Pronoun-shift, Mental Distance And Self-politeness

Utterance politeness, because of its effects in communication, has attracted a lot of attention in the linguistic circle. Yet, its research has focused exclusively on other-oriented politeness, while little attention has been paid to speakers' need to save their own faces.; Many linguists and scholars have been studying and discussing personal pronoun and the interpretation of their usage, yet some linguists don't distinguish personal pronoun from pronoun in the perspective of linguistic; And in actual daily life, an interesting phenomenon gets merely attention, that is people often mean first person pronoun, while use second or third person pronoun for instead consciously or subconsciously; or people actually mean second person pronoun but use first or third person pronoun for instead.In the light of these important elements, it is essential to conduct further researches on pronoun. Two research questions are formulated in this thesis:1. Why people change the personal pronoun when they are taking a conversation?2. Can the universality of linguistic theories proposed by pragmatic and cognitive linguists instruct to analysis Chinese phenomenon?To answer these questions, we draw insights from CRP (Conceptual Reference Point) proposed by Longacker (1999), Mental Distance proposed by Kuno (1987) and Territory of Information (Kamio, 1997; 2001) and we also associate the Face Theory proposed by Brown and Levinson. With analyzing natural speeches from Chinese novels and magazines by using of graphology method, we get major findings of the study:Firstly, the speaker will take positive politeness strategies to change the pronoun to protect the self-face consciously or subconsciously: some utterances are inherently threatening, then the speaker have to think about how to protect his own self-politeness and find solutions to lower down this threat——the speaker shift personal pronoun to change the point of view of understanding the utterance and the information, which blur the identity of the speaker's or hearer's, meanwhile enlarges the mental distance between the speaker and the impolite information, that is to say the speaker leaves away the threat conveyed the utterance, protecting the speaker's self-politeness.Secondly, the universality of English linguistics can interpret the diversity of Chinese phenomenon: Usually, a conceptual structure includes a set of cognitive conceptual entities. Among these entities, more and more attentions have been paid to the processor and its identity. Kuno (1987) pays more attention to the processor outside of the sentence. In other words, the mental distance between the speaker / hearer to a certain referent in the sentence. The speaker / hearer make empathy to a certain referent or the speaker / hearer takes the referent's standpoint to understand a question may affect a sentence is legal or not; Kamio's territory of information is associated with Kuno's discussion theory and these theories can be applied to analyzing the phenomenon of Chinese speech(e.g. people often mean first person pronoun, while use second or third person pronoun for instead consciously or subconsciously; or. people actually mean second person pronoun but use first or third person pronoun for instead).Thirdly, when "Renjia / Bieren" corefer to the first person, there are some limitations: "Renjia / Bieren" often used by woman especially for young woman; The relationship between the speaker and the hearer is close when the speaker use "Renjia" to refer me; The classic meaning of "Renjia" refers to third person or the addressee except the speaker, only when it associates "zhi" can corefer first person, especially when the utterance inherently is threaten.Implications of the findings in teaching English and cross-cultural communication are suggested.