| Spatial demonstratives, a sub-category of deictics, can be found across all languages. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the use of demonstratives has been considered as a significant linguistic phenomenon and a hot topic in linguistic research. A lot of scholars have explored demonstratives from different perspectives, and have attained important achievements on this topic. However, most discussions of demonstratives and their deictic qualities are illustrated by similar types of invented examples, or by decontextualised examples to account for a certain point. Yet demonstratives serve as one of the most self-expressive and subjective forms, which are necessarily bound to the location and point of view of the speaker.This study, based on the parallel corpora(which are composed of Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu by Mo Yan and its English version Red Sorghum by Howard Goldblatt and Lord of the Flies by William Golding and its Chinese version Ying Wang by Gong Zhicheng), focuses on demonstrative pronouns/adjectives and demonstrative adverbs used in a deictic way. We have collected 476 deictic demonstrative instances from the conversational data(212 instances from the Chinese corpus and 264 instances from the English corpus), and have made a contrastive study of their uses in the parallel corpora. In order to interpret the uses of deictic demonstratives in conversation, we have formulated an integrated cognitive-pragmatic model as the theoretical framework.Here are the major findings of the present study:According to the contrastive study of deictic demonstratives used in the parallel corpora, we find that the proximal demonstratives appear more frequently than the distal ones in Chinese corpus. While in English corpus, the distal demonstratives appear more frequently than the proximal ones. The data also tell us that “这”and its compounds are much more frequently used as deictic demonstratives than “那” and its compounds in Chinese corpus, but distal demonstrative adjectives/pronouns(DDA/DDP) are a bit more popular than proximal demonstrative adjectives/pronouns(PDA/PDP) in English corpus. Our data show that the English demonstrative system seems to guide the speaker to distinguishing “far” from “close” more by physical distance, while the Chinese demonstrative system seems to make the speaker tend to do so based on their psychological distance in many cases. Although demonstrative adverbs seem to be used much more frequently in English than in Chinese discourse, demonstrative adjectives/pronouns used as spatial demonstratives are still the most predominant in both languages.The selection of deictic demonstratives in both Chinese and English conversation is affected not only by the accessibility of the referent, but also by the participants’ psychological distance towards the referent to some extent. The influence is twofold: if the speaker objectively perceives the distance and the psychological distance involved corresponds with the actual physical distance, it is the case of “unmarked psychological distance”; if the speaker subjectively treats the distance and the psychological distance becomes longer or shorter compared with the actual physical distance based on the speaker’s evaluation and stance, it is the case of “marked psychological distance”.In the case of “unmarked psychological distance”, the selection of demonstratives mainly relies on the degree of accessibility of the referent regardless of its physical distance. On the basis of data analysis, we conclude that ‘proximals’ are used to encode the referents with high accessibility whereas ‘distals’ are used when a referent has low accessibility in the context. When it comes to “marked psychological distance”, the choice of demonstratives is usually based on the participants’ evaluation and stance towards the referent that they are talking about. Our analysis demonstrates that the cognitive-pragmatic model proposed in the present study is effective in explaining the uses of deictic demonstratives in both Chinese and English conversation. |
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