Abstract
Second person pronouns functioning as person deixis are found to be used in both Bengali and English language to express the role relationships as well as the interpersonal relationships involved between the participants in conversation. However, the expression of these relationships through the use of second person deixis varies significantly in the two languages as it necessarily involves both linguistic as well as social aspects. Being an Asian language, Bengali has a detailed and somewhat complex system of encoding the role relationship of the participants, their interrelationships, their social status, level of formality and politeness involved, and so on by the use of second person deixis. In contrast, English, a European language, exhibits relatively simple and straight forward ways of encoding the aforementioned issues of conversation. Based on the intuitive observation of the utterances of the two languages, the present study intends to make a comparative analysis of the use of second person deixis in Bengali and English with a view to exploring the extent to which the two languages differ linguistically and pragmatically in their encoding of social information with the use of such deictic expressions.
Highlights
IntroductionDeictic expressions (i.e., this, that, she, he, here, there, etc.) are found to be present in almost all known human languages on the planet (Huang, 2014)
Deictic expressions are found to be present in almost all known human languages on the planet (Huang, 2014)
I intend to make a comparative analysis of the range of second person pronouns used in Bengali and English for encoding the person deixis with a view to exploring the extent to which the two languages differ linguistically and pragmatically in their encoding of social information with the use of such deictic expressions
Summary
Deictic expressions (i.e., this, that, she, he, here, there, etc.) are found to be present in almost all known human languages on the planet (Huang, 2014). The person deixis in Bengali (an Indo-European language) is grammaticalized through the pronominal system It has got a rich array of morphological options functioning as person deixis. Unlike English where the pronominal pattern allows a restricted set of second person pronoun devoid of any social and contextual information, the pronominal system in Bengali exhibits a range of morphological options which give rise to different set of socially determined meanings to the pronouns functioning as deictics. I intend to make a comparative analysis of the range of second person pronouns used in Bengali and English for encoding the person deixis with a view to exploring the extent to which the two languages differ linguistically and pragmatically in their encoding of social information with the use of such deictic expressions. The primary data for the analysis of the second person pronouns functioning as deictics in the two languages comes from the intuitive observation of the utterances of the two languages, which helps to form the research questions as of ‘how do the two languages differ, linguistically and pragmatically, in their use of second person pronouns for encoding person deixis?’ and ‘what pragmatic functions do the second person pronouns carry out in the two languages?’
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