On Decentralization Of Chinese Social Deixis

Social deixis,has long been regarded as an important topic of pragmatics, concerns the encoding of social relationship that holding between speaker and addressee or speaker and some referent. Most scholars made their researches on the basis of speaker-centering, especially Buhler put forward his deictic system—‘the here-now-I system of subjective orientation’. Many previous studies of Chinese social deixis have been conducted from the perspective of rhetoric and traditional semantics etc., and few studies have been devoted to the analysis under the framework of decentralization, which leaves space for this thesis. Under the framework of the Decentralization Model which is revised from Buhler’s deictic system, this study intends to analyze the interpretation coding mechanism, semantic and pragmatic features of Chinese social deixis renjia, and its application range.This thesis mainly tries to make a quantitative study of Chinese social deixis based on the revised Decentralization Model. Chapter One mainly introduces the background, objectives, methodology and layout of the thesis. Chapter Two firstly the concept of centralization and decentralization, and then it makes a review on the previous studies on social deixis and points out the gaps at the end. Chapter Three includes the introduction to the theoretical framework of the Decentralization Model, the rationale for revision and the operation of the model. Chapter Four classifies the Chinese social deixis and make an introduction towards social deixis renjia. And then applies the Decentralization Model to examples that have been chosen from National Language Committee Corpus and some literary works, and finally discusses the general features and understanding of the social deixis, the results and the application range. Chapter Five conclusively discusses the contributions, significance and limitations of the study.Through the study, we find that: 1) In contrast with Buhler’s deictic system ‘the here-now-I system of subjective orientation’, the Decentralization Model can efficiently explain the mental process and pragmatic meaning of renjia in the actual language use. 2) By the study of Chinese Deixis Dictionary, we found a lot of decentralized social deixis in Chinese. Only through the analysis of the Decentralization Model, we can understand the working mechanism of decentralized Chinese social deixis, thus can change the speaking centre away from the speaker. 3) A questionnaire survey told us that gender and age are important factors in using renjia as social deixis. Young female tend to use renjia to represent herself and other people. 4) From the analysis of the general features and application range of decentralized Chinese social deixis, this study reveals that we should pay attention to the question of properly understanding and using deixis, which can provide further reference for actual practice.This thesis is based on the quantitative study. The examples that have been chosen are typical, however, they still lack diversity, and cannot stand for all the Chinese social deixis. The new analytical model in this study is based on the subjective judgment of the author. More evidence is in need to verify it.