The Study On Chinese And English Discourse Deixis From Cognitive Perspective

The deictic phenomenon of language exists in human communication and interpersonal conversations during which human beings realize their own interpretations and expressive assumptions.By using deixis,utterances can be more cohesive and relevant.Likewise,Discoursedeictic phenomenon appears in communication between authors and writers.In discourses,regarding the main body of interpretations as referent point,the author applies words or phrases to direct an utterance object which is in or out of discourses,or to illustrate a pragmatic or semantic relation between a sentence the words or phrases belong to and other linguistic elements within the same discourse.Studies on discourse deixis include a wide range of scopes,from analysis and descriptions of languages,discourse or textual linguistics and corpus linguistic,to contrastive linguistics,to name just a few.Doing these studies needs great efforts,creativity and challenges.Meanwhile,discourse deictic researches are key focus of cognitive linguistics,because definiteness of the main utterance body and cognitive preceding of information are involved in the process of reference.The Chanel of realizing discouse deixis is a continuum,namely,the existence of the real world> the representation of the reality> mental representation>discourse representation.Thus,in discourses,whether utterance receptionists can correctly judge referent objects or not becomes the key to successful discoursual understanding.We choose discourse deixis as our research objective,and apply the Buhler's “Deictic field-deixis” theory and some other theories of cognitive linguistics to build up classified models of discourse deictic categories,which along with corpuses set a basis of our systematical preceding discussion of Chinese and English discourse deictic system,semantic features of different types of discourse deixis,directional function of mental distance,anaphoric and cataphoric function as well as their grammaticalized process.After above systematical discussion and analysis,we try to point out constructional answers to the following questions: What makes discourse deictic use possible? How can cognitive proceeding of deictic process be realized? What are the cognitional mechanics and motivation of grammaticalization of discourse deixis? Etc.The thesis can be divided into seven chapters.Chapter one is an introduction of the whole research.In this chapter,we mainly introduce the origin,meaning and creative points of our thesis.At the same time,we make clear basic opinions of cognitionallinguistics,sources of language materials,methods used and the framework of our research;Chapter two is literature review part.In the chapter,we systematically collect researching achievements from previous studies about deixis and discourse deixis,aiming to check out shortcomings and vacancies of the existing researches;By so doing,we assure accessibility and values of our study.Chapter three is about criteria for the setting of deixis and discourse deixis.Orienting from cognitive features of human beings and basing on Buhler's mapping of “deictic field-deixis”,we discuss the construction of deixis and deictic elements,in order to supplement and perfect his Deictic Axis and eventually form a complete Discourse Deictic Axis(value or meaning included)which is originated from a grammaticalized discourse representative.After essential analysis,we get a continuum of discourse deixis,namely,situational deixis>discourse deixis>gramaticalized deixis.The above discussion of criteria makes up a basis for the following analysis,such as classifications of Chinese and English discourse deixis,interpretation of deictic and directional functions,analysis of deictic grammaticalization and contrastive study that is based on corpuses.Chapter four is the discussion on how we divide Chinese and English discourse deixis into five kinds,namely,personal,deictic,time-space,modal-adverbial and linking discourse deixis,based on what has been set up in chapter three.Then,basing on parallel corpus that has been set,we make a contrastive study on the above five kinds of discourse deixis between Chinese and English and get the result.In Chinesediscourses,we are likely to use more implicit discourse markers,but English discourses are in the opposite story,which proves that Chinese is a semantic language and English is s syntactic language.Besides,from five layers of deixis,we take typical Chinese and English discourse deixis as examples and analyze locations of typical Chinese and English discourse deixis in deictic system.After detailed discussion by setting discourse examples,we try to figure out that in real discourses,typical Chinese and English discourse deixis of “zhe/na” and “this/that” co-exist three deictic types---contextual deixis,discourse deixis and grammaticalized deixis,and from the first type to the third,there is a deictic continuum which is regarded as deixis grammaticalization process of all languages.In our thesis,although we primarily emphasize discourse deixis,but we can't deny that situational deixis and grammaticalized deixis provide us the orientation and the final purpose of deictic study.Therefore,in this chapter,we also provide the readers with simple introduction of situational deixis.As for grammaticalized deixis,we put it in chapter six for the completeness of our thesis description.Chapter five is about deictic and directionalfunctions of discourse deixis by taking typical discourse deixis “zhe/na”and“this/that”as examples in order to deeply discuss discourse deixis.During the discussion,we combine it with corpus analysis to figure out common similarities and differences between Chinese and English discourse deixis.First of all,we analyze deictic function of the mental distance of typical“zhe/na”and“this/that”in detail.We believe that the nature of distance between the main utterance body and referent objectives is a kind of cognitive judgment and is influence by psychological elements,no matter the distance is featured time or space.Realizing mental distance has four methods,and the deixis of mental distance can be separated into two types,one is covert deixis and the other is overt deixis.The result shows that covert deixis is inevitable and the differences of covert and overt are on degrees;The choice of proximal or distal mental distance deixis depends on four elements---deictic focus,social distance,familiarity and emotion,because discourse mental distance is a kind of reflection of language speakers' thinking,emotions and psychological attitudes.Chinese language speakers are likely to use proximal discourse deixis to minimize communicative distance.In contrary,English language users apply more distal deixis to show their desires of protecting privacy,which contains deep cultural notions.Secondly,guided by materials from corpus,we analyze directional function of Chinese and Englishdiscourse anaphoric and cataphoric deixis in details.Anaphora has two kinds,that is,explicit anaphora and implicit anaphora.On one hand,explicit anaphora can be deeply divided into three types according to its cognitive syntacticfunction,namely,nominal explicit anaphora,verbal explicit anaphora and sentential explicit anaphora;on the other hand,implicit anaphora can also be deeply divided into three types according to relations between pre-directional item and its antecedent.They are inclusive implicit anaphora,associated implicit anaphora and generalized implicit anaphora.Comparatively,cataphoric use of discourse deixis of “zhe/na” and “this/that” is not as much as anaphoric use,but there is no doubt that the use of cataphora also has referential and cohesive textual function.When creating literatures,the use of cataphora has more aesthetic value than the use of direct descriptions,because that kind of writing method can be of great help for authors to set an unknown and mysterious atmosphere which can attract more readers' attentions and stir their interests of continuous reading;contrastive analysis shows us that anaphoric and cataphoric uses of deixis have obvious distinctions between Chinese and English.In Chapter six,we try to throw a light on grammaticalization of Chinese and Englishdiscourse deixis.Firstly,Major principles of discourse deixis grammaticalization are given.Then,detailed discussion is followed.The result shows that pronominal discourse deixis can be grammaticalized into linkers of Chinese and Englishdiscourses,attributive clause and object clause markers of English discourses;adnominal discourse deixis can be grammaticalized into indefiniteness markers of Chinese and English discourse.Moreover,adnominal discourse deixis can grammaticalize into antecedents of English,articles,attributive clause markers,possessive clause marker,generalized words and co-referent words of Chinesediscourses.Meanwhile,we discuss the cognitive mechanism of discourse deixis from perspectives of schema,metaphor and metonymy,basing on Langacker's ICM.In chapter seven,according to what has been discussed in the previous chapters,we conclude the research findings and answers to the research questions.At the same time,we figure out the limitations and expectations of our research.Study on Chinese and English discourse deixis from the cognitive perspective can not only effectively dig out differences between Chinese and English languages but also find out cognitive basis and evidence of these differences.The research findings are of great importance and values for cross-language studies,such as intercultural communication,multi-language translation,Chinese as second language teaching,English teaching and artificial intelligence,through which we can promote Chinese language to a higher stage of the world.