On Deixis Of Demonstrative "zhe" And "na

Deixis is a universal phenomenon in human languages. The most typical and complicated deictic words in modern Chinese are demonstrative pronouns this and that. In previous studies, deixis in discourse was considered untypical. But it plays an important role in natural language understanding. Based on the theories of Deixis and Cohesion, this dissertation reclassifies Chinese demonstrative pronouns this and that. Meanwhile, by using real data in our corpus, we attempt to investigate the gestural and symbolic usage of this and that in situational context and anaphora and cataphora in linguistic context. The dissertation is composed of seven chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction. It briefly introduces the pervasive phenomena of deixis in natural languages and overviews the previous studies on deixis both in the West and Chinese. We also present the necessities and objectives and the foundations and ways of this study. Chapter 2 is the types of deixis. Based on Deixis and Cohesion, we reclassify deictic usage of this and that in Chinese discourse.Chapter 3 is devoted to deixis in situational context. It mainly studies the gestural usage and symbolic usage of Chinese deictic words this and that. The statistic shows that deixis in situational context doesn't occur frequently. We adopt the deictic theory to study the rules of Chinese deictic words this and that.Chapter 4 is anaphora I——explicit anaphora. It studies the coreferentially explicit relationship between antecedent and anaphor. Based on the function of antecedent, we thoroughly investigate the nominal anaphora, verbal anaphora and clausal anaphora within a paragraph and anaphora across paragraphs. Chapter 5 is anaphora II——implicit anaphora. It studies the coreferentially implicit relationship between antecedent and anaphor. Based on the different relationship between antecedent and anaphor, we mainly analysis the implicit part-whole, associated and inclusive relationship between antecedent and anaphor. Chapter 6 is cataphora. It studies the rules between post-antecedent and anaphor. The statistic shows the occurrence of cataphora is relatively few. Thus we briefly study the formal markers in discourse. Chapter 7 is the conclusion and implications. Through the investigation of situational context and linguistic context of Chinese demonstrative pronouns this and that in real text, we conclude the theoretical implications and practical values of this study.