| Deixis is one of important study areas in pragmatics. People in the discoursethrough the use of deictic word and other means make the discourse and certainpeople, things, space and time directly connected. Words which can play a direct rolein indicating or pointing are: personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns,demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative adverbs, relative pronouns, the definitearticle, and the verbs like the meaning of“come”and“go”etc.(Lyons1977:636-656).Person deictic words are used to refer to each other when both convey information inthe conversation. That is, through open or implied personal pronouns, the person orthing and the speaker, listener, or third party involved in discourse can be linked up tosuggest the relationship between each other. It is taking addressers as benchmarks;addressees understand words naturally on person deixis corresponding change.(Levinson,2004:68). Generally speaking, Person deictic words can be divided intothree types: the first person deixis, including speaker; the second person deixis,including listener; the third person deixis, including neither the speaker nor thelistener. In the speech activities, speakers use person deixis constrained by thepoliteness principle, context and intentions of the speaker. Person deictic words aregetting more attention in the fields of social linguistics, pragmatics and functionallinguistics, especially in recent years a large number of domestic and foreign scholarshave made many researches on person deixis and interpreted it from differentperspectives.M.A.thesis is compulsory for graduates who want to get master degree, it is animportant standard to measure the quality of graduates’ education, and it is also onecriterion to test master’s level of scholarly research and academic innovation. TheEnglish M.A. thesis writing refers to the academic writing in English. English has become the common language used in the international academic field, so it isindispensable skill for scholars and researchers who aim to gain achievements in theacademic field to write academic papers in English in the future. In order to be able tounderstand the real situation and level of Chinese linguistics master’s degree in thesiswriting, this article intends to select domestic and foreign masters’ theses introductionin linguistics as authentic corpora for analysis.Based on classical deixis theory in pragmatics, this article attempts to make adescription and analysis study on person deictic words in using feature by means ofthe self-established corpus. On the basis of previous studies, this paper will makefurther discussion on person deictic words used in M.A.thesis writing and explore thesimilarities and differences in use of person deictic words for Chinese and foreignsenior scholars in M.A.thesis. Therefore the author puts forward the following twomajor questions:1. What is the frequency of each form of person deixis used in Chinese and foreignlinguistics M.A.thesis Introduction? What are the similarities and differences?What are the possible reasons?2. What are the pragmatic functions of person deixis used in English M.A.thesis forthe Chinese and foreign scholars?Through statistical analysis and study, the results show that abundant persondeixis are used in thesis introduction part by Chinese English majors and nativeEnglish scholars. It is also found that there are same tendency in the use of persondeixis，but there are still some differences found to be in common in many waysamong thesis introduction by native and Chinese writers, which may be related withdiscourse features and register, and different ways of thinking and culturalbackground. The author thinks that the study will help the readers better to understandand grasp the characteristics of M.A.thesis writing, effectively guide Chinese Englishmajors’ ability of using person deictic words in M.A.thesis writing and play animportant role in understanding functions embodied by person deictic words in thediscourse.What is new in the thesis is that it is the first time to conduct an empirical study on contrasting and comparing a number of thesis introduction parts in English writtenby both native and Chinese writers. However, due to time and space constraints andthe complexity of deixis theory itself, deficiencies still exist in the present study.What the thesis aims at is to make a tentative study from the perspective of persondeixis on M.A.thesis writing with expectation to shed some light on the teaching andwriting of M.A.thesis．... |
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