deixis and deictic

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Sunday, January 14, 2001 8:48 pm +0800 Laurence Horn
<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

> ['daiksIs] (DIE-ksis)
> ['daiktIk] (DIKE-tick)

This  is certainly how I pronounce these words, and it's like nails on a
chalkboard when peole pronounce deixis as "dee-ex-iss" or some such thing.
But I find that that's how my colleagues here pronounce it.  At first I
thought it was British pronunciation, but the New Oxford lists (I'm
translating their phonetic symbols into pseudoEnglish) DAY-ksis and then
DAY-ksis.  So, I suspect that the three-syllable pronunciation is what
people untrained in semantics make of the word--but then, of course I hear
it from the students they teach as well.  Not sure if this is limited to my
university.

Lynne


M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320