A Pragmatic Analysis Of Deixis In English Sports News

Deixis is the language in context, which is the ostensive way reflecting the language and the context. From the angle of the speaker, through lexicalization and grammaticalization, the deixis reflects the relation between language and context and determine the relationship among the utterance goal, space and characters (mingled into context). Hence, the determinacy of its meaning should integrate the relevance degree between the speaker and the space, the time, the characters, and depend on the listener's understanding of the context. Different contexts lead to different utterance meanings. So, the understanding of deixis requires that the speaker and the listener should have sharing knowledge of the context. However, when the communication is not face-to-face, the principle of egocentric is broken or there appears the phenomenon of mapping. Different choices of the expressions (this or that), not only depend on the physical distance, but also reflect the psychological distance between the speaker and the hearer or the pragmatic distance between the speaker, the hearer and the signified. Furthermore, some deixis (such as social deixis) reflects the social status of the people through grammaticalization of the words, and making the deixis a social symbol.Sports news reports include abundant of deictic expressions and there is a great need to discuss its types, features and the functions. This investigation uses the context view of the relevance theory to analyze the deixis in English sports news, studies the news reports in China Daily (2008) and classifies the deixis into five types (time, space, person, text, social), then compares the classification. It researches the language features of deixis in English sports news are as follows:The time, space and person deixis are widely used in sports news text; among the time deixis, the past tense is frequently used and which rank the highest frequency among the five deixis, the present and the future tense are used relatively less frequent; among the person deixis, the third person pronouns such as he/she/they/it are used most often, far exceeding the first person pronoun I/we and the second person pronoun you; the using of the discourse deixis and social deixis (especially the latter) is far more behind the time, space and person deixis.This paper then discusses the functions of deixis which are as follows: the first function is making the distance between the speaker and the listener closer through the appropriate selection of the person deixis; the second function is making the effectiveness of the sports news in a larger range of time, space and different regions through the effective use of time and space deixis, it then creates a kind of timeliness effect in time and space and tends to generate psychological resonance between the speaker and the listener; the third function is the use of discourse deixis plays an important role in the listener's understanding of the text.These three functions work together, causing the endurance of its spread influence and the immediacy in time and space. This investigation not only emphasizes that the deixis exist universally in sports news language and human thinking, it is the tool of the human's concept understanding; but also reveals the basic functions of deixis, making it the effective means of helping people's comprehension of the content of sports news.