The Study Of Person Deixis’ Application In Cross-cultural TV Interview Programs From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Person deixis is always the focus of pragmatic study. This paper aims to analyze and interpret the person deixis used in cross-cultural TV interview programs based on the Adaptation Theory. Most of the previous studies are based on the Chinese language materials while English ones are limited. There are differences in person deixis choices between the interview participants and their causes will be analyzed.The studying content of this thesis includes the following. The person deixis used in the cross-cultural TV interview programs, which belong to a special language use phenomenon, will be studied to find its features. The factors that influence the interview participants’ choices of person deixis will be discussed. Besides, this study will check whether the person deixis choices in TV interview programs are a dynamic and adapted process.The researching methods are like this. After twelve programs from the Yang Lan One On One are collected, the English language conversations will be transcribed into the written form. This thesis summarizes the features in the uses of person deixis and gives a qualitative analysis from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.The findings are:1) The person deixis used in cross-cultural interviews has anti-preemptive use, fuzzy use and variant use. In the anti-preemptive use of person deixis, personal names, general nouns and social addressing terms can be used to refer to the referents in the conversations. Besides, the plural forms of the first person pronoun, second person pronoun and third person pronoun have fuzzy use. Moreover, the second person pronoun and the singular form of the third person pronoun have variant use.2) The choice of person deixis in interview is a dynamic process, which is influenced by physical, social and mental factors.3) The cultural backgrounds and different motivations have caused the different choices of person deixis between the interview participants.Studies on cross-cultural interview programs are limited. Still less are the studies on English language programs. This research provides a new perspective to study cross-cultural TV interview programs. That is to study the person deixis in the programs based on Adaptation Theory, which enlarges the scale of researching the cross-cultural TV interview programs.