Deixis Analysis in A Tale of Two Cities written by Charles Dickens

Abstract

Language is more than a sign as it can function as a tool for communication among humans. This means
that language can be learned by the humans. One of the fields that study the language is pragmatics.
Pragmatics can be defined as the study of contextual meaning; therefore there should be a relationship
between language and the context. However, this relationship can be recognized through deixis. The
purpose of this paper is to analyze the types of deixis found in the novel of ―A Tale of Two Cities‖
written by Charles Dickens. This paper uses descriptive qualitative method, because it analyzes the types
of deixis found in this novel. The method of collecting the data is documentation. According to Levinson
(1983), deixis is divided into five types: person, time, place, discourse, and social deixis. The data were
taken from the novel A Tale of Two Cities published by Penguin (2003). The steps to analyze the data are
reading the novel, finding the deixis, and classifying the types of deixis. The result shows that the total
number of deixis in this novel is 510: social deixis 164 (32%), 125 person deixis (25%), 111 time deixis
(22%), 74 place deixis (14%), and 36 discourse deixis (7%). The deixis that mostly used by the writer is
the social deixis with the frequency of 164 (32%).