Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

3 Categorization of indexical devices
An indexical device (also called a pointer) is a particular kind of referential 
expression where the referent is recovered from a particular context in which 
the semantics is put to work (Mey 1993: 91), i.e. it is pragmatically determined. 
Indexical relationship is expressed by the so-called deictic language elements
,
which are associated with the basic deictic categories of person, place and time 
related to an utterance. Since texts can be metaphorically conceptualized as 
space, an additional deictic category has been introduced – textual or secondary 

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deixis – to account for the potential of indexical expressions to indicate internal 
links within the discourse. Thus the present investigation draws on the following 
categorization of indexical expressions:
1. Person deixis – conveys the participants’ roles in a discourse situation 
typically expressed by personal pronouns. These include:
a. the roles of speaker/writer (first person 
I
, 
we
) and addressee (second 
person 
you
). The reference of first and second person pronouns is context-
dependent and therefore inherently unstable, as it shifts according to the 
situation, in particular in spoken discourse, where the participants take 
turns to speak (cf. Levinson 1983, Wales 1996).
b. the role of ‘third parties’, those not directly involved but mentioned in the 
discourse (third person 
he
, 
she
, 
it
, 
they
). The third person pronouns may 
have both anaphoric and deictic interpretation.
2. Place deixis – refers to location relevant to the discourse, typically from the 
perspective of the speaker/writer. The most notable indexical expressions 
in this category are the adverbs 
here
and 
there
and the demonstratives 
this/
these
, 
that/those
. The choice between distal and proximal forms indicates 
the accessibility and importance of the intended referent (Piwek et al. 2008), 
where proximals are used to refer to objects that have low accessibility and/
or are important, while distals are used to refer to objects that have high 
accessibility and are less important.
3. Time deixis – indicates the temporal orientation of discourse expressed by 
tense forms and temporal adverbs such as 
now
, 
tomorrow
, 
yesterday
etc. In 
the unmarked case the deictic centre is anchored with the speaker.
4. Text (discourse) deixis – is associated with the use of words like 
this
and 
that
or 
the former
and 
the latter
to locate anaphorically and cataphorically items, 
facts and linguistic structures in the co-text
 
(cf. Lyons 1977: 677-678, Wales 
2001: 99, Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1460). Text deixis is regarded as a 
metaphorical process combining both anaphora and deixis which “implies the 
metaphor ‘TEXT IS A SPACE’ by means of which the spaciotemporal ground 
of utterance is mapped onto the text itself” (Ribera 2007: 152). Thus text-
deictic referential devices are regarded referring to “entities in the metaphorical 
spatial text domain as they would in the situational domain” (ibid.). The 
deictic centre is located with the speaker/writer, while the central time is the 
moment of utterance production and the central place is the speaker’s location 
at the time of utterance production. In the unfolding discourse, the discourse 
centre is the point where the speaker/writer is currently at in the production of 
the utterance (Levinson 1983: 64).
When interpreting discourse, indexical expressions with anaphoric 
interpretation refer to referents which already have their place in the discourse 
world and are established as accessible in the minds of the participants in the 

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communication. Indexicals with deictic interpretation refer to entities available 
to the discourse participants from their shared background knowledge or 
the situational context; they are introduced into the discourse world and can 
subsequently be referred to by deictic or anaphoric reference devices. It is 
assumed that by making the referents continuously available in the discourse 
world indexical reference devices with both anaphoric and deictic interpretation 
contribute to the perception of discourse coherence.