A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Person Deixis In Social Contact

To be the significant component of deixis study, person deixis study has beenfocused for a long time and continually expands its field. The previous studies ofperson deixis mainly anchor its grammatical function; argue whether person deixisequals to personal pronouns; discuss the indication of person deixis in discourse;focus on the social meaning of the second person deixis “you”,“ni”(你),“nin”(您).Currently, the scholars at home and broad gradually concentrate more on thepragmatic function of person deixis than before. Meanwhile, the concentrationcontinually expends to the study of pragmatic empathy and the philosophy oflanguage.Social deixis belongs to the special component in deixis system, because it hasevident pragmatic functions. The application of social deixis is to convey the socialinformation and indicated information. Some person deixis has strong social functionin social context, so the relationship between social function and person deixis areclose. Meanwhile, the study category of social deixis and person deixis has the similarpart. These phenomena are the basis of the study which concentrates on the socialproperties of English and Chinese person deixis; it means that person deixis both inEnglish and Chinese has its specific social function and it can convey socialinformation in a conversation.Discussing the three person both in English and Chinese respectively and thencontrasting them can make the similarities and differences between the two languagesclear. Under English social contact, studying the singular form “I” and plural form“we” of the first person deixis; analyzing the second person deixis “you”; arguing“he”,“she”,“it”,“they”, the proper noun and the address terms which can representthe third person deixis can help to find out the social function of English person deixis. In Chinese social context, studying the singular forms “wo”(我),“zan”(�'�),“an”(俺)and plural forms “wo men”(我们),“zan men”(�'�们),“an men”(俺们) of first persondeixis; analyzing “ni”(你),“nin”(您),“ni men”(你们) of the second person deixis;arguing the words which belong to the third person deixis system:“ta”(他,她,它),“tamen”(他们,她们,它们), proper noun and address terms can find out the pragmaticfunction of Chinese person deixis. After contrasting the first, second and third persondeixis between English and Chinese respectively, the similarities and differences ofthe two languages can be found easily.The first step to engage the contrastive study of English and Chinese persondeixis in social contact is to define the similarities and differences of person deixisbetween the two languages under different social contacts. After fully discussing thesimilarities and differences, discovering the essential causes which are from the viewsof culture and social contact to analyze and illustrate these language phenomena givesa different way to consider the study. The relationship between culture and languageare close to each other during the process of language development. Culturedifferences lead to the language differences while language differences can reflect theculture differences spontaneously. Moreover, the differences between English andChinese social contacts also influence the development of the two languages. And thesocial contact is affected by culture too. In some way, language, culture and socialcontact cannot be divided. Analyzing these factors will help to find out the essentialcauses of forming the similarities and differences between English and Chineseperson deixis.However, the contrastive study of English and Chinese person deixis in socialcontact at home and abroad is relatively limited. The discussion of the reasons whichform the phenomena is not completely clear. Most of the studies of English andChinese person deixis in social contact focus on the different functions of the twolanguages but not to discover the essential reasons.Analyzing amounts of examples in social situations to illustrate person deixis inEnglish and Chinese respectively is a basic way to consider the contrastive study.After comparing the features of person deixis in the two languages, the reasons of forming the language phenomenon can be found easily. The reasons will be arguedfrom the following three aspects: the differences produced from the process of thedevelopment of each language; the influence of English and Chinese cultures to theirlanguages; the varied need of two kinds of social context. From the contrastive study,it can improve the communication between English and Chinese better.