A Contrastive Study Of Deixis Between English And Chinese

Contrastive study is a branch of science concerning with two or more languages byexploring the differences and similarities in a synchronic way. The purpose of thisdissertation is to offer some assistance in language teaching and translation betweenEnglish and Chinese.Due to the study of pragmatics in China, great attention has been paid by manyscholars who have shown interests in this area. The reason is that understandingpragmatics is sure to help learners have a good comprehension of the language in acertain situation. Based on this, this dissertation puts its core on the study of deixisbetween the two languages: English and Chinese.Deixis is a popular and universal language phenomenon. In speech events, therelationship between language and context is mostly represented by lexical meaningsand grammatical structures. It is this category that deixis plays a positive role in thelanguage. As Levinsion points out: "Pragmatics is the study of those relations betweenlanguage and context that are grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of alanguage". In Levinson's definition of pragmatics, it is clear to see that deixis is asubject whose focus is on the lexical and grammatical study. In English, the lexical andgrammatical scope primarily include personal pronoun, demonstrative, definite articleand adverb of indicating time and place. In Chinese, such phenomena still exist.It is known that the typicality of utterance in human's activity is going between46A Contrastive Study ofDeixis Between English and Chineseperson to person, or person to group. This channel requires all participants in acommunicative situation in which participant can see and hear each other. Thiscommunication is considered to be paralinguistic features such as gesture, stance, eye-contact, face expressions, etc. In the course of communication, all participants are in thestate of sending or receiving messages. Thus it will produce deictic expressions fromthe participants. Attention should be paid to the reference of point in understanding thisdeixis. The point is in the center of speaker who plays a role in organizing theconversation.The functions of deixis mainly lie in two: the symbolic use and gestural use. Thistwo uses reflect the characteristics of deixis in the field of pragmatics.There are seven chapters in this dissertation. Chapter One generally summarizesthe definition of deixis as well as its philosophical views. Chapter Two gives a briefintroduction to the classification of deixis. Chapter Three has given many examples toanalyze the person deixis. It is obvious that the two languages share something incommon in terms of the uses of personal pronouns. Chapter Four has elaborated thesimilarities and differences of time deixis between English and Chinese. We can see thatwords used to refer to time are some demonstrative adverbs and prepositions. In thisrespect, both languages have their own way by using different time deixis to indicatetime. However difference seems clear that English uses two basic forms of tense toconvey varieties of aetions and states. On the contrary the Chinese language expressesits present, past or future time by using some words which characterize its differencefrom English. Chapter Five has analyzed the space deixis. The location and direction ofthe speaker seems very important in the context of utterance. They influence theutterance between the speaker and addressee. Chapter Six focuses its attention on thediscourse deixis and social deixis which are the improvement and extension of person,time and place deixis. It is important to note that deixis in both English and Chinese areinterrelated. The last chapter falls into conclusion.