Pragmatic Functions of Anti-Pre-Emptive Use of Person Deixis and Pre-Emptive Use of Social Deixis in Chinese

Yu Zhang

doi:10.4236/ojml.2013.34038

Abstract

Pre-emptive use of deixis involves speakers’ psychological tendency towards using deixis to pre-empt the non-deictic ways of referring to the relevant person, time or place, while anti-pre-emptive use of deixis refers to the phenomenon of non-deictic words substituting deixis. Both the pre-emptive use and anti-pre-emptive use of deixis produce significant pragmatic functions in language communication. This paper discusses the anti-pre-emptive use of person deixis and the pre-emptive use of social deixis in Chinese and concludes that their pragmatic functions are of the same nature.

Highlights

The pre-emptive use of deixis, as one of the derivational usages of deixis, has been put forward by Levinson to explain linguistic phenomena
Such special conventions referred by him, or constrictive factors to pre-emptive use raised by later scholars are essentially relevant to studies upon what is called anti-pre-emptive use of deixis
Most of the existing researches cover a general account of the five types of deixis in this area, while this paper intends to concentrate on the pre-emptive use of social deixis and antipre-emptive use of person deixis, and concludes that the pragmatic functions of the former and the latter are of the same nature

Summary

Yu Zhang

Pre-emptive use of deixis involves speakers’ psychological tendency towards using deixis to pre-empt the non-deictic ways of referring to the relevant person, time or place, while anti-pre-emptive use of deixis refers to the phenomenon of non-deictic words substituting deixis. Both the pre-emptive use and antipre-emptive use of deixis produce significant pragmatic functions in language communication. This paper discusses the anti-pre-emptive use of person deixis and the pre-emptive use of social deixis in Chinese and concludes that their pragmatic functions are of the same nature

Introduction

Conclusion