On The Proximity Of Deixis In English Advertising

Deixis is a pervasive phenomenon in languages, person deixis, spatial deixis and temporal deixis are generally considered as basic types of deixis. Different choices of deixis can express distance. Proximity means 'near to the speaker' while distalness 'away from the speaker'. Such distinction is based on physical distance as well as psychological distance. In most cases, deixis has an egocentric anchoring from the speaker's point of view, but sometimes the deictic center is shifted from the speaker to the addressee to adjust the distance between the two sides.Deixis is an indispensable part in advertising discourse. To the limitation of my knowledge, studies of deixis in advertising are not many and researches on the proximity of deixis are even fewer.John Lyons (1977a: 677) once mentions that: "It frequently happens that, this is selected rather than that;here rather than there;now rather than then ". Thus proximal terms are more frequently used, because they could reveal more of the subjective involvement of the speaker.Based on the above discussion, a hypothesis is proposed: proximal terms should be applied more frequently in advertisements, as advertisers will generally try every means to shorten the distance and please their customers. In verifying the hypothesis, 249 English advertisements are randomly chosen from Time, Newsweek and China Daily. The distribution of four pairs of typical deictic terms is analyzed.Statistics shows that the proportion of proximal terms in spatial, temporal, and discourse deixis is 70%, which conforms to the hypothesis on the whole. However, in person deixis, the distribution of distal term you outnumbers proximal terms I and we. This is seemingly contrary to the hypothesis. But considering the characteristics of advertising discourse, the distribution result can be explained. Advertising discourse is addressee-centered, which is different from the usual speaker-centered utterance. In advertising discourse, customers are placed to a salient position, thus the deictic center is pushed to the addressee, and Levinson calls this a polite deictic shift.In this way, distance between the two sides is greatly shortened. Then the hypothesis is verified.The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1 first discusses the definition and classification of deixis along with its frequent use in advertising language;then the significance and structure of this thesis are provided.Chapter 2 views the previous studies on the proximity of deixis and advertising language. Stephen C Levinson, George Yule, John Lyons' studies on deixis are discussed respectively;and current researches on advertising language are introduced, finally the hypothesis is made.Chapter 3 studies proximity in person deixis, spatial deixis, temporal deixis and discourse deixis respectively and typical proximal and distal deictic terms are chosen and classified.Chapter 4 talks about the principles and methods in data collection. The printed advertisements are from Time, China Daily, and Newsweek. And the distribution results of each typical term are shown in this chapter too.Chapter 5 deals with the data analysis. The reasons for the distribution results in advertising are discussed on the theory of proximity.Chapter 6 draws the conclusions to see whether the hypothesis will be verified on the previous analysis. Limitations of this thesis are pointed out and further studies are suggested.