deiktisk

Deiktisk, or deictic, refers to linguistic expressions whose interpretation depends on the context of the utterance. The term derives from the Greek deixis, meaning “showing” or “pointing.” Deictic expressions anchor their reference to features of the situational context, such as who is speaking, where the speaker is, when the utterance takes place, and which participants are involved.

Typical deictic forms include personal pronouns (I, you, he), possessives (my, your), and demonstratives (this, that, these, those); place words like here and there; and time words such as now and then. In discourse, deictics can refer to parts of the conversation, for example this or that in the current text.

Deictic categories include person deixis (the speaker and addressee), place deixis (here vs there; proximal vs distal), time deixis (now vs then), and discourse deixis (this in the present text; that in earlier material). The deictic center may shift across sentences or languages, affecting how utterances are interpreted and translated.

Cross-linguistic variation is common: languages may encode deictic distinctions via pronouns, demonstratives, verb forms, or word order. In linguistics and natural language processing, deictic resolution is a basic task for parsing and translation, because the intended reference depends on surrounding context. See also deixis.