A Comparison Of Chinese And English Demonstrative

Deixis is a common phenomenon in human language through the specific language to indicate the context of an object. The demonstrative pronouns, as an important component of language, have a very important role in communication and the study of language. The demonstrative pronouns are also the most primitive means of basic instructions, which are frequently used in English and Chinese.The research of the demonstrative pronouns is the need of the current linguistic research. This paper selects"è¿™/é‚£"in Chinese and " this/that " in English demonstratives system as research object and summarizes the similarities and differences between them.In this paper, we start the study by contrasting the translation "è¿™/é‚£"" this/that ", contrasting the indicate and pronoun function of them. One way we compare the combination function when they modify nouns, the other way we compare the anaphora and cataphora function of them. "è¿™/é‚£"" this/that "also generate the phenomenon of grammaticalization, "é‚£" grammaticalizates into conjunction, in Beijing dialect the "è¿™" becomes into the syntax of the definite article; "that" grammaticalizates into the definite article and the relative pronoun; from this we can see that Chinese and English demonstrative pronouns "è¿™/é‚£"" this/that " grammaticalizate the specific direction and the process is different. Many different reasons result in this. There are two factors of different languages and cultural factors both in Chinese and English. Comparison of these areas can help English-speaking learners of Chinese to understand the differences between Chinese and English demonstrative pronouns, and guide foreign language teaching demonstrative pronouns.