Exploring Cultural Deixis And Its Intersubjective Expressions

Cultural deixis are linguistic expressions pointing to relevant cultural context.On the basis of the description of the manifestation of cultural deixis in American utterances,this dissertation aims to explore how a speaker,triggered by his internalized cultural knowledge,leaves the cultural subjective imprint on his linguistic behaviors by making good use of cultural deixis and how he realizes his cultural intersubjectivity through interaction with others.Deixis,which means ―pointing to‖,is one of the basic categories of linguistics,and has drawn attention of scholars from fields such as linguistic philosophy,pragmatics,functional linguistics and sociology etc.Linguists start with the investigation of the essence of deixis,then endeavor to expound the influence of deictic center and deictic projection on the production of deictic meaning,and distinguish between symbolic usage and gestural usage of deictic expressions.The gradual perfection of theories capacitates scholars to define and classify deixis,and facilitates their in-depth researches on the functions of deixis.And the unified classification has been followed since it was proposed by Bühler and Fillmore,who note that deixis has five types: person deixis,time deixis,place deixis,social deixis,and discourse deixis.Pragmatics regards deixis as a speech act and emphasizes the defining and explanatory functions of context.Previous researches on deixis mainly focus on how to define their indexical scope,and how the application of deixis reflects the social distance between interlocutors.Few researches directly concentrate on cultural deixis and cultural context,or resort to cultural models as the explanatory framework for speech acts,or investigate the mechanism and motivation for the production of cultural linguistic behaviors.The object of the study is cultural deixis.Data employed for analysis are mainly from a small corpus constructed by the author,which comprises news reports from American popular newspapers.The theories applied in this dissertation include context(utterance context,situational context,social context and cultural context),Iceberg Model of Culture,Onion Model of Culture,cultural orientation,and Stance Triangle.Cultural deixis is a type of deictic phenomenon.With the development of society,some values,ideas,beliefs,thinking patterns,and other cultural assumptions are projected into the language and the language becomes the carrier of cultural messages.In certain context,these cultural messages will be foregrounded and become the guiding principles and judging criteria for human behaviors.The interpretation of cultural deixis must depend on cultural context and the application of cultural deixis exhibits obvious subjectivity.The speaker is equipped with certain internalized cultural knowledge,which will be activated in certain context by his communicative purposes.By selecting appropriate cultural deixis,the speaker leaves the speech act with cultural subjectivity by means of self-feeling,self-centered evaluating,self-identifying,self-reflecting and self-correcting.Cultural intersubjectivity is the extension of cultural subjectivity.The speaker expresses his attitude towards the addressee and makes comment on his behavior so as to foreground his own cultural knowledge,establish certain relationship with the addressee and achieve communicative purposes.By introducing the Conversation Analysis,this study tends to display how the speakers establish and maintain intersubjectivity through negotiating and cooperating in light of turn-construction and repair.Then it will explore how the speaker externalizes his immanent cultural knowledge with the employment of cultural deixis to realize the cultural intersubjectivity through the other-oriented evaluating and alignment.Besides the self-identifying,the speaker may foreground an identity,or shift among different identities,or create a new identity in a conversation,which is activated by the addressee or his behavior.The construction of the other-oriented identity presupposes the relationship between interlocutors and the relationship between interlocutors and the culture.All in all,the study of cultural deixis and its intersubjective expressions provides a new angle for the researches on deixis and has broad perspective and great potential for future development.This dissertation carries out a detailed analysis of the notions.such as cultural deixis,cultural context,cultural subjectivity and cultural intersubjectivity and explores the relationship between cultural context and cultural deixis.But studies of the manifestation of cultural intersubjectivity and its motivations should be furthered and a more rational and systematic cultural model as the explanatory framework should be constructed.