Logos

REALIZATIONrlz.eng.deixis

deixis in English

English encodes the position of a referent relative to the speaker on a two term scale, near or not near, with no third degree and no reference to the addressee.

The English demonstratives divide the space around the speaker in two. This and these mark a referent as near, that and those mark it as not near, and there is no neutral demonstrative: a speaker who reaches for one must choose. The same two way cut runs through the locative adverbs here and there and through the temporal pair now and then, so the contrast is drawn three times over in three word classes with one dividing line.

Two terms is the whole of it, and that is the divergence worth naming. A language with a three term system distinguishes a referent near the speaker from one near the addressee from one near neither, and English has no word for the middle term. The addressee simply does not figure in the system: nothing in the language encodes proximity to the person spoken to, and a speaker who needs that distinction states it in words. Nothing encodes visibility or elevation either, which are dimensions some languages grade and this one does not.

The demonstratives are also the only place in the language where a determiner varies for number, which is why they are counted twice in this graph, here and under number. That variation is not itself deictic. The obligatoriness is recorded as obligatory because the contrast is settled wherever it applies: a demonstrative always carries a value, and no clause is required to contain a demonstrative in the first place, since the definite article occupies the same slot and encodes identifiability without encoding distance at all.

statusstatus
documentedasserted, and the sources agree
provenanceprovenance
authoredwritten for Logos, from first principles
derivation statusderivation_status
unstatednobody has said whether it follows from anything
saliencesalience
No salience. Where no frequency source applies the object carries none, rather than a default or a guess (03-schema.md §3.5).
aliasesaliases
None recorded.
sourcessources
An empty list, which is an assertion: this rests on nothing external, and somebody checked. It is not the same as nobody having looked.

What this language does about this category

realization.state

One of five states, or the eleventh cell: nobody has recorded a state, which is not a claim that the language lacks the distinction.

statestate
explicit, documented: marked in the word itselfexplicit
obligatorinessobligatoriness
obligatorymarked wherever it applies

The realizers

realization.via

Every via edge: this realizer, this way. An explicit or periphrastic state is a summary of this list, recomputed on every build and never authored.

No realizer. For an absent or void state that is required rather than missing: those states have zero via edges by design (03-schema.md §6.1).

Everything joined to this object

One group per typed edge, in both directions. A1b guarantees no object node is an orphan, so this is the whole navigation: an object with no edges would have failed the build rather than reached this page.

What this object is a kind of

Walking this object's own `is-a` edges: what it is a kind of. Several branches from one object are several classification axes, not competing supertypes.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.
  • REALIZATIONdeixis in Englishrlz.eng.deixisREALIZATION

    English encodes the position of a referent relative to the speaker on a two term scale, near or not near, with no third degree and no reference to the addressee.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

Fan-out per dimension

A4

One row per dimension, largest first. That is a display order, not a verdict: 03-schema.md declares no threshold above which fan-out is too much, so this reports the count and grades nothing.

  • case13 values
  • mood8 values
  • voice8 values
  • aspect7 values
  • aktionsart6 values
  • number6 values
  • person6 values
  • tense6 values
  • comparison4 values
  • evidentiality4 values
  • gender4 values
  • politeness4 values
  • valency4 values
  • animacy3 values
  • definiteness3 values
  • deixis3 values
  • finiteness2 values
  • information structure2 values
  • interrogativity2 values
  • polarity2 values
  • switch-reference2 values

What kinds of this object there are

Walking the `is-a` edges that point at this object: what kinds of it there are. An object reachable two ways is drawn in both places and is still one object.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.
  • REALIZATIONdeixis in Englishrlz.eng.deixisREALIZATION

    English encodes the position of a referent relative to the speaker on a two term scale, near or not near, with no third degree and no reference to the addressee.

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

has-a

edges.has-a

the parent carries this

this object carries

derives

edges.derives

the why-chain

derived by