Karly

There is something about the sentence “She said it would be announced soon” that feels deliciously unfinished. Not in the way an ellipsis leaves something trailing, or a comma asks you to wait, but in the way certain sentences quietly rely on context to make any real sense at all. You read those eight words and immediately find yourself trying to fill in the blanks, conjuring up a mental cast of characters and potential timelines. Who is she? What is it? And what does “soon” even mean? The sentence, which appears perfectly innocent at first glance, is in fact a complete deictic mystery; every single word of it hinges on something that isn’t there. And for someone who has long loved the subtleties of language, who once wrote essays on reference and intention, who once collected ambiguous sentences like they were rare gems, this feels like the perfect way to mark my quiet return to the branch of linguistics I have always loved most: pragmatics.

Pragmatics, in the simplest of terms, is the study of how meaning works in context. It’s not just about the dictionary definitions of words, but about how they are used, how they are understood by others, and how much of that understanding depends on things that aren’t said aloud. Where semantics concerns itself with the logical content of language, pragmatics asks what else is happening when people speak. It concerns itself with inference, with politeness, with metaphor, with implication. And, perhaps most crucially, it concerns itself with deixis.

Deixis is one of those concepts that sounds slightly obscure until you realise how much of everyday speech is built around it. The word itself comes from Ancient Greek, meaning “pointing,” and in linguistic terms, deictic expressions are words whose meaning shifts depending on the speaker, the listener, the time, the place, or the situation in which they are uttered. Words like I, you, here, there, now, then, this, that, yesterday, tomorrow, and of course the ever-enigmatic soon are all examples of deixis. These are words we use constantly, instinctively, without even noticing how slippery they are. Their meaning is never fixed; it depends entirely on where and when you are, who you’re talking to, and what shared knowledge you can assume.

This is why I say “She said it would be announced soon” is a perfect example of deixis at work. The sentence is grammatically complete, yet nothing in it makes sense without more information. She is a third-person pronoun that could refer to literally any female-identifying person. It is a vague placeholder for an unspecified noun. And soon is a temporal adverb that only carries meaning if you know the timeline of the speaker. Is soon a few hours? A day or two? Is it code for not this week? Are we talking about an album drop, a breakup, a scandal, or a new lipstick collection? Is the speaker known to be reliable, or have they been vague before? Every piece of that sentence requires context to become real, and in the absence of that context, the sentence becomes both mysterious and oddly compelling.

What makes deixis so powerful, and so pragmatically rich, is that it forces us to think about the relationship between language and the world. Deictic expressions require a shared frame of reference, a kind of imaginative leap between speaker and hearer. They assume knowledge, familiarity, trust. When someone says “I’ll be there soon,” you don’t just hear a promise; you hear an entire history of how punctual or unreliable that person tends to be. You interpret “soon” based not on the word itself, but on everything around it, tone, habit, setting, subtext. That is pragmatics at its most human.

And it shows up everywhere. In poetry, deixis often adds intimacy, drawing the reader into a specific, subjective world. In pop music, it allows artists to be deliberately vague, inviting listeners to project their own experiences onto a lyric. When Taylor Swift sings “I remember it all too well,” we don’t need to know the exact details to feel implicated. When a press release says something will be revealed “very soon,” we don’t need a date to start refreshing the page every hour. The uncertainty becomes part of the game.

I have always loved this side of language, not just what is said, but what is meant, what is assumed, what is left unsaid but still understood. During my undergraduate studies in linguistics and my postgraduate work in English Language, I often found myself drawn to pragmatics, especially the kind that makes you question how people manage to communicate anything at all given how much depends on inference. And after spending some time away from that world, dabbling in more literary waters, building a blog, writing creatively, interviewing people I admire, I find myself craving that feeling again, the quiet thrill of recognising that even the simplest sentence can be loaded with layers.

So yes, this is a post about deixis. But more than that, it is a post about language as a living thing, a collaborative act, a puzzle that is never quite complete without someone else’s input. She said it would be announced soon might look like filler, the kind of sentence you skim past in an email or a social media comment. But if you pause and really listen, it becomes a reminder of just how much meaning can hide in plain sight.

I do know who she is. I do know what is being announced. The only part I cannot quite pin down, the one that stretches the sentence into something slightly unbearable, is soon. That single word is the mystery, the variable, the soft chaos holding everything else in suspense. It is the one deictic element I cannot resolve, and it is the one doing the most emotional work. Still, I return to the sentence. Because somewhere, someone said it, and someone else heard it, and meaning happened in the space between. That has always been my favourite thing about language.