Positioning Effects Of Deixis In Text-World Building

This dissertation is intended to investigate how the readers build up the text world and perceive the aesthetic effects of narrative discourse with the deictic system by applying Text world theory (Werth 1995,1999) to the analysis of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.As a language universal, deixis is a subject that has long been a focus of concern in philosophy, linguistics and narratology. Traditional deictic theories are generally derived from an examination of decontextualized sentences and are not intended to represent how the positioning effects of deixis are actually processed by the readers at the discourse level.Through an examination of the Alice books, this dissertation focuses on how the positioning effects of deixis work in a fictional context. The positioning effects of deixis are based on its intrinsic quality to orient the language with respect to a particular time, place and person. In order to expound how the readers of the Alice books perceive the positioning effects, this study divides the world-building process into two steps, i.e. world-defining process and world-switching process. Accordingly, the positioning effects are mainly two folds. They are first embodied by its orientation in the conceptual space defined by "I", "here", and "now". The deictic terms contained within a text endow the concept of the space where the discourse is positioned. They define the basic parameters of the conceptual space in the reader's mind, establish the spatial and temporal boundaries of the text world and specify whether any entities or objects are present in the world-defining process. These details, known as world-building elements of the text, can be seen to form a kind of conceptual background against which certain events and activities may be played out. Secondly, influenced by Possible worlds theory, Text world theory holds that there occur switches of worlds during the process of discourse interpretation, e.g. switches between the real world of the reader, the textual actual world, the narrator-centered world and the character-centered world, which are reflected by the change in the deictic signature of the world. The deictic systems in the cross-world mappings between discourse world and text world frame the layered conceptual space and enable the readers to monitor and adopt multiple perspectives in the world-switching process (shift of one's origo from its anchorage in the "I", "here" and "now").This dissertation focuses on the following three aspects. (1) The deictic systems in Carroll's Alice books are analyzed from the perspective of Text world theory, to see how deixis defines the conceptual space in the processing of a particular discourse and how the deictic parameters concerning spatial, temporal and epistemic coordinates determine the idiosyncratic nature of the Alice books. (2) The relationship between deixis and point of view is considered in the discussion of the interaction and tension between different worlds and deictic fields. It is hoped that this sheds some new light on the aesthetic values of Carroll's works. (3) The validity and applicability of Text world theory are explored and modifications are made where necessary. The purpose is to find a tentative model to represent the positioning functions of the deictic system in the construction of text world in narrative texts.It is found that the positioning effects of the deictic terms play a vital role in initiating absurdity of Alice's "non-sense" books. The enchantment of the Alice books lies firstly in the nonsensical and subversive potentials of the deictic terms. It is found that deixis in the Alice books, instead of being a help in orientation, often contributes to the reader's disorientation. This study explores how the readers build up an absurd text world in their mind, the means including inverted spatio-temporal coordinates, misleading non-referential deictic terms and predicament in reference. The world is reversed with respect to the real world. Wonderland's scenery is that of a world in which, with regard to space-time, the space is never a "place" and the time never finds an even temporary point of arrival that can define its features. "You are! Who are you? You are not! You can't be!", continuously repeated, can be viewed as a reflection of Alice's predicament in defining herself. Alice is included in a story where sense and non-sense send her continuously back to the definition of her identity. The enchantment of the Alice books lies secondly in the viewpoint effects, challenges coming from the shift of the deictic fields. The process of interpretation turns into a process involving multiple projections of the deictic center, i.e. a process of cross-world metaphorical mapping between discourse-world and text-world participants. The multiple perspectives compose a kaleidoscope, which enables the reader to experience the labyrinth of the layered world and deictic fields. The positioning effects culminate in the chain of dreams which can be perceived from the nuanced analysis of the shift of deictic centers in the text. A chain of dreams comes into being:Carroll "dreams" Alice and Alice dreams the story. The two levels are very clearly separated by the rabbit hole and the looking-glass, each standing for a deictic field. Furthermore, a third level of existence also appears. Tweedledee and Tweedledum tell Alice, "You are only a sort of thing in his [the Red King's] dream". If the Red King were to wake up, she would risk disappearing. Alice and the others live on the two sides of the glass respectively, and they each live in the other party's dream. The funny result is a recursive continuum where Alice dreams of the King who dreams of Alice who dreams of the King...a paradoxical structure which lacks a deictic center and which is typical of the mirror image effects of the Looking Glass World. This kind of effect is somewhat typical of postmodern literature. In these layers, the notion of deictic center and the tension and interaction between different deictic fields may help the reader to interpret all levels of existence and ponder over the instability of inner reality.Discourse processing is fundamentally deictic, i.e. a process to communicate a position, changing dynamically as discourse proceeds in the abstract conceptual space. In order to epitomize the text world landscapes established by the deictic system in the reading process, this study presents a text world model of deixis in discourse, with the three-dimensional vector framework consisting of spatial axis, temporal axis and epistemic axis. The three dimensions together constitute the deictic space in the reader's mind, working in an integrative way to illustrate the situated, embodied and reader-oriented linguistic performance.In this way, deixis is primarily seen as a mental construct in that it fulfills the conceptual needs. The text world is thus a deictic space that functions in terms of mental representation rather than the "absolute" linguistic entities. Such a system allows us to put deixis where it belongs, i.e. in the mind rather than in the real world or in the text.