On The Uses Of Nonvocative Person Deixis In Hong Lou Meng

Deixis is one of the basic subjects in the study of pragmatics. Person deixis, closely connected with place deixis, time deixis etc, plays an important part in the study of deixis. Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event in which the utterance is delivered. Person deixis consists of person pronouns and nominal phrases that encode the identification of persons who participate in the utterance. Nominal phrases include depreciatory terms, honorific forms, kinship terms and occupational titles etc. LüShuxiang (1983) has done research on the deictic usage of pronouns in Chinese from the perspective of grammar, illustrating with many examples from the great Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng. In this thesis, the author examines, from the perspective of pragmatics, the uses of nonvocative person deixis, especially the first person deixis and the second person deixis, including both person pronouns and nominal phrases, in the theoretic frame of respect degrees in the novel Hong Lou Meng. The language in the novel Hong Lou Meng is eighteenth century Chinese, unrolling all the walks of Chinese society. It is found that respect degrees increase from person pronouns to nominal phrases and intimacy degrees increase from nominal phrases to person pronouns. Person deixis is determined by the politeness principle, the context and the speaker's intention. In most cases, the speaker conforms to the politeness principle, using appropriate person deixis to abase self and elevate other. In certain situations, the speaker uses the person deixis that does not conform to his or her identity in order to enlarge or shorten the distance between the speaker and the addressee and express the speaker's conversational implicatures.