A Contrastive Study Of Pragmatic Functions Of English And Chinese Person Deixis

Deixis is a word derived from Greek. In1904German linguist Brugmann firstbrought person deixis into the range of deixis, which made the concept of “the subject oflanguage communication” begin to do research on deixis and gave it a base point. Persondeixis is a sign reference for the participants or related roles encoded in conversationalactivities. Person deixis includes personal pronouns and identity items. And identityitems refer to the pronouns indicating the character indentity, including honorific items,depreciatory items and kinship terms, and also the noun phrases indicating social statusand family status and so on. In the specific use, the same person deixis in differentcontexts will get different meanings. Therefore, the language phenomenon of persondeixis has gradually drawn the scholars’ attention in the field of pragmatic study.Person deixis, as a language phenomenon, is an important part of pragmatics. Thegreat work of Brown and Gilman in1960initiated the wave of the studies of persondeixis. After them, numerous scholars have done a lot of research from differentperspectives and acquired brilliant achievements. At present, the related researches onperson deixis are carried on from different fields and perspectives such as semantics,pragmatics, sociolinguistics and contrastive linguistics. However, the present studies ofperson deixis are mostly focusing on the first and second person deixis, and the study onthe third person deixis is still little. Besides, there is little attention drawn on theunconventional use of person deixis and the reflected pragmatic meanings.This thesis tries to observe and study the social and pragmatic meanings of Englishand Chinese person deixis. Based on the contrastive study on the pragmatic functions ofEnglish and Chinese person deixis, similarities and differences of person deixis betweenEnglish and Chinese can be analyzed. The result of the contrastive study can be used toaccount for English learning and E-C/C-E translation.This thesis consists of three parts: an introduction, the main body and a conclusion.The main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction, which mainly states the definition of person deixis, thehistory of the research on person deixis, the previous achievement of person deixis studyas well as the aim and significance of person deixis study.The second part is the main body, which is made of three chapters: Chapter One mainly introduces the social and pragmatic meanings of person deixisin English and their unconventional uses. It discusses the basic uses of the first persondeixis, the second person deixis and the third person deixis in English. Moreover, it alsoshows the special use of English person deixis in this part, i.e. the shift of person deixisto express his/her uncertainty, modesty, objectiveness or avoidance of the responsibilityand so on.Chapter Two chiefly discusses and analyzes the pragmatic meanings of Chineseperson deixis. First, it introduces the basic uses of the first person plural wo-men(我们)and zan-men(咱们) in Chinese and their similarities and differences. And there is also adiscussion of the conventional uses of the second person deixis ni(你) and nin(您) aswell as the basic uses, deferential use and non-deferential use for the second persondeixis nin(您). Furthermore, it states the unconventional uses of Chinese second persondeixis. At the end of this chapter the basic uses of Chinese third person deixis and thepragmatic functions are furtherly discussed.Chapter Three gives a summary of the contrastive analysis on person deixs inEnglish and Chinese based on the previous chapters and their similarities and differencesof pragmatic meanings.First, the pragmatic meanings of the singular forms of first person deixis in Englishand Chinese are quite similar. They are often used to state the speaker’s own viewpointand opinion. However, as there is a difference in ideology between English and Chineseculture, English speakers use the first person singular form more frequently. The pluralforms in both English and Chinese are used to achieve the purpose of pragmatic empathy.There are two forms in Chinese first person plural form: wo-men/zan-men while Englishhas only one form for it: we. Wo-men in Chinese is often used by the people form lowersocial class in self-reference showing their own lowliness while English royal membersuse we in self-reference to show power. Besides, the first person plural form in Englishalso can be used to refer to the third party that is absent, but this use does not exist inChinese.Secondly, the second person deixis you in English and ni in Chinese can both beused to replace the first person singular form to refer to the speaker himself/herself. Andit can be used as vocative to express the speaker’s strong emotion. There is only one item you for an addressee or addressees in English. While Chinese has two different forms forthe addressee, ni (你)and nin(您). Nin(您) is basically used by the addresser to showrespect for the addressee. It is also used for ni for an indirect criticism or dissatisfactionof an addressee in Chinese. Ni-men is often used for ni by the speaker to blame theaddressee indirectly in Chinese. While the second person deixis in English has no suchuse. Finally, when it comes to the third person deixis, in both English and Chinese, toavoid mentioning the addresser(s) or the addressee(s), the third person deixis is used torefer to the addresser(s) or the addressee(s). While the same pragmatic function tends tobe conveyed in Chinese through nouns.The last part is conclusion, which makes a summary for the previous discussion andgives a brief statement for the arrangement of the whole thesis. Meanwhile, this partmakes the intention of this thesis clear through analyzing similarities and differencesbetween the two languages to guide language teaching and E-C/C-E translation, and toachieve the better communication between the two cultures.