An Integrated Cognitive Model Of Demonstratives With Contrastive Studies In Chinese And English

Demonstratives are frequently used both in English and Chinese. People use demonstratives to designate the referent on the basis of spatial or temporal distance so that the linguistic forms help the hearer to establish mental contact with the representations of the things and relations in the objective world or mental world, and make their discourse cohesive, as well.Traditionally, the study of demonstratives has been developed in the line of adapting the linguistic expression to fit the world and explaining the use of demonstratives in relation to the distance between the speaker and the referent in the physical reality, so early discussions of them are primarily found in philosophical works. Indeed, proximity is a crucial factor in the choice of demonstratives but philosophers and truth-conditional semantists believe that the physical distance is the focus of study. They judge the truth value of expressions with indexical expressions on the basis of the physical distance. Their theory becomes unconvincing when applied to explain the cross-linguistic difference of demonstrative systems because the same distance is sometimes encoded by different demonstratives in different languages. Therefore, the proximity in this paper is developed on the cognitive ground of the psychological distance between representations of the referent and the ground in spatial reference and metaphorically, in temporal and discourse deixis. This view can account for the cross-linguistic inconsistency and be extended to a wide range of actual use of demonstratives.With the rapid development of pragmatics, greater attention has been directed to the pragmatic aspect of demonstratives. Since they are contextually dependent, pragmatists argue that the use of demonstratives is essentially concerned with the appropriateness in linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. Though they still resort to physical distance for the explanation of the choice of demonstratives, their description of demonstratives is more precise with the introduction of the contextual factor. Functional linguists have also studied demonstratives but they mainly attach...