Alternating mechanism of person deixis in Persian interactions: A cognitive-dialogic account

Abstract

By examining the employment of personal deictic terms in Persian interactions, this study focuses on the dynamic and emerging uses of them in order to shed some light on how to interpret the construction of interpersonal relations of Persian speakers. More importantly, it aims to account for the alternation mechanism between paradigmatic pronouns of lowering and elevating one's status within a single interaction. A cognitive-dialogic analysis of approximately 20 h of everyday conversations and videotaped broadcasts reveals that interlocutors' use of personal deictic terms is a fluid, emergent, and contingent practice, governed by at least six possible interactional factors: i) the speaker's emotions, ii) the speaker's situational intentions, iii) the prior speaker's turn, iv) the shift of discourse topic, v) bystander(s), and vi) the message content. Interlocutors' emergent shift from lowering into elevating terms and vice versa brings about a fluctuation of interpersonal relationships in the course of interaction. By taking these factors into account, this study shows that each usage of lowering and elevating terms conveys multiple, but distinct referential and indexical meanings about the interactants and the context in which it occurs. It also reveals that Persian speakers are aware of the potential indexical meanings of these terms, and that they use them (un)consciously and strategically to define, negotiate, or reshape their social relationships. Above all, this study argues that interlocutors' (inter)subjectivity essentially regulates the alternation of using lowering- and elevating-deictic forms.