A Cognitive Study Of Deictic Projection

The present thesis investigates a kind of derivative usage of deixis—deictic projection with a view to exploring its internal mechanism of meaning construction within the framework of Conceptual Blending Theory in the field of cognitive linguistics.We try to prove that the conceptual blending theory is powerful for explicating the cognitive process of meaning construction of deictic projection by means of qualitative analysis, and at the same time enrich the deictic projection studies from a new angle.Through the analyses, the author of the present thesis redefines deictic projection from the cognitive perspective as a special kind of language phenomenon of violating the usage of deictic center, in which mental spaces are continuously constructed while the speaker is thinking and communicating, and through partial or selective cross-space mapping the speaker's deictic center can be projected into the mental space in which the addressees or other participants are.The author attempts to classify deictic projection into three categories: addressee's mental space mapping, audience's mental space mapping and dramatic mental space mapping.