ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT

Children’s language development, especially in first language (L1) acquisition, is beneficial to investigate and observe for it is useful to develop second language learning which children’s L1 also affects the other language level-vocabulary and grammar. One of children’s language developments is how they use deixis. Deixis means 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context. It is words or phrases that can only be understood from the context of the text or utterance where they are found. Children are often hard to negotiate meaning, and they try hard to find it through some deixis. When they notice a strange object, they will soon ask ‘what is that?’ It means that they use a deictic expression (that) to indicate something in the immediate context. This descriptive research, therefore, revealed how the child uses deixis and what kind of deixis he uses. The data was obtained from observation in daily life of a little child aged two years. It was recorded and analyzed into deixis category. The results of the study show that the child prefers to employ the deixis, in particular spatial deixis at all, to acquire his first language.

Keywords

Deixis, First Language Acquisition