The term deixis is derived from the Greek word pointing at or denoting a referent in the circumstances of utterance. First of all, the referents can be demonstratives, personal pronouns, tense, specific time and place adverbs, and a variety of grammatical features. The referents represent a prototypical or focal exemplar to indicate a person (person deixis), time (temporal deixis), space (spatial deixis), social ranks (social deixis), or what has been just stated (discourse deixis). For example, when a speaker says, "Meet me there in a week from now with a banner. That is what I needed to draw my attention last time I visited Singapore,” the word me indicates person deixis; here indicates spatial deixis; (a week from) now indicates temporal deixis, and that indicates discourse deixis. Second, to understand what each word that I have previously mentioned means, the circumstances of utterance need to be investigated. The circumstances of utterance have two sides: the side of emergent situational context and prior context (Kecskes, 2014). For instance, in the emergent situational context, me can accurately point at Mr. David, the speaker who has made the utterance. The word there refers to Changi airport. A week from now only makes sense if the interlocutors are both aware that at the point of speaking, it is June 1, 2019, so both can infer that they will meet each other again on June 8, 2019. In contrast, to understand what that indicates, not only does a hearer need to know the action of holding a big noticeable banner previously mentioned in the emergent situational context, but he also has to remember and relate to the size of the banner used last time to welcome Mr. David. In other words, while emergent situational context represents the physical interactional environment where the conversation takes place, the prior context represents the privately mental and psychological storage of interactional occasions of an individual. Because of the considerable reliance on contextual inference, deixis, therefore, has been widely studied to comprehend different strategies of how speakers layout their specific referents and hearers interpret contextual cues to allocate speaker’s intended referents (Fauconnier, 1985; Kiesling, 2005; Kiesling & Jaffe, 2009; Mei, 2002; Silverstein, 2006).

One the one hand, although there are many studies about deixis (e.g., see Hanks, 2005; Enfield, 2003 for a review), most of them investigate the phenomenon within a homogeneous context of use. On the other hand, Hanks (2011) pointed out that deixis reflects the encyclopedic knowledge that is set up and anchored locally and culturally according to sociopsychological grounds of the language users. This characteristic of deixis motivated me to examine deictic usage in a heterogeneous context, where localism of each speaker’s deictic usage influences their deictic decoding and encoding messages. In the case of intercultural communication, where speakers coming from other sociocultural backgrounds use English as a lingua franca, I assume that the use of deixis in English is intrinsically different from intracultural communication. The reason is that the prior contexts of those speakers are more diverse pertaining to the norms of using language than those of intracultural communicators. Intercultural communicators cannot hold the assumption that they share pre-established communal norms of reference and pre-existing formulas and frames, or a shared common ground. The intercultural interlocutors exert more individual abilities to decode each other’s deictic usage, especially if that deictic referent is deeply rooted in sociocultural-specific prior context. For example, take a look at the interactional excerpt taken from the study’s corpus:

American Female: It was a brunch that you had to wear pink when attending.

Korean Female: ...It’s like they required you to wear a color..?

American Male: Was it a girl, is that why they said pink?

American Female: Yes, yes.

In the dialog above, everyone is using the discourse deixis it and elaborating more information to clarify its referential event of a baby shower in their mind. The thing that matters is only the American speakers (American Female and American Male) are familiar with the mental image of the target referent due to their own experience in their native culture. Therefore, the American Male could add additional detail to decode the referential meaning without much effort. In contrast, the Korean Female, who was not aware of the sociocultural meaning the other speakers are referring to, was mainly building up her concept around “it.” Hence, she asked for confirmation and clarification from American Female instead of indicating she could retrieve the mental frame of the referent.

The findings of this pilot study (the study belongs to an ongoing broader-scale project) discussed in this article confirmed that the use of deixis in intercultural communication deviates significantly from its norms in intracultural communication carried out among English native speakers. Specifically, the influence of L1, the sociocultural backgrounds of L1, and the pragmatic intake from L2 socialization may determine their use of deixis to build mutual understanding among advanced-level second language speakers in intercultural communication. Hence, the aforementioned factors need to be taken into consideration to uncover the different and appropriate communicative strategies employed by intercultural communicators.

The corpus consisted of six 1-hour transcripts of the conversation carried out by three groups of participants at one of the U.S. universities located in the northeast of the country. Thirteen subjects were involved in this study, including four native-speaking (NS) and nine nonnative-speaking (NNS) students (both male and female). The Intracultural Group consisted of four American native speakers who were all from the same town near the university and had no experience in traveling out of the United States or using a second language. They fall closer to the intracultural end of the comparative continuum. The Intercultural Group has five subjects with different first languages and cultures that have very little or nothing in common (China, Nigeria, USA, Brazil, Russia). They fall closer to the inter-cultural end of the comparative continuum. Between Intercultural Group 1 and 2, Intra-Intercultural Group was created. This represented the intercultural communication context where interlocutors maintain similar backgrounds from the intracultural group yet still deviate from each other if coming to sociocultural specificity. I included participants from China, Singapore, and Vietnam in this group since countries in the (South East) Asian regions construct their cultural ideologies and sociocultural conceptualization on the doctrines of Confucianism (Wei-Ming, 1996).

The group met three times throughout one semester for a topic related to different cultures around the world. The three topics included "cultural patterns and prejudices," "cultural belonging, customs and beliefs," and "cultural heritage." The subjects discussed freely in English on the proposed topic, and the researcher only interfered when the discussion paused longer than three minutes before sixty minutes ran out. The researcher provided some prompts such as, "What do you all think about…? In your country, what are some cultural beliefs towards gender roles?" After transcribing all sessions analyzed in this study, the occurrences of each deixis were identified and categorized into types of deixis. There were only four types of deixis found in the corpus, including person deixis, temporal deixis, spatial deixis, and discourse deixis.

Preliminary Findings

The Percentage of Deixis Use in Each Group

Figure 1 provided the percentage of each type of deixis the communicators of each group utilized during their communication (the total number of words in each group is standardized before calculating the deixis proportion so that the percentage can be comparable across the groups).

Figure 1. Percentage of deixis found in each group of speakers.

As shown in Figure 1, the overall trend is that person deixis is used most in the discussion, denoting the stance of the speaker, the relation to the hearer(s) and the people emerging in the talk. The spatial deixis, temporal deixis, and discourse deixis are used with less proportion compared with person deixis, to add more details and information to the discussed subject(s) in the talk. Notably, the proportion for each type of deixis varies among the groups. First of all, the Intracultural Group with American speakers 60.79% of deixis used in the corpus accounts for person deixis, followed by discourse deixis (24.71%), spatial deixis (8.66%) and temporal deixis (only 5.84%). The proportion in person deixis found in this Intracultural group is higher than the other two groups; whereas, for other types of deixis, it has the least proportion. To be specific, person deixis gradually decreases in Intracultural Group (52.25%) and Intercultural Group (43.12%). Next comes discourse deixis. The use of discourse deixis increases by 0.38% in Intra-Intercultural Group and by 3.2% in the Intercultural Group compared with Intracultural Group. Similarly, compared with Intracultural Group, temporal deixis is used more in Intra-Intercultural Group (13.61%) and in Intercultural Group (19.53%). Spatial deixis is also used more in Intra-Intercultural Group and Intercultural Group (9.05% and 9.45% respectively). The graphic analysis indicates that while speakers coming from a relatively definable and similar sociocultural backgrounds tend to withhold and save more detailed information on the discussed subjects in the talk, speakers coming from more and more diverse sociocultural contexts tend to elaborate on specific facts and circumstances detailed on time, space/location, and surrounding subjects.

Deixis Usage as a Strategy in Meaning-Making in Intercultural Communication

Content analysis reveals the reason why deixis is used quite differently in intercultural communication compared with intracultural communication. First of all, although English is used to communicate as a lingua franca to communicate with each other, deictic usage of speakers whose first language is not English is affected by the mental world of their L1. For instance, in the corpus, the speakers coming from Asian cultures, under the impact of Confucianism, preferred to use more person deixis "we" instead of "I" to show the inclusion of both addressers and addresses in the talk. They also used “we” to establish a harmonious relationship with other interlocutors.

Also, if the hearers are from different sociocultural backgrounds, it is challenging to navigate the referential meaning of the deixis. However, with the presence of deictic words, at least there are some contextual clues for everyone to follow the story. Consider the excerpts below. The discourse deixis is highlighted in green. They present themselves all over the discourse to assist the interlocutors to build the concept of newborn babies’ celebration and naming ceremony, which vary across cultures:

Excerpt 1 (Intra Intercultural Group discussing the customs related to celebrating newborn babies)

Chinese Female: So, in China, like other people in general, whether like friends, relatives…it’s like they will give like red envelopes with money to the baby. That not only like just for the baby, but it’s like...blessing in general.

Taiwan Male: We do that in our culture as well. And also it’s a big celebration when the baby is… one?

Chinese Female: Not too much when the baby is one. Full moon… a month is better.

Excerpt 2 (Intercultural Group discussing the beliefs related to naming babies)

Brazilian Male: Usually the name is chosen by the parents. That I don’t know if there’s any formal ceremony.

Chinese Female: In China, that goes down with the, uh, father’s side, like your father and father's brothers, will share like one character, and like you, and if you are a son, and you and your brothers will share like one character that is representing a generation, but that’s only for the father’s side. Like, the paternal names, not like for females.

American Male: Oh…That we will have expensive gifts to guess and announce the name. That’s usually left for the parents of the parents, the grandparents as an honored duty. Yeah.

Deixis of spatial and temporal is used more excessively as well as a strategy for meaning-making in intercultural communication groups (Intra-Intercultural Group and Intercultural Group). The more diverse the group of speakers is, the less common they share regarding their private prior contexts. Because the speakers in intercultural communication do not have a common ground, they have an urge to build as solid (even though it is temporary) common ground as possible to make the conversation smoother and more cohesive. Interestingly, when the communicative contexts move further away from intracultural contexts, the interlocutors take more advantage of deictic words to construct new referential concepts with information obtained from the speakers. In other words, to help the hearers understand what the speaker is referring to, the speaker chooses to recruit more deictic words to describe the referential entities and their context of use in great details. That is the reason why more spatial, temporal, and discourse deixis were found in the corpus, which is not the case in Intracultural Group. In intracultural communication, fewer deictic words were detected or repeated because speakers could relate to the referents. Instead of focusing on expanding the descriptive, contextual information and bringing their mental frame to life, speakers coming from the same sociocultural backgrounds concentrate on giving comments and egocentric perspectives on the topic. They use more person deixis to offer their own opinions and subjective elaborations on the discussed topic.

Excerpt 3 (Intracultural Group talking about welcoming the newborn babies)

American Female 2: That’s an hour clapping, like, I would like a small announcement about our new family member. I don’t feel like wasting everybody’s time. I feel like that takes away the anxiety time from like letting people show up and chat by themselves.

American Female 3: Yeah.

American Female 2: Like, “yay, I am not familiar with the relatives of the baby!” Like, nobody's excited about the baby. More about social chit-chat.

Conclusion

Communicative context includes language users—utterer/speaker and interpreter/hearer, the mental world, the social world, and the physical world. The observation of deixis usage in intercultural communication in this pilot study indicates the distinctive difference where the primary attention is drawn on building new concepts and common ground among interlocutors rather than assuming everyone is familiar with the discussed subject. The study hints at pedagogical implications in the area of teaching pragmatic skills for second/foreign language learners. First of all, ESL/EFL teachers could be aware of aspects of physical, social, and mental reality that are activated by the utterer and the interpreter in their respective choice-making practices due to their sociocultural background. Second, deictic words can be actively and consciously employed and taught as a highly flexible strategy to negotiate meaning and satisfy communicative needs.

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