Words whose meaning depends entirely on who is speaking, where and when — 'I', 'here', 'yesterday'.
In precise terms
Reference anchored to the context of utterance. Deictic categories include person, spatial, temporal, discourse and social deixis; interpreting a deictic expression requires knowing the deictic centre.
An example
これ / それ / あれ
this (near me) / that (near you) / that (near neither)
What is going on here
Japanese demonstratives make a three-way distinction organised around the speaker and the addressee. English has two terms and organises them around the speaker alone, so a Japanese sentence can specify something the English translation cannot.
Why this matters when you are learning a language
Deictic systems rarely map one-to-one, and getting them wrong makes reference genuinely unclear rather than merely accented. Social deixis — the formal 'you', honorifics — carries real interpersonal consequences.
Across languages
Two-term systems (English, French), three-term systems (Japanese, Spanish, Turkish), and systems marking elevation or visibility all exist. Social deixis is elaborate in Japanese and Korean and comparatively thin in English.
Related terms
- PronounBeginner — A word that stands in for a noun phrase — 'she', 'it', 'them'.
- TenseBeginner — Grammatical marking that locates an event in time — past, present or future.
- PragmaticsAdvanced — How context supplies meaning that the words alone do not carry.
- Information structureAdvanced — How a sentence packages what is already known against what is new.
- DeterminerBeginner — A noun-phrase item, such as an article or demonstrative, that helps anchor or quantify what the phrase refers to.
- Honorifics and speech levelsAdvanced — Conventional words or grammatical forms that index a social relationship involving the addressee, a referent or another participant.
Where to go next
- Language guides — See grammatical and lexical categories used in context.
- Terminology quiz — Test the terms on this page.