Deixisfree

Deixisfree is a designation used in linguistics to describe a property of language in which expressions are chosen to avoid deixis—terms whose reference shifts with speakers, places, or times. A deixis-free text aims to be referentially transparent within the text itself, such that interpretation does not hinge on the reader's or speaker's context.

Deixis, in contrast, covers person (I, you), place (here, there), and time (now, then) as well as discourse markers. Deixisfree language minimizes or eliminates these elements by using explicit nouns, definite descriptions, and fixed temporal expressions. It relies on specific named entities and calendar dates rather than pronouns or adverbs tied to utterance moment or location.

Applications include technical and legal writing, archival descriptions, and some forms of machine translation and natural language processing where context dependence can cause ambiguity. In corpus linguistics and semantics experiments, deixisfree text helps isolate non-deictic reference patterns.

Examples: "Marie Curie discovered polonium in 1898" exemplifies a deixis-free formulation, whereas "She discovered polonium here in this lab" uses person and place deixis. Limitations include reduced naturalness for narrative discourse and potential awkwardness or verbosity; in many contexts, deictic references aid cohesion and readability.

See also: deixis, deictic expression, deictic pronouns, referential cohesion.