An Interactive Pragmatic Study Of English And Chinese First-Person Reference

The focus of this thesis is on the universalities and specificities of first-person reference between English and Chinese. It is aimed at representing the corresponding tripartite relationship among first-person expressions, self-referring concept marked by cognitive access to oneself and pragmatic strategies of self-referring in discourse. The study combines the post-Gricean pragmatic-semantic and pragmatic-grammar interface studies and Interactive Semantics to carry out this systematic pragmatic multidimensional interaction(PMI) analysis in order to explicate the complexity of self-reference uses in English and Chinese.This research is intended to focus on three aspects: at the grammar-pragmatics interaction level, the conventional and non-conventional grammatical forms employed in English and Chinese to accomplish self-reference;at the semantics-pragmatics interaction level, the utterance meanings represented by the first-person referential expressions; at the discourse-pragmatics interaction level, the discourse strategies realized besides self-referring. On the basis of reviewing and scrutinizing the relevant literature, this study mainly takes a qualitative approach combining native speakers? introspection and authentic language data elicited from authoritative Corpora.The research finds that English and Chinese first-person references demonstrate both specificities and universalities at the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic levels. At the grammar-pragmatics interaction level, both languages employ conventional and non-conventional ways to mark the self-reference and the self-referring forms differ between English and Chinese. The process of self-referring can be represented by Interactive Semantics which merges a variety source of information including pragmatics inference. At the semantics-pragmatics level, first-person pronouns convey both deictic and non-deictic meanings in English and Chinese. Non-deictic meanings of first-person pronouns in Chinese include shifting deictic center, bleaching the referent. At the discourse-pragmatics interaction level, first-person reference used in tandem with certain verbs represents a kind of pragmatic strategy as a hedge to intensify or attenuate the corresponding proposition. The discourse strategies of first-person reference are more abundant in Chinese than that in English, they are modifying and delimiting, introducing topic, intensifying ego, highlighting contrast and representing belonging. The pragmatic multidimensional interaction model tentatively set up in this research and its application in linguistic contrastive study yet awaits further empirical verification.