Deixis

Deixis is reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the extralinguistic context of the utterance, such as who is speaking, the time orplace of speaking, the gestures of the speaker or the current location in the discourse. There are five mayor types of deixis: person, place, discourse, temporaland social.
Person deixis is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as: the speaker or the receiver.
• 1st person: speaker’s referenceto self.
• 2nd person: speaker’s reference to addressee.
• 3rd person: to others who are neither speaker nor addressee.
The composition starts with theword “missions” and then follows the sentence “they were built by the indians”, in which the pronoun “they” is referring to the missions, after this sentencefollows the sentence “They used red earth to make them”, here the pronoun “they” refers now to the indians and not the missions as it did before and this cycle happens inall the composition.As we can see all the time is used 3rd person, it is used in plural too due to the use of “they” for emphazising the missions , the priests andthe Indians. Also it is is working as a 3rd person in singular because it is referring to the father Serra as “he”.
Therefore, I think that person deixischanges depending the language you speak. For example if those children were asked to write the paper on Japanese the estructure of the text would be very differentbecause the uses of T/V forms are different than in Spanish, English and French. In Spanish and French the children would it use pronuns as well to write the composition.