Indicates The Cognitive Study Of Language Usage

Deixis, as an ordinary linguistic phenomenon, plays a significant role in human communication. Deictic words explicate the importance of the relationship between linguistic structure and context, involving all the contextual parameters such as participants, time, space and utterances.Researches on deixis have experienced several decades from 1930s, while most of which are still retained to the pursuit of nature and functions of deictic words from pragmatic or philosophical perspective. This study sheds much light upon deixis research under cognitive framework, involving theories on cognitive model, mental space, image schemata and metaphor. This paper aims at the solution to the problems arising in traditional pragmatic research on deixis: 1) violation of strict distinction between deictic and non-deictic usage; 2)the problem of deictic projection; 3) vague classification of deictic words, exemplifying by some expressions, in different context, used as time, place and discourse deictic words individually. All the problems mentioned above are not solved satisfactorily.This paper proposes three hypotheses: first, cognition is indispensable to the understanding of deictic words; second, cognition facilitates the development of deictics usage; deictic words are closely related by the conceptual metaphor. Cognitive approach to language is not only to describe the linguistic structure, but to account for the cognitive law of language use.