A Study On The Choice And Identity Construction Of Personal Deixis In Court Discourse

Person deixis is defined as the relationship the speaker establishes between what he refers to and a certain another person through the use of an overt or covert person pronoun. Person deixis is a mirror which can reflect human’s social activities. People frequently use personal deixis in daily discourse and institution discourse, especially in court, where the conversation is the representative of institution discourse, communicators choose personal deixis according to their aims in court. Appropriate choice of person deixis demonstrates communicators’language use ability.Based on the self-built "Corpus of China Civil Court", the study examines the relationship of person dexis chosen by plaintiff and defendant and identity construction. We adopt both the Positioning Theory and the Principle of Goal Direction as a holistic theoretical framework in this dissertation. We use the theories and methods of pragmatics and conversational analysis to describe how plaintiff and defendant choose certain person deixis to construct corresponding identities. It identifies the impacts of non-linguistic and linguistic contextual factors, such as goal, identity and the interrelationship between goals and discursive roles.It is found that in the construction of rights identity, plaintiff procurator or defendant procurator prefers to choose identity/career type personal deixis; in the construction of relative identity, procurators prefer to choose relative personal deixis; in the construction of power and reciprocity identity, procurators are inclined to use evaluational personal deixis; while law identity personal deixis is apt to construct institutional identity-plaintiff and defendant. One identity is not constructed by only one type of personal deixis, and one type of personal deixis can be used to construct different identities. Because court discourse is the variant of daily discourse, personal deixis in pragmatics are used commonly among these deixis. If plaintiff and defendant major in law, they are less likely to use personal deixis in pragmatics.