A Pragmatical Analysis Of Person Deixis In The Joy Luck Club From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Person deixis,an important category of deixis,has attracted much more attention from linguists.Most linguists,especially Levinson and Fillmore,try to analyze person deixis in grammatical usages,classifications,and meanings.Contemporary domestic and foreign researches mostly focus on the conventional usages of person deixis and are always comparatively single and static,whereas the research on the function and the choice of person deixis is nonetheless deficient.This thesis collects the conversations about the person deixis in The Joy Luck Club and analyses its pragmatic functions,which complements the analysis of text novels.Meanwhile,this thesis attempts to analyze the function of person deixis on the basis of the context of the person deixis,i.e.I,We and You,and to study further about the pragmatic function of person deixis from the perspective of the choice of person deixis.In 1978,Verschueren proposed the theory of adaptation and made a detailed explanation in his Understanding Pragmatics in 1999.According to adaptation theory,language use is regarded as a process of continuous choice between the utterer and the interpreter,taking place not only at the level of language structure,but also at the level of strategy.It is closely concerned with three worlds,the mental world,the physical world and the social world.In fact,the processes of choices,in which the context and the language selection are mutually compliant,are genuinely dynamic.It can be seen in the process that the degree of consciousness of the language user's communication is highlighted by language selection.The theory of adaptation,for its great explanatory power to ordinary language from the very beginning,exhibits great vitality,and therefore,it is widely adopted to investigate various aspects in researches on pragmatics and even linguistics.This thesis will take the theory of adaptation as the theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between the choice of person deixis and the mental world,the physical world and the social world.This thesis will firstly introduce the background of the research,the reasons for choosing the novel,The Joy Luck Club,the research methods,and literature review of the current domestic and foreign researches on the adaptation theory and the persondeixis.And then it will collect a large number of the protagonists' lines containing the person deixis in the novel,adopt qualitative and comparative analyzing methods to investigate the employment of context of I,We and You in The Joy Luck Club and further study the principles of person deixis choice,basing on the investigation of person deixis' s context and distribution.From the function of the three deixis in conversations,we can see that the participants adjust the relationship between characters and the context in virtue of adaptation of different forms of I,We,and You,and that the process of person deixis choice is a dynamic one,in which context selection and language selection conform to each other.Afterwards,this thesis,from the perspective of adaptation theory,investigates the characteristics of the person deixis I,We and You and further analyzes the selection of I,We and You from the Joy Luck Club corpus adopting to the mental world,the social world and the physical world.These three worlds,as we can see,have great impacts on the selection of person deixis.This thesis has certain theoretical and practical significance.From the theoretical point of view,this thesis analyzes the choice of person deixis I,We and You from the perspective of adaptation theory,broadens our understanding of person deixis' pragmatic functions,and tests the explanatory power of adaptation theory.From the practical point of view,this thesis adopts adaptation theory to investigate person deixis' applications and functions in a particular discourse,which practically enlightens us to apply a new methodology of person deixis investigation in different discourses.