Which of the following best explains why 'I'll meet you here tomorrow' is uninterpretable if found written on a note with no context?
AThe sentence contains a grammatical error
BEvery deictic expression (I, you, here, tomorrow) requires knowing the speaker, location, and time of utterance to fix its reference
C'Here' and 'tomorrow' are ambiguous words with multiple dictionary definitions
DThe sentence lacks a main verb
I, you, here, and tomorrow are all deictic expressions — their reference shifts depending on who speaks them, where, and when. This is not lexical ambiguity (multiple dictionary senses) but indexicality: each expression points to a coordinate in the context of utterance, and without that context the pointing gesture has no target.
Question 2 True / False
'This' and 'that' are largely interchangeable demonstratives; choosing between them is mostly a matter of speaker preference.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
'This' and 'that' encode systematic distinctions of spatial, temporal, and psychological proximity. 'This' marks a referent as proximal — physically or conceptually closer to the speaker — while 'that' marks it as distal. The selection is constrained by the deictic relationship between speaker and referent, not stylistic taste.
Question 3 Short Answer
A novelist writes: 'She stepped into the room. Here was the place she had dreaded all her life.' The word 'here' refers to where the character is, not where the narrator is. What is this phenomenon called, and what does it reveal about the deictic center?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: This is a deictic shift (or deictic projection): the deictic center — the anchor point for deictic expressions — has been displaced from the actual narrator to the character's perspective. It reveals that the deictic center is a cognitive construct that can be projected into an imagined viewpoint, not a fixed property of the literal speaker.
Deictic shift is fundamental to how fiction creates narrative immersion. If the deictic center were always anchored to the physical speaker, first-person and third-person narration would be indistinguishable in their effects. The ability to shift the center explains how readers simultaneously track the narrator's perspective and the character's, and why 'here' in literary narration so often means 'here from where the character stands.'