Deictic Field and Narration

In linguistics, psychology, and literary theory, the concepts of deictic field and deictic shift are sometimes deployed in the study of narrative media. These terms provide a theoretical framework for helping literary analysts to conceptualize the ways in which readers redirect their attention away from their immediate surroundings as they become immersed in the reality generated by the text.

The term “deixis” refers to the ways in which language encodes contextual information into its grammatical system. More broadly, deixis refers to the inherent ambiguity of certain linguistic expressions and the interpretive processes that communicants must perform in order to disambiguate these words and phrases. Such ambiguity can only be resolved by analyzing the context in which the utterance occurs. To understand deixis, one must first understand that language grammaticalizes context-dependent features such as person, space, and time. When language is oriented toward its context, certain expressions in speech emerge that differentiate the “here” and “now” (proximal deixis) from the “then” and “there” (distal deixis). According to Karl Buhler, an Austrian psychologist who was one of the earliest to present a theory of deixis, “When philosophers, linguists, and narrative theorists attempt to understand the role of subjectivity in language and conversely, the role of language in subjectivity, they invariably notice a certain aspect of language which seems to depend on extralinguistic, subjective, occasion-specific considerations.” Within the context of narrative, deixis reflects those aspects of storytelling by which the audience is pragmatically directed to understand the perspective of the narrator or the perspective of the story’s characters in relation to their own story-external vantage point. Essentially, deictic expressions help form the layers of narrative that direct the audience to either the narratorial discourse or to the story world. “Deixis (adjectival form, deictic) is a psycholinguistic term for those aspects of meaning associated with self-world orientation”. Deixis is an integral component of the lens by which the audience perceives the narrative.

When examining perspectives on narration in natural-language environments, one must not ignore William Labov, who argues that stories of personal experience can be divided into distinct sections, each of which serves a unique function within the narrative progression. Labov schematizes the organization of natural narrative using the following conceptual units: abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, and coda. Generally, anecdotal narratives tend to arrange these units in the order outlined; however, this is not an inflexible, structural progression that defines how every narrative must develop. For instance, sentences and phrasal items that serve an evaluative function can be interspersed throughout a narrative. Some stretches of narrative discourse also feature overlap among these Labovian categories. Each of Labov’s narrative divisions serves a characteristic purpose typified by a particular section’s grammatical construction and functional role within the unfolding narrative, but the boundaries of such divisions are not always clear-cut.

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