Semantics

94 BASIC SEMANTICS
4.3. PERSON DEIXIS
Saeed also explains how there is a further deictic system that
grammaticalizes the roles of participants, such as the current speaker, the
addressee and other participants. This information is grammaticalized
by pronouns in English and in many other languages such as Spanish.
Prototypically, the first person singular is used for the speaker, the second
person for addressee or addressees and at least a third person for ‘neitherspeaker
- nor - addressee’. This is the most common pattern in European
languages, but there are other languages such as Spanish that
grammaticalize the gender of plural addressee (vosotros/vosotras) or the
plural of ‘neither - speaker - nor - addressee’ (ellos/ellas). Arabic, for
example, has a dual pronoun that codifies “exactly two” and that also
grammaticalizes gender. Other languages apply the notion of plurality in
first person singular depending on whether it includes the speaker.
These differences can also be illustrated when comparing the codification
of possession in both English and Spanish. In English, possession and gender
are codified together in the word referring to owner as in.
His / Her car contrasting with:
Su coche (both genders)
this difference does not exist in Spanish
In Spanish, possessive adjectives and gender are codified together as
in:
Esta casa es mía / Este coche es mío
where ownership is codified in the element possessed and not in the owner
of the thing in question. One possible explanation for this is the nearly
deictic characteristics of the English possessive system.
4.4. SOCIAL DEIXIS
The pronoun systems of many languages also include information about
the social identity and/or status of participants in a conversation. In English
the codification of the treatment of respect is not grammaticalized. That
is, the treatment of respect that is frequent in many European languages,
such as the Spanish difference between tú/usted, the French difference
between tu/vous or the German du/Sie difference does not exist in English.
This difference is even more marked in languages such as in Japanese
where you cannot address a third person without codifying at the same