Temporal deixis:

+ identifies entities and processes(present, past and future

processes) with respect to the temporal deictic centre, which is
the speaker’s time of utterance.
+ Or any expression used to point to a time is called temporal
deixis or time deixis
+ Actually, temporal deixis include time verbs like now, then,
soon and so forth, and also different tenses.
Eg: I will go to school tomorrow.
The approaching year.
+ One basic type of temporal deixis in English is in the choice of
verb tense. English has only two basic form, the present and the
past.
+ The present tense is the proximal form and the past tense is
the distal form.
Eg: I

+ In English, deixis is related to the form of the verb.

More definitely, it affects the sequence of tenses.
The past tense is always used in English in those //-clauses that
mark events presented by the speaker as not being close to
present reality.
 [12] a. If I had a yacht, ...
b.If I was rich,...
 
 +Neither of the ideas expressed in this example are to be
treated as having happened in past time. They are presented as
deictically distant from the speaker's current situation.
So distant, indeed, that they actually communicate the negative
(we infer that the speaker has no yacht and is not rich).
 
+ we have to recognize that, in temporal deixis, the remote or
distal form can be used to communicate not only distance from
current time, but also distance from current reality or fact.

+ Through all the knowledge that I have given, you can

 

understand: because Tense belongs to the aspect of temporal

deixis, Tense is a deictic category which relates the time of the
event/state represented by the clause to the time of the
utterance.
*bài tập:
Exercise 1: Discuss the following sentences and say which
sentence is used temporally proximal and which temporally
distant:
a. He is going to school now.
He read this comic yesterday.
b. She has an exam today.
She passed the exam 2 days ago.
c. Why didn't they do it last month? 
What are they doing now?
Ex2: Choose the correct form of the verb: present and past.
a. We _________ (go) to the beach last weekend.
b. I (live)____in London now.
c.  Last year, I ___________ (travel) to Japan.
d. We (play)___________ Monopoly at the moment.
e. If the weather (not/be) ____ so bad, we (can/go) ________
to the park.