Deixis: Mental Spaces And Subjectivity

Deixis has been of great interest to philosophers, linguists and logicians. Up to these days quite a lot of scholars have approached deixis from different perspectives, and have made important achievements about this topic. They have given explanations towards some phenomena related to deixis, e.g. egocentricity of deixis, deictic projection, etc.. However, as a complicated linguistic phenomenon and an indispensable part in our life, deixis is not yet fully examined in many aspects. Scholars disagree on some issues concerning deixis, such as the definition, classification, the relation between the semantic components and the referential concept of deixis, etc.The paper attempts to reanalyze the phenomena of deictic projection and the empathetic deixis this vs. that in the light of mental spaces. Through the analyses, deictic projection can be regarded as a phenomenon that the speaker continuously constructs mental spaces while speaking, so that the speaker's position can be transferred into the mental space in which the addressee is, thus the deictic centre is projected to the addressee or other participants of the communication. As for the use of empathetic deixis this and that, the speaker seems to set up another space in or outside the reality, and tends to put his preference within his space (or close to him), and the disliking into another space (or distal to him psychologically). Since the establishment of mental spaces is closely connected with the subjective speaker, the examination of the subjectivity of deixis is the second concern of this paper. The subjective manifestation of deixis is approached by taking place deixis and person deixis as examples. Moreover, by making cognitive and psychological analysis of deixis, one point is made clear that place deixis is the most basic among five types of deixis.This paper is made up of six chapters.Chapter one is an introduction to the whole paper, which mainly introduces the reason of writing this paper, a brief introduction of the history and current situation of the study of deixis, the source of the linguistic material, the method of analysis and the design of the paper.