Cognitive Approach To Deixis

Deixis is examined as a pragmatic phenomenon encoded by particular linguistic expressions which establish a relationship between the speaker and such various contextual parameters of the speech event as the addressee (in particular, his social position with respect to the speaker), time, place, and discourse point in the speech event.Traditionally, deixis is described according to its function and the contextual parameter it defines. The paper first gives a brief description of the traditional views on deixis, then it points out that there are some issues needed to be further clarified. Firstly, traditional accounts of deixis distinguish between deictic and non-deictic terms and usages of these terms on the basis of rigid criteria for membership in the deictic category, which obscures our understanding of deixis itself. Secondly, an essential characteristic of all categories of deixis appears to be their egocentricity and the speaker 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. Traditional accounts of deixis cannot provide a convincing explanation for this phenomenon of deictic projection. Thirdly, some particular expressions are used to express place, time, and discourse deixis in different contexts. There must be some conceptual and social relatedness at least among the three basic deictic categories, and it remains unexplored.Cognitive linguistics provides a new theoretical framework for the study of deixis. The paper follows this new approach to analyze deixis and handle the above problems. It claims that deixis is a pragmatic category which can be understood in terms of an idealized cognitive-3-model (ICM); mental space theory may offer some reasonable explanations for the phenomenon of deictic projection; prototype structure can help us understand the deictic expressions and their usages and it clearly shows that deixis is a graded category. Moreover, the paper attempts an account of the common origin of different deictic categories. It argues that social, time and discourse deixis are metaphorically derived from place deixis. This analysis is consistent with and confirms the spatialization-of-form hypothesis, which requires a metaphorical mapping from physical space onto a conceptual space. It claims that social deixis is based on the metaphorical understanding of social space as physical space, time deixis is based on the metaphorical understanding of time as space, and discourse deixis is based on the metaphorical understanding of discourse as time and time as space.