A Study On The Construction Of Cognitive Mechanism For English Deixis

The deixis is always one of the most important subjects of language study. There are many scholars study it from different perspectives on the past days. They have already made great contributions on the using of deixis. But there are still some shortcomings. For example, the explanation of deixis projection is not well and in some occasions, the deixis not always follow the principle of egocentric. Recent years, a booming of cognitive linguistics puts forward a new view to describe and investigate the using of deixis.The mental spaces belongs to the cognitive linguistics theory, which provides an imaginative space to describe the relationship between the words semantic and context. According to this theory, mental spaces are not only a part of the linguistic structures or semantic structures themselves, but also the temporary container of relative information of linguistic structures. The construct of mental spaces are different from the linguistic structure. It is based on any discourse provided by the expression of language.This paper is based on the mental spaces theory within the perspective of cognitive linguistics. In cognitive world, everything surrounding us, no matter object or substance can be divided into three spaces, which are mental space, physical space and social space. The three spaces have a close relationship with each other and make up of a wonderful and colorful world. The study of deixis within the frame of three spaces has provided a new perspective for our further research the deixis. Within the influenced by three spaces, we construct a cognitive model of deixis to explain the different usages of deixis in actual conversation.This cognitive model of deixis is within the frame of mental space, physical space and social space. It is a Descartes coordinate system, the mental space, physical space and social space is respectively as one part of axis making up the model. The mental space plays an important role in this model. It is a mechanism to influence the operation of three spaces. This model is a prototype model. According to the categories of deixis, we also set up some models based on the prototype model in order to better explain the using of social deixis, place deixis, person deixis, time deixis and discourse deixis.