Deixis In English And Chinese Contracts

Deixis is an important theory in the field of pragmatics,and is also widely applied to the fields of linguistic philosophy,semantics,and psycholinguistics.It is a kind of reference. Deixis refers to person,entity,time,place,process and social relationship in certain contexts.The theory of deixis is used to analyze discourses of literature,dialogue of movies and daily words and so on,but is seldom used to analyze formal documents such as legal documents,and almost not to analyze language of contracts.This thesis tries to apply the theory of deixis to analyze language of contracts both in Chinese and English.Based on the analysis of the definition,characteristics and pragmatic functions of deixis,all the deictic expressions in the contracts being studied are picked out And based on whether the expressions have been specially studied as deixis or not,the deictic expressions in contracts are divided into two categories in this thesis.The first includes those that are rarely considered deixis.Among them are "Party A/甲方(jiafang)" and "Party B/乙方(yifang)",the archaic expressions(hereinafter called "archaism") such as "hereinafter" and "whereof" which are composed of "here","there" and "where" followed by prepositions,and other words and expressions.The second contains the deictic expressions that have been commonly studied and discussed in papers,monographs by linguistics,such as the first and the third personal pronouns,"as follows/如下(ruxia)", "below/下列(xialie)" and "according to/按照(anzhao)",and so on.The deictic expressions in the first category are illustrated in detail in this thesis,some of the deictic expressions in the second category are explained and some are just mentioned.Then,based on a summary of the frequencies of usage of different types of deixis in contracts;and an analysis of the special contexts of deixis in contracts,,the paper comes to the following findings:As for the frequencies of usage of.different types of deixis,discourse deixis is comparatively more frequently applied in contracts;contracts do not tend to use person deixis;the typical social deixis are "Party A/甲方(jiafang)" and "Party B/乙方(yifang)" and the like;time deixis is partly employed;place deixis is rarely used in contracts,even less than that of time deixis.As for the special contexts of deixis in contracts,the two parties of contracts enjoy absolute equality in law,which requires that the parties of a contract should be treated as a whole to form a deictic centre from which the distances to the two participants are the same in length.