A Study Of Person Deictic Projection In Talk Show Yang Lan One On One In Light Of The Politeness Principle

As one of the essential phenomena in pragmatics,deixis has aroused much attention from scholars at home and abroad.An important feature of all kinds of deixis is egocentricity.That is to say,the speaker constitutes the deictic center of the speech event.In verbal interactions,person deictic projection is regarded as the process of shifting deictic center from the speaker to the addressee or other referents.This study aims to analyze deictic projection to investigate its politeness function in light of Leech's Politeness Principle and to present a systematic,though by no means exhaustive,analysis of how person deictic projections reflect politeness.The focus is on person deictic projection in talk shows.Data is collected through transcription of sixteen talk shows from Yang Lan One on One.This research probes into the following two questions:1.How are different types of person deictic projection distributed in talk shows?2.How does person deictic projection reflect politeness in talk shows?This study got the following two major findings:Person deictic projections are divided into two categories: 1)proximal deixis with distal reference and 2)distal deixis with proximal reference.Each of these two categories can both be further divided into three subcategories.Based on person deictic projections collected from Yang Lan One on One,most subcategories can be found.But the followings are not founded: first person singular being projected on third person singular,second person singular being projected on its plural,second person plural being projected on its singular,and third person singular being projected on first person singular and plural.Speakers use person deictic projections to maximize benefit to other and cost to self or minimize cost to other and benefit to self.On the other hand,person deictic projections maximize praise of other and dispraise of self or minimize dispraise of other and praise of self.Agreement and empathy are also achieved between self and other by these projections.