Time Deixis in Engineering Discourse

Abstract

Nowadays, it has become commonly accepted that the meaning of linguistic elements is interconnected with the context of their use. Deixis is one of the classical pragmatic phenomena that illustrates that context-dependence is inherent in language as meaning of deictic expressions cannot be constructed without the identification of the speech event where these expressions occurred. The present article discusses cases of time deixis in the context of engineering discourse. The goal of the research is to demonstrate how the deictic expression use in different genres of professional discourse impacts meaning construction. The study deals with the data obtained from scientific articles, encyclopaedia chapters and coursebooks. The findings indicate that temporal deictic expressions can be utilized both deictically and non-deictically and their frequency may depend on the genre within each professional discourse. Further research can be conducted to investigate the use of other categories of deictic expressions in engineering discourse.

Keywords

• time deixis
• deictic expressions
• pragmatic meaning
• reference
• engineering discourse