in :
LL : Mau dagang apa emang si Wiwit ?
[What does Wiwit wanna sell actually?]
LL and LKH are related. LKH is LL’s aunt. Therefore, LL says “Mau dagang apa emang si Wiwit ? which is the informal style of “Mau berdagang apakah Wiwit ?

They also use Betawi language which is classified as vernacular.
LKH :Bener. Ya udah, ambil itu aje gelas aqua.
[Right. Take that Aqua glass.]
JM :Iya. Itu juga mungutin gelas aqua. Saya ngumpulin. (laughing)
[Yes. I pick it up, too. I collect it.] (laughing)

LKH says “aje” instead of saja. JM says mungutin instead of memungut and ngumpulin instead of mengumpulkan. The ending –in is commonly used in Betawi language. There are some Betawi particles, such as: deh and sih.

They use some Javanese words.
LKH : Si embak - embak dagang yang di pinggir jalan kereta tuh kan deket tukang
buah. Tanya deh alamatnya.
The girl selling near the railway, near the fruit-seller over there. Why
don’t you ask her address?

LKH uses the words “embak-embak” (a young lady) which is taken from Javanese “mbak” (sister).
The reasons why the respondents choose informal style can be summarized as follows:
1.Two of the respondents (LKH and JM) are neighbors. Informal style is used to show that they have known each other and to minimize the social distance.
2.Two of the respondents (LKH and LL) are part of the same family. Informal style is commonly used among family members.
3.Two of the respondents (LKH and JM) have similar educational background.
4.The setting is at the grocery store. In this place formal style is not required.

Holmes describes register as the use of specific words used for a particular occupational group (p.259). Two of the respondents in this data are in the same line of business. Both are sellers. They share the same knowledge of buying and selling business. It can be seen from the specific vocabulary they use when talking about their business, such as: utang piutang (loan), modal (capital), kios (kiosk), dagangan (merchandise), laku (sold out), kaki lima (street vendor).

ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPEAKING: AN ANALYSIS

I. INTRODUCTION
A mother is yelling to her twelve year old son who always forgets to put his shoes in the shoes rack.
Mother :[ pointing at her son’s shoes]
“Sudah berapa kali mama bilang jangan taruh sepatumu di sini !”
[“How many times have I told you not to put your shoes here!”]

Son : Iya…. iya . [he grabs the shoes and put them in the shoes rack]
[ OK…..OK]

Having noticed that her son always forgets to put his shoes in the shoes in the shoes rack, the mother is yelling angrily. Her son knows why she is angry. This can be seen from his response “Iya ….iya” [ OK…..OK]. He will not answer, for example “Sudah tiga kali” [three times]. Her son can interpret his mother’s utterance “Sudah berapa kali mama bilang jangan taruh sepatumu di sini !” [“How many times have I told you not to put your shoes here!”] as an angry statement instead of a question. This example shows an utterance may be interpreted differently depending on the context.

Sociolinguists have been using discourse analysis to understand the meaning of stretches of spoken or written language beyond an utterance or a sentence level. Holmes (2008) points out that:
Discourse analysis provides a tool to identify the norms of talk among different social group and cultural group in different conversational and institutional contexts and to describe the discursive resources people use in constructing different social identities in interaction. (p. 356)
The analysis can be conducted with different kinds of approaches. One of them is ethnography of speaking.

Ethnography of speaking framework focuses on speech event as a whole, and embraces the total social and cultural setting as components in the analysis. Dell Hymes developed for the analysis of communication events involved the following components:
·Topic: what people are talking about
·Setting and Scene: It refers to the time and place of a speech act and, in general, to the physical circumstances.
·Participants: Speaker and audience. The audience can be distinguished as addressees and other hearers.
·Ends: Purposes, goals
·Act Sequence: Form and order of the event.
·Key: Cues that establish the "tone, manner, or spirit" of the speech act.
.Instrumentalities: Forms and styles of speech.
·Norms: Social rules governing the event and the participants' actions and reaction.
·Genre: The kind of speech act or event.

II. DATA ANALYSIS
The data was collected from utterances in a conversation among three people. The conversation, which lasted for four minutes, took place in the grocery store. Below is the data of the respondents.

DATA OF RESPONDENTS
NO NAME AGE EDUCATION OCCUPATION LANGUAGES
1 LKH 60 Elementary School Grocery Owner Indonesian, Betawi, Sundanese
2 JM 45 Elementary School Street Vendor Indonesian, Javanese
3 LL 26 Bachelor in English English teacher Indonesian, Sundanese


Based on Hymes’ framework, the data can be analyzed as follows:
·Topic : the difficulties of earning money nowadays
·Setting and Scene: The conversation took place in the grocery store, in the morning
·Participants:
LKH: Grocery owner
JM : Street vendor, visiting customer and grocery owner’s neighbor
LL : English teacher, grocery owner’s niece
·Ends [Purpose]:
The purpose is to share problem about the difficulties of earning money
nowadays.
·Act Sequence:
The conversation began as a response to LL’s question to her aunt, LKH.
LL : Buat apa ?
[What for ?]
Then, LKH responded with :
LKH :Katanya mau dagang. Kalo mau dagang di inpres noh ada.
Tapinya ya gak bisa. Tempat si Encang noh kalo mau dibeli.
[She said she wanting sell. If she wanna sell at Inpres, go there.
But yeah, she can’t. It’s Encang’s place if she wanna buy it].

Latter on, the conversation developed in the form of question and answer, like in:
LL : Mau dagang apa emang si Wiwit ?
[What does Wiwit wanna sell actually?]
LKH : Tauk.
[Dunno]
LL :Ngaco
[That’s silly.]
LKH : Emang dagang enak?
[You think selling easy ?]
LL : Iya, susah kan. Sepi ya, sekarang ini....
[Yeah, difficult, right ? Not many transaction nowadays]
LKH : Kelihatannya enak, yah? Sekarang...
[Looks easy, right ?]
LL :Kenyataannya ?
[Actually ?]

When JM was coming, she was directly involved in the conversation. From the
middle to the end of conversation, LL did not take part in the conversation. She
was only listening because as an English teacher, she did not have any experience
in running a business. She could not share her opinion or feeling towards the topic
of the conversation: the price of a kiosk at Inpres market and the
difficulties of running a business nowadays like LKH and JM.

LKH : Iya. Entu yang ke sini, anak buahnya bos. Jualan rokok. Kalo dia
banyak duit bosnya, ya ? Kalo yang embak-embak tuh, yang
jualan sayuran tuh. Dua puluh lima juta ?

[Yes. The one coming here is the boss’s man. Selling cigarrettes.
He has lots of money, right ? What about he girl selling vegetables?
Twenty-five million?]

JM :Kalo kita dua puluh lima juta? Buat beli apa ? Jualan aja kaki lima.
[Twenty five millions ? How can we afford it ? We are only street
vendors]

·Key:
B
· Instrumentalities:
Styles of speech is casual because the conversation took place in a grocery store.
Formal style is not required in this place, for example :

LKH : (laughing) Ntar kita dagang ya...
[We will trade, then.]
JM : O, iya...Kalo nggak bisa dagang gimana nih ? Nyari makannya
gimana ? Udah make gerobak. Jualan kaki lima.
[Yeah right….What if we can’t sell? How can we survive? We’re
only using carts. Being street vendor.]

Both speakers used informal style Ntar kita dagang ya... instead of Nanti kita
berdagang ya. [We will trade, then.]. Then, Kalo nggak bisa dagang gimana nih?
instead of Bagaimana kalau kita tidak bisa berdagang [What if we can’t sell?]

· Norms:
The norm in this conversation allow the participants to interrupt, like in:
LKH : Apa kita jual kerbau ya ? (laughing) Berapa biji kerbaunya?
[What about selling buffalo ? (laughing) How many buffaloes ?]
JM : (Laughing) Ya, kalo punya kerbau kalo nggak punya ? Jual apa ?
Jual kecapung? (Laughing) Jual kecapung juga kagak laku.
(laughing) Yes, if we have buffaloes. But, if we don’t ? What can
we sell ? Dragonflies ? (laughing). Nobody buys dragonflies.
LKH : Dah sekarang mendingan kita jadi tukang sapu aja di jalanan.
[Well, now we’d better become street sweepers.]

LKH interrupted JM when they made a joke of selling buffaloes to buy a kiosk at
Inpres market. Knowing that they were talking nonsense, LKH interrupted using
the particle “Dah” to move to another idea.

· Genre:
The kind of speech act is conversation between people who have known each
others.
· Rules of interaction:
There is no prescribed orders of speaking

BASIC NOTIONS IN SEMANTICS

An Indonesian student who learns English at the beginner level may misunderstand the meaning of the sentence I could eat a horse even though he understands the meaning of each word in the sentence. His limited semantic knowledge cannot help him recognize the non-literal meaning of the above sentence. Semantics can eqquip a language learner with this linguistic ability that allows him to communicate facts, feelings, or intentions to other speakers and to understand what they communicate to him. Saeed (2003: 47) defines semantics as ‘the study of meaning of words and sentences’. In similar vein, Kreidler (1998: 3) asserts that ‘semantics is the systemic study of meaning’. Hurford et.al (2007: 7) says that ‘native speakers of languages are the primary source of information about meaning’. However, non-native speakers of a language can study the meaning of a language by recognizing the forms of communication: verbal and non-verbal communication.

In verbal communication, there are three levels of meaning: utterance, sentence, and proposition. Utterance is something that people express whether it is in written or spoken form (Saeed 2003: 12). Utterance is the concrete unit that can be a sequence of sentences, a single phrase, or even a single word (Hurford et.al 2007: 16). ‘Sentence is concieved abstractly, a string of words put together by grammatical rules of a language’ (Hurford et.al 2007: 17). Kreidler (1998: 27) points outs that a sentence is a construction of words in a particular sequence that is meaningful. There are three people in the same room uttering:
(1)‘This room is hot’,
It means that there are three utterances but there is only one sentence. In (1) hot is the predicator and describes the state This room is. The predicator in declarative sentence can be of various parts of speech: adjectives, verbs, prepositions, and noun. They share the property of being able to function as the predicators of a sentence. In order to know the meaning of (1), we need to know the proposition of this sentence. Proposition is the content of the sentence. It is ‘the part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs’ (Hurford et.al 2007: 20). True proposition corresponds to the facts while false proposition does not. In (1), it is true that the room is hot. Proposition consists of an argument and a predicate. Argument is what the proposition is about and predicate is what is attributed to the argument. In (1), the argument is This room and the predicate is hot. Thus, the relationship between these notions is that the sentence This room is hot can be expressed with another different sentence (say This room is not cool) and each of these sentences can be uttered an infinite number of times.

Meaning can also be communicated by the way it is said. Utterances are produced with variations of prosody that consists of accent and intonation (Kreidler1998: 30). In additon to this, paralanguage, appearance, tone of voice and gesture can communicate something about the mood of the speakers, which eventually contribute to meaning intrepretation. As an example, when the sentence (2) I got the scholarship is uttered with falling intonation, it means that the speaker informs the hearer that she got the scholarship. In contrast, when it is uttered with rising intonation, the speaker does not believe or she is surprised that she got the scholarship.

Another important aspect to understand meaning is by studying lexical semantics. Cruse (2004: 26) suggests extentional approach to correlate expressions in language with the things in the world referred to. In the dialog below:
(3) A : ‘Do you live around here ?’
B : ‘No, my house is in the suburb’
both A and B have the knowledge that the word house denotes the whole class of potential referents of the object house. Reference in wider sense is ‘the relationship between a word and or phrase and its entity in the external world’ (Richards and Schmidt 2002: 450). However, My house, which refers to a particular house (B’s), may be intrepreted differently. The word house to A may be a 21 square meter house whereas to B it is a two story luxurious house. This is called connotation. It refers to ‘the affective or emotional associations it elicits, which clearly need not be the same for all people who know and use the word’.(Kreidler1998: 45). To turn from reference to sense, sense is the relationship inside the language (Hurford et.al 2007: 26). The sentences below show that the same word can have more than one sense:
(4) I have a chicken.
(5) She is a chicken.
In (4) chicken refers to the object ‘chicken’ in the real world while in (5) chicken means timid. Because of this sense, a word co-occurs or does not co-occur with another word meaningfully.
Saeed (2003: 68) devides the lexical relations into several types. Those expressing identity and inclusion between word meanings are called homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy. The others expressing opposition and exclusion are antonymy.
Homonymy is unrelated senses of the same phonological word, e.g.:
(6) bank can mean a financial institution or the side of the river
A polysemy deals with multiple senses of the same phonological word, e.g.:
(7) He hurt his foot.
(8) He stood at the foot of the stairs.
A synonymy is different phonological word which have the same or very similar meanings, e.g.:
(9) seaman/sailor
A hyponym is also called the superordinate or hyperonym e.g.:
(10) rose and jasmine are hyponyms of animal
Meronymy is decribed as a part-whole relationship between lexical items, e.g:
(11) wheel, engine, door are meronymy of car.
An antonymy is traditionally described as words which are opposite in meaning, e.g:
(12) dead/alive
While Cruse (2004: 150) puts forward that taxonymy is a subtype of hyponymy, e.g:
(13) A mustang is a type of a horse but a stallion is not. A stallion specifies sex

In summary, these basic notions of semantics is essential to enrich language users’ linguistic competence. As a result, misintrepretation in understanding the meaning of words can be eliminated.

References
Cruse, D.A. 2004. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. (2nd ed)
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hurford, J.R.and B. Heasly. 2007. Semantics: A course book (2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kreidler, Kate. 1998. Introducing English Semantics. London: Routledge.
Saeed, J.I. 2003. Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Richards, J.C and R. Schmidt, 2002. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied
Linguistics. (3rd ed) Harlow: Longman Group.