Introducing English Linguistics

Referential deixis
According to Halliday and Hasan (1976: 33), there are two types of referential
deixis: exophora and endophora. The two instances of my brother in the pre-
vious example are exophoric because they refer outside the text to the partic-
ular situational context in which they were uttered. In other words, to fully
understand the reference of my brother, one needs to be listening to the actu-
al radio show to know that the two people uttering the exchange are brothers
and that they are referring to each other. The excerpt below, taken from a con-
versation between two people discussing real estate listings, contains a num-
ber of instances of exophoric reference, all highlighted in boldface:
Speaker A: I’m hungry. Ooh look at that. Six bedrooms. Jesus. It’s quite
cheap for six bedrooms isn’t it seventy thou. Not that we
could afford it anyway. Is that the one you were on about?
Speaker B: Don’t know. 
(CIC)
The personal pronouns I, we, and you are each exophoric because they refer
to the individuals engaged in the conversation – individuals who will only
be known by those people directly engaged in the conversation. The pro-
noun I refers to the speaker, we to both the speaker and the person being
addressed, and you to the addressee. The pronoun that is also exophoric
because this pronoun refers to a particular description in a written text
that the two speakers are reading together. This use of that is also spatial,
a point that will be discussed in greater detail in the next section.
Because exophoric reference is so context-dependent, it predominates in
spoken texts – texts created in contexts where speakers and addressees are
physically present and have access to the surroundings in which they are
speaking. First and second person pronouns can certainly occur in writing,
where they refer to the writer and reader, respectively, but such usages are
generally confined to informal rather than formal writing. Writing there-
fore consists primarily of reference that is endophoric, or textual. That is,
words refer to other words present in the text itself. This type of reference
was discussed in Chapter 4 because it helps create cohesive ties in a text. In
the example below, the proper noun Sophie Green is introduced as new
information. This individual is subsequently referred to as she. Towards the
end of the excerpt, them refers back to both men and women:
Later, and in recognition of her own achievements, Sophie Green was
awarded a scholarship to attend a summer course at Bryn Mawr College,
Pennsylvania in 1928 and in the following year she became a co-opted
member of the Kettering Education Committee. Because she lacked 
English words: Structure and meaning
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academic qualifications, Miss Green never conducted a Tutorial Class,
but she revelled in her Terminal and, less frequently, One-Year courses.
Nevertheless, she was unequivocally ambitious for her students, both