A Cognitive Approach To Personal Deictic Projection

Deixis, as a complicated linguistic phenomenon and an indispensable part in our life, has attracted the attention of a lot of scholars in various fields. An essential characteristic of all categories of deixis seems to be their egocentricity and it is the speaker who generally constitutes the deictic center of the speech event. But there are various exceptions to this, in which deictic expressions are used in ways that shift this deictic center to other participants, or indeed to protagonists in narratives. Lyons (1977:579) called this kind of phenomenon "deictic projection".Conceptual blending theory (CBT) by Fauconnier and Turner (1998:133) is the further development of the mental space theory (MST). This theory has attracted much attention due to its forceful explanatory power for the meaning construction of many linguistic phenomena. Fauconnier (1998:133) holds that mental spaces are continuously constructed while the speaker is thinking and communicating, mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk for purpose of local understanding and action.This thesis presents a tentative study of the phenomenon of personal deictic projection within the framework of conceptual blending theory in the field of cognitive linguistics. In this paper, through the qualitative analysis and natural observation of the collected data of personal deictic projection, the internal mechanism of the meaning construction of personal deictic projection has been explained by CBT.The significance of this research consists of two aspects. First, this research attempts to study the meaning construction process of personal deictic projection from the cognitive perspective. It probes the nature of personal deictic projection, and enriches the study of it as well. Second, in this research, it has been fully demonstrated that conceptual blending theory has a strong and pervasive explanatory power, which extends the range of its applications. In the virtue of conceptual blending network, the on-line meaning construction of personal deictic projection can be shown vividly and directly. It can also help English learners better understand the meaning and the usage of personal deictic projection in a persuasive way.