Words like here, now, and you only make sense when you know who is speaking and from where. Deixis is the phenomenon by which the reference of certain expressions depends on the context of utterance—especially person, place, and time.

Person deixis distinguishes speaker, addressee, and others. Spatial deixis locates entities relative to the speaker’s position. Temporal deixis anchors events to the moment of speaking. Gestures often accompany deictic words, reinforcing their context-bound nature.

Languages encode deixis differently, including elaborate systems of directional terms or honorific person forms. Translators and dialogue systems struggle when deictic centers shift. Pragmatics treats deixis as a core demonstration that meaning is not fully contained inside sentences alone.

• Context-dependent reference to person, place, or time
• Includes terms like I, here, and tomorrow
• Often supported by gesture
• Varies in complexity across languages