indeksiniai

Indeksiniai, or indexicals, are words or expressions whose reference depends on the context of the utterance. The term derives from the Latin index, meaning pointer, reflecting their function as pointers to features of the speech event such as the speaker, the addressee, the time, and the place of utterance. In linguistics, indexicals are a central part of deixis, the phenomenon by which language anchors meaning to context rather than to stable referents.

Common examples include personal pronouns (I, you, we), demonstratives (this, that), and adverbs of time and place (now, here, yesterday, there). Other indexicals cover possessive determiners like my and your, which point to the speaker and addressee in the moment of speech. The reference of indexicals shifts with who is speaking, where, and when the utterance is made, and can also depend on conversational roles or discourse context.

Indexicals are studied in semantics and pragmatics for how they convey information beyond the lexical content of a sentence. They pose translation and interpretation challenges, especially in reported speech, indirect questions, or cross-linguistic rendering, where the relevant context may change. Cross-linguistic differences in deictic systems mean that languages vary in how precisely they encode spatial, temporal, and social context through indexicals.