A Pragmatic And Cognitive Analysis Of Temporal Deixis

Deixis, linking language structure and context, plays a significant role in people’sdaily communication. Lots of scholars have made numerous researches on deixis withrespect to its deictic usage as well as its reference. Temporal deixis is one of theindispensible parts of deictic expressions; it helps to anchor the reference point oftime in communication. However, literature review shows that most of the studiesfocused on the study of deixis as a whole, temporal deixis is the field rarely touched.This thesis aims to explore how we communicators choose and understand thetemporal deixis and tries to explain the conceptualization of temporal deixis based onrelevance and cognitive theory. It tries to give answers to the following questions:1. How does the speaker choose the temporal deixis to achieve hiscommunicative purpose?2. In what way does the hearer understand the temporal deixis?3. How is temporal deixis conceptualized from the perspective of cognition andin which aspects does temporal deixis embody the spatial concept?Under the guidance of relevance theory, this thesis firstly introduces two kinds oftemporal deixis and different uses of temporal deixis and discusses the speaker’sostension in choosing temporal deixis and the hearer’s cognitive process in identifyingtemporal deixis from two angles: cognitive context and ostensive-inferentialcommunication. Besides, this thesis also probes into the understanding of temporaldeixis from the perspective of cognitive linguistics including metaphor and imageschema to find the underlying relation between temporal deixis and spatial concept.After analyzing some examples of temporal deixis, we have obtained such findings as:1. In the process of communication, the speaker has to estimate the hearer’scognitive context first to choose a proper temporal deixis which is relevant enough forthe hearer to identify. The speaker will successfully convey his informative andcommunicative intentions when the hearer identifies the temporal deixis.2. The inferential process allows the hearer to activate related information in hiscognitive context and get the assumption yielding adequate effects with no unjustifiable processing effort, and then the hearer identifies the temporal deixis andthe speaker’s intentions as well. When the hearer gets the speaker’s intentions, hiscognitive context is altered and mutual manifestness is achieved.3. Time is perceived in terms of spatial concept; people understand the abstractconcept of time based on temporal metaphor deriving from people’s spatial bodilyinvolvement. Time is one-dimensional, unidirectional linear image schema; theexpressions indicating temporal deictic information also embody spatial concepts:such as spatial extent, spatial distance and spatial prepositions, among which spatialprepositions provide more evidences.Based on the above findings, it might be proper for us to conclude that people’scognitive abilities are crucial in the use and perception of temporal deixis. Theperception of time and temporal deixis is realized through the metaphorical mappingfrom space domain onto time domain; and in using temporal deixis, people arerequired to choose and comprehend temporal deixis in their cognitive contexts, andthen realize or seek the optimal relevance to achieve a successful communication.