Grammaticalization Of Deixis In International Business Lease Contracts

Deixis exists in almost all languages in the world, the fundamental function of deixis is to locate referents which are related to speakers, addressees or others. The referents can be objects, person, time, place and so on. Usually, deixis is used to analyze discourse of literature, film dialogues and daily talks, few of which are formal texts. A business contract is a primary category of legal documents, so the language of contracts should be formal, clear, concise, as well as complete. Deixis is also applied frequently in business contracts, which is a research subject deserving study.This study selects deixis in the self-built Business Lease Contracts Corpus as research project. The study applies both the qualitative and quantitative research method. With the assistance of softwares Antconc and SPSS, the study first checks out the person, time, place, discourse, and social deixis. Then it selects proximal deixis this and distal deixis that as the representatives. And finally it explores the grammaticalization phenomenon of these words from the synchronic aspect: pragmatic perspective and syntactic perspective respectively.As is shown in the study, in BLCC, the first and second person deixis are rarely used, while the third person deixis takes an apparently large proportion of person deixis in BLCC.It and Its are the most frequently used third person deixis. Among time deixis the compound time deixis is the majority. Place deixis in BLCC is mostly prepositional phrases composed by in, on, and at. Said is used as place deixis. Discourse deixis contains conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs, noun phrases and the archaic words consisted of here, there and where. Tenant and landlord are words of the highest frequency in social deixis, and they show the two participants in one event.The grammaticalization of deixis is a serial course from exophoric use to endophoric use, and finally goes into grammatical markers in sentences. Exophoric use is considered to be the fundamental use which all other uses evolve from. The endophoric use, has already been grammaticalized in some ways, and it plays a language-internal role. It has been further grammatical ized as follows:the anaphoric use has evolved into relative clause marker and definite article, while the discourse use has progressed to sentence connective and complementizer.This study has made a contribution to the comprehension, translation and formation of business contracts by the detailed discussion on the classification and function of deixis in business lease contracts, and provided assistance and guidance for future studies.