Subjectivity Of Deixis And Its Representation In Literary Discourse

Deixis, as a complex phenomenon, has attracted great attention of experts andscholars from different fields for a long time, which is mainly because it plays animportant role in people’s language activities. After a study of previous researches, thisthesis finds that studies of deixis are mainly centered on egocentricity and psychologicaldistance which can be summarized as the subjectivity of deixis.And as to subjectivity of deixis, some scholars have already done some researcheson it. However, their studies are not systematic enough. As early as1971, Benvenistehad already discussed subjectivity of deixis when he was discussing subjectivity oflanguage, but he only talked about the subjectivity of personal deixis; as to other kindsof deixis, he didn’t do much interpretation. Langacker (2002) explored the relationshipbetween deixis and subjectivity in the framework of Cognitive Grammar, but he didn’ttouch upon the applications of it. Domestic scholars also did some researches on it. WuYi’an (2003) discussed the subjectivity of demonstratives. And Jia Junhong (2006)talked about the subjectivity of deixis in her master’s thesis, but she only exploredspatial deixis and personal deixis. This thesis, based on previous researches, exploressubjectivity of deixis from the three aspects of subjectivity of language respectively,which are perspective of the speaker, affect of the speaker and epistemic modality of thespeaker. It proves at last that deixis is a kind of linguistic element which is of typicalsubjectivity. And what’s more, from the perspective of Cognitive Poetics, the thesisdiscusses different manifestation modes of deixis and roles it playes in literary discoursefrom subjectivity. It primarily analyzes novels and poems which have different stylisticfeatures. It finds that writers transfer perspectives and construct spatio-temporal relationsvia the shift of deictic center in novels; while poets express different feelings byemploying different personal deixis. In brief, this thesis explores why deixis is subjectivebased on the theory of subjectivity of language; and what’s more, it proves that deixisplays a very important part in the analysis of literary discourse from the perspective of Cognitive Poetics.In a word, subjectivity is very important to the study of deixis, and subjectivity ofdeixis plays a great part in people’s language activities.