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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 36:1 (2026) ► pp.137–163

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Blended origo — Deixis in virtual reality

ORCiD logo with link | University of Hildesheim
Published online: 16 January 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.22059.sen
Abstract
Studies on communication in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) have shown that the immersive qualities of VR — the sense of presence, and a sense of embodiment through increasingly realistic motion tracking and avatars — have an impact on verbal communicative interactions in the new medium. Misunderstandings and moments of linguistic creativity are observable, and many of them revolve around ambivalent locations, doubled ‘bodies’, and issues while coordinating attention, i.e.: they concern deixis. This paper presents the results of a qualitative analysis of deictic terms in verbal interactions in SVR. It demonstrates that the unusual communicative circumstances in immersive VR directly affect a speaker’s origo, the deictic zero-point of orientation in space and time. This paper concludes that the term blended origo may serve as an analytical concept to understand deixis while SVR users communicatively interact in two ‘realities’ simultaneously.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What we need for a linguistic approach to social virtual reality
    • 2.1Presences and bodies
    • 2.2Intersecting spaces
  • 3.Theories of deixis and their application to virtual environments
    • 3.1Transpositions and shifting origos
    • 3.2The problem of the origo in VR
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Misunderstandings in hybrid presence: Who is “du”?
    • 4.2Ambivalent locations and distances
  • 5.Results: Blended origo in VR
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
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Cited by (1)

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