A Cognitive Linguistic Approach To Deixis

The study of pragmatics has been of great interest to philosophers, linguists and psychologists in recent years. As the main subfield of pragmatics, deixis plays a very important role within the domains of semantics and pragmatics. Deixis is a universal phenomenon existing in all languages, the study of which is sure to help learners have a good understanding of the language in a certain situation. A general feature of deictic categories is their egocentricity, i.e. the fact that the speaker is taken as the deictic centre. Traditionally in pragmatics, deixis is divided into five categories: person deixis, social deixis, time deixis, place deixis and discourse deixis according to the deictic functions of words and the contextual parameters. However, this classification does not accord with human cognitive experience, thus the traditional accounts of deixis are inadequate to explain the overlapping of deixis, together with its polysemy, deictic and non-deictic uses and fail to see "deixis as a graded category of usages of a number of linguistic terms".In this dissertation, person and social deixis are considered as interdependent. Time and space deixis are reserved the same kind of interdependence as they are encoded through the same expressions. Thus an experiential view of deixis is offered as "a pragmatic category corresponding to an idealized cognitive model" of pointing out to an entity in space, which "structures a mental space and exhibits an image-schematic...