An Analysis Of Deixis Used In John’s Book, Holy Bible Jhon Ferdinand Purba, Rotua E. Pangaribuan, Jubilizer Sihite [email protected] Abstract The writer analyzes the use of deixis from john’s book, Holy Bible. In collecting the data, the writer applies a descriptive research. There are five types of deixis are found in the ten chapters of john’s book Holy Bible, they are: person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, social deixis, and discourse deixis. that are 12 kinds of discourse deixis that are found the ten chapters of John’s book, Holy Bible. The most frequency is “But” with 99 occurrences, followed by “therefore” with 23 occurrences, then “so” with 16 occurrences out of the total 170 occurrences. The portion of the discourse for discourse deixis is found .There are five types of deixis are found in the ten chapters of john’s book Holy Bible, they are: person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, social deixis, and discourse deixis. The most dominant type of deixis occurred in the ten chapters of John’s book, Holy Bible is person deixis with 1269 occurrences out of the whole , total 2018 occurrences and the deitic word “ You”, is dominantly use in the ten chapters of John’s book, Holy Bible. “You”, refer to the persons or addressee either as subject or object in those chapters of John’s book, Holy BibleThe most dominant type of deixis occurred in the ten chapters of John’s book, Holy Bible is person edeixis with 1269 occurrences out of the whole total 2018 occurrences. Key words : deixis, descriptive research, person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, social deixis, and discourse deixis. I. Introduction Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics which is concerned with of meaning as communicated by a speaker (writer) and interpreted by a listener (reader). According to Yule (1996:3), “pragmatics is of contextual meaning”. This type of study necessarily involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular context and how the context influences what is said. It requires a consideration of how speakers organize what they want to say in accordance with whom they are talking to, where, when, and under what circumstances. Yule also concludes that pragmatics is as one of relate branches of linguistics study. By studying language through pragmatics, one can only talk about people’s intended meanings, their assumptions, their purposes, or their goal, and kind of actions (such as: request) that they are performing when they speak. Looking at this problem, the writer tries to find out a good way to help the readers in getting the exact meaning of a text. It becomes a background, why the writer chooses that topic. The writer thinks that deixis can help the readers to solve that problem. By knowing deixis, the readers will be easier to get the target meaning which contains in a senteGgnce or text. Furthermore, the writer argues that a good step to identify deixis is by analyzing them that exist in the book. Here, the writer made an analysis in the book of the holy bible to find out what types of deixis is dominantly being used. This study gave us an understanding about deixis and their usages. This study analyzes deixis in the text book according to pragmatics field. Holy Bible and to find the dominant type of deixis used in John’s book, Holy Bible. The result of is expected to be useful for the students, especially for the students of English department, to enlarge their knowledge about deixis, particularly to identify the types, the use and the meaning of it which appeared in a context. Furthermore, it is hoped that they will have an ability to understand the meaning of a text easily, for the readers in order to get some information about deixis and each type especially those which are used in the book of John of the Holy Bible, for the writer, to catch the knowledge about what deixis is, the types, then the usage of them. Besides, by knowing deixis, the writer can understand the contents of a text exactly. 2. Pragmatics . “Pragmatics is of the relations between language and context that are basic to an account of language understanding”, Levinson (1983:21). Here the term language understanding is used in the way favoured by workers in artificial intelligence to draw attention to the fact that understanding an utterance involves a great deal more than knowing the meanings of the words uttered and the grammatical relations between them. Above all, understanding the utterance an utterance involves the making of inferences that will connect what is said to what is mutually assumed or what has been said before. In another word, pragmatics is the use of language communicated by a speaker to the reader or listener where they need an intelligence of what the speaker intend to. Here, between the speaker and listener or reader have to understand a certain context among of them Deixis The term”deixis” comes from the Greek word for “pointing” and “indicating”. It is a part of pragmatics which has a simply meaning “pointing” via language or asserting something via language. Any linguistics form used to accomplish this pointing is called a deictic expression. Deictic expressions are also sometimes called indexical. Deixis is used in pragmatics to refer the use of demonstrative and personal pronoun, specific time and place adverbs like “now” and “here” and a variety of other grammatical features. According to Levinson (1983:54) “deixis concerns the ways in which language encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of the context of utterance”. Yule (1996:9) defined that “deixis is a form referring that is tied to the speakers context, with the most basic distinction between deictic expressions being ‘near speaker’ versus ‘away from speaker’. In English, ‘proximal terms’ or the near speaker’, are ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘now’. The ‘distal terms’ or the away from speaker are ‘that’, ‘there’, ‘then’. Types of Deixis Deixis has an important role in studying pragmatics. It helps people to interpret the meaning of a certain sentence based on its context. It is supported by Levinson (1983:68-94) defining the deixis into five types, they are: person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, social deixis and discourse deixis. Person Deixis According to Yule (1996:10), person deixis clearly operates on a basic three-part division, examplified by pronouns for first person (I),second person (You) and third person (she, he, it). Person deixis involves the speaker (I) and the addressee (You). In conversation, each person constantly changes from being Ito being you. The choice of one of these forms instead of another, because of the surrounding social circumstances is sometimes described as social deixis. An example of social contrast involving person deixis could be the distinction between forms used for a familiar versus a non-familiar addressee in some languages. This is known as the T/V distinction from the French form tu (familiar) and vous (non-familiar), and is also found in other languages, such as Spanish tú/Usted, Italian tu/Lei, German du/Sie. The choice of one form communicates something about the speaker’s view of his relationship with the addressee. The use of the third person pronouns where a second person form would be possible indicates distance. "This can be done in English for an ironic or humorous purpose as when one person, who’s very busy in the kitchen, addresses another, who’s being very lazy, as in: "Would his highness like some coffee?” (Yule, 1996:11) Besides, deixis is often found in many discourses which used the pronouns. It can be seen by some examples below: 1. First person a. Singular form Ricky said:”I’ll visit your town next week”. (I refer to Ricky) b. Plural form Tian, Jane and Rina will leave at eight p.m. They will go to the cinema.We refer to Tian, Jane, and Rina. 2. Second person a. Singular form “I love you”, said Bobby to Mary. You refer to Mary b. Plural form “You must study hard to be clever”, said the lecturer to the students. You refer to the students. 3. Third person a. Singular form Elisabeth is my friend. She is a pretty girl. She refers to Elisabeth. b. Plural form Nico, Bram, and Joko go to the stadium. They watch a football match. They refer to Nico, Bram, and Joko Place deixis According to Levinson (1983:79 in Lyons) place or space deixis concerns the specification of locations relative to anchorage in the speech event. The importance of location specification in general can be gauged from the fact that there seem to be two basic ways of referring to objects - by describing or naming them on the one hand and by locating them on the other. According to Cruse (2000:320) “spatial or place deixis manifests itself principally in the form of locative adverbs such as ‘here’ and ‘there’ and demonstratives or determiners such as “this” and “that”. English has a relatively impoverished spatial deictic system, with only two terms, usually labeled proximal and distal. The proximal term here means something like “region relatively close to the speaker” and there means “relatively distant from the speaker”. Furthermore, spatial or place deixis is the form of the space viewed from the location of participant of the language process. In English, the adverb of place are “here”, “there” and demonstrative pronoun are “this” and “that” . The word which shows things or people near from the addressee are : “this” ,”here” , while, when the people or things are far from the addressee are : “that” and “there” .