On The Pragmatic Contrast Of Place Deixis Between Chinese And English

Spatial relationship is the most important and most basic one in the objective world. As a phenomenon with universality in language, deixis is the reflection of the relationship between language and context in language system. Although Chinese and English belong to different types of language, both of them use place deixis to express spatial relationship. By adopting Zheng Daojun's classification of place deixis and drawing on the research approaches as contrastive analysis, analysis of generality as well as descriptive analysis, this thesis analyzes the similarities and differences between Chinese and English place deixis under the guidance of contrastive linguistics, pragmatics, psychology and cross-cultural communication.Make a systematical contrastive pragmatics study to show a general sense of place deixis in Chinese and English, enable Chinese and English learners to have a better understanding of the pragmatic meanings of place deixis in both languages, and to improve their efficiency of their expressions and cross-cultural communication.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter introduces this research in target and significance, research scope, research method, language sources and some questions needed to be explained. The second chapter explores the pragmatic similarities and differences of locative nouns, pronouns of place, directional verbs and demonstrative nouns from the perspective of the shared place deixis system in Chinese and English.The third chapter discusses the pragmatic similarities and differences of locative noun phrases and demonstrative noun phrases in Chinese, the definite article and place adverb in English from the perspective of the special place deixis systems in Chinese and English.The fourth chapter analyzes the major reasons for the pragmatic similarities and differences between Chinese and English place deixis.The last chapter summarizes the whole thesis, pointing out the loose ended to be tied and the aspects to be improved in the research.