Deictic Action Verbs In Utterance Understanding

Deixis is the most obvious way in which linguistic forms are associated with context,and it has long been studied in semantics and pragmatics.In the studies of deixis,verbs are a rather underexplored category.Studies on deictic verbs have mainly focused on motion verbs such as come and go,and works of Fillmore,Lyons,Talmy,Clark,etc.are seen as classics in this research field.In addition to this,there exist few systematic studies on other deictic verbs,especially in naturally occurring utterances.This research status quo of deictic verbs has invited us to think about the research object of this dissertation,namely deictic action verbs.In other words,this dissertation aims to study how certain action verbs in utterances can make reference to or ‘point to' the context of utterance.The investigation of deictic action verbs broadens the research scope of deictic verbs,because previous studies pay little attention to verbs other than motion verbs.How to delimitate this term has become the first thing we need to deal with.Unlike traditional delimitation of action verbs in semantics,action verbs are understood as those linguistic units that are used to describe actions or acts in utterances,including single-word action verbs,action phrasal verbs and action verb phrases.A single-word verb describes the action or act performed by the agent.A phrasal verb is an idiomatic phrase consisting of a main verb and a particle(preposition and adverb).A verb phrase is rather a free combination consisting of a main verb and its object,complement,and adverbial modifier.Such a wide delimitation is not without a reason,because what we are concerned about in this dissertation is how the action described in an utterance is associated with or sensitive to the context of the utterance,and the action in question is sometimes not just confined to single-word action verbs.Study on the indexicality of action verbs cannot be done without reference to the context of utterance,as the latter is the core to the study on any deixis.The context of utterance is a broad notion,including speech participants,spatial and temporal setting,co-text,shared knowledge,speaker's intention,etc.However,what are the contextual features that are most related to action verbs? Based on a close observation on the collected data,Chapter 3 explores the context at the actional level by proposing 5 contextual features most related to actions described in utterances,namely spatial direction,temporal orientation,instrumentality,degree of effect and agent's mental state.In light of the classic definition of deixis by Levinson(1983,1997),deictic action verbs are understood as those which encode these contextual features and whose semantic indeterminacy needs to depend on particular contextual features.With the collected data from COCA,we will describe and explain which action verbs in English are sensitive to these features of context.In addition,the context of utterance has been extended to social and cultural dimensions.As for the social context,we have mainly investigated how action verbs in utterances can lexicalize or contextualize 4 features of social context,namely social institution,power relation,social identity and social role.As for the cultural context,we have constructed the cultural space in which action verbs occur as a set of cultural information consisting of acts of ways of living,normative acts and acts of core assumptions.We will explore which action verbs can directly or indirectly ‘point to' the cultural information.After having explored the indexical phenomenon of action verbs in the immediate,social and cultural contexts,we will investigate in details how action verbs can ‘point to' the politeness strategies and American mainstream cultural assumptions in Chapter 4 and 5 respectively.Firstly,the reason why we target at politeness strategies is due to the consideration that politeness is the typical representation of social indexicality in the study of social deixis,say,the Tu/Vous distinction and other forms of address.Thus on the basis of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Strategies(1987)and in light of the idiosyncratic features of action verbs in social interaction,we have proposed a set of politeness strategies most related to action verbs in utterances,namely respect/deference,humbleness,hospitality,friendliness,freedom of action and honesty.These strategies are the concrete representation of social politeness.Besides compared with the honorific verbs in Japanese,Korean and Chinese,we have come to understand the idiosyncrasies of English action verbs ‘pointing to' politeness strategies in social interaction,which is realized through the use of certain action phrasal verbs and verb phrases.Therefore socially deictic action verbs are understood as those that are sensitive to features of social context and that lexicalize particular politeness strategies in social interaction.Secondly,Chapter 5 is mainly an investigation of the cultural indexicality of action verbs.Since the collected data are speeches or utterances in American English,it is of great necessity to construct a model of American cultural context suitable for analyzing action verbs that occur in America people's mundane communication.To achieve this,we will focus on what is most typical,representative and commonly shared,namely the American mainstream culture consisting of basic beliefs and dominant values.Referring to several authoritative works on American culture,we have constructed a model of American culture consisting of a set of information about basic beliefs,dominant values and mainstream attitudes,a referential framework for the interpretation of context-sensitive action verbs in utterance understanding.Thus culturally deictic action verbs are understood as those that can directly or indirectly ‘point to' the above-mentioned cultural contextual features.In order to better describe and interpret deictic action verbs in cultural context,we will also explore two core notions,namely cultural indexicality and deictic mode.Cultural indexicality is the extension of deixis into cultural dimension in natural languages.Cultural deictic mode is a pragmatic inferential process in which the speaker chooses particular linguistic units(e.g.action verbs)to direct the hearer's attention to specific features of cultural context of utterance so as to achieve his communicative intention.Finally,based on the naturally occurring utterances collected from online major American newspapers(USA Today,NY Daily News,ABC News),we will conduct an empirical investigation of how certain action verbs used by Americans can ‘point to',to a varying extent,the features of cultural context(i.e.basic beliefs,dominant values and mainstream attitudes)in their daily communication.All in all,this dissertation extends the investigation of deictic verbs in naturally occurring utterances and pays special attention to the deictic relation between action verbs and context of utterance.Since there exist several levels of contextual features(the immediate,social and cultural ones),our interpretation will focus on the indexicality of action verbs at these levels of context.The major findings have important implications and significance for a better understanding of the phenomenon of deixis in natural language.