Deictic Center Research Articles

A Proximization Study of Critical Discourse Analysis---Taking the Documentary Itaewon Crush as an Example

Based on the documentary Itaewon Crush, guided by proximization theory, this paper makes a comparative study of the discourse strategies of the documentary on the theme of sudden catastrophic events from two aspects: negative proximization and positive proximization. It is found that the entities recognized to be ODCs and IDCs, the use of lexical items, and the communication effects achieved are different in negative proximization and positive proximization. The former takes government and disaster as the external threat to the deictic center, emphasizing the serious consequences of disasters and government actions to realize the documentary’s warning effect. The latter establishes a positive influence between the external entities and the deictic center to achieve the documentary’s humanistic value.

Deixis in Most Rev. Dr. P. K. Boafo’s Address at the 50th Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, Ghana

This study examined the use of deixis in Most Rev. P. K. Boafo's address at the 50th annual conference of the Methodist Church Ghana. Most Rev. Dr. Boafo is the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church Ghana. It is a descriptive qualitative study which employs the textual analytical method. Hank's (2005) deictic field was employed in the analysis. The findings revealed that Boafo systematically sets up the deictic field by issuing several persons, spatial, temporal, social and discourse deictic elements in a subsequent plain field referred to as "ground zero". The Bishop's deployment of deixis in the address creates a deictic field where the congregation is thrust at the deictic centre, and the Bishop and his administration are set in binary opposition. The placing of the congregation at the deictic centre and the use of the person deixis such as "we", "our", and "us" create a closer relationship and harmonious management of the Church and, thus, bring the Bishop and the Church closer to the deictic centre where the congregation assesses his administration and himself favourably as a competent, spiritual and godly leader.

Identifiziert euch (nicht): Deixis, Adressierung und Distanzmanagement in Shida Bazyars <em>Drei Kameradinnen</em>

This article examines deixis and reader address in narrative texts in order to develop a differentiated and appropriate understanding of identification for the analysis of literary texts, especially with regard to questions of identity and representation. Taking a close reading of Shida Bazyar's 2021 novel Drei Kameradinnen as a starting point, I show how deictic procedures and the inclusion or exclusion of readers in addressing them function on the one hand as strategies managing and navigating distance and proximity, and on the other hand as devices constituting a co-presence of narrator and reader. Drei Kameradinnen in particular, directly addressing the reader and involving them in deictic procedures and literary text in general, by employing deictics and implying addressees, demand an identification, conceived as a process not of empathizing with a character, but of adopting a deictic center of orientation (origo).

Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in Anti-lynching Songs by Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez

Abstract Mexican composers Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez each wrote one song that execrates the lynching-murder of Black persons in the United States. In them, the composers pit a Mexican aesthetics of death against violent spectacle and social inequities to assert a universal dignity of life and to situate an antiracist position within the context of a broader international class struggle. In the process of airing fresh interpretations of the songs, I imply that the composers’ divergent experiences in the United States—Chávez’s relative proximity to establishment structures of power and Revueltas’s intimacy with working-class struggle and race-based discrimination—informed their translation of Black suffering into the (differently historically colonized) context of Mexico. Both composers effected an artful indirection: a displaced deictic center from which to mediate their social thought concerning Mexico’s own problems of penal excess and extrajudicial lynching. Bracha Ettinger’s aesthetically activated Matrixial dimension sets a theoretical and analytical stage for an exploration of these anti-lynching songs and offers a way of understanding aesthetic expressions of allyship in a transhistorical mode.

Deictic Expressions and their Contribution to Create a Viewpoint in Discourse

his paper provides an overview of the main three deictic expression categories, which are: person deictics, temporal deictics, and spatial deictics. It will explain their forms, meaning and their relationship to the speech reference. It will argue that there are a certain class of expressions in Arabic which can be considered in their linguistics usage as spatial deixis. This class of words is known as ‘‘The Vocative/ Call Elements’’ (أدوات النداء). Therefore, this paper attempts to answer these questions: What is a deictic expression? What is a deictic centre? What are The Vocative Elements in Arabic? How can they be considered as a category of linguistics deictic expression? and how can a deictic expression be applied to create a particular point of view in discourse? These main points will be considered through the discussion. A variety of different examples will be quoted or created alongside the theoretical discussion in order to clarify these mentioned points.

“Ek sal en jy gaan.” The interaction between the modale auxiliaries sal and gaan

Traditionally sal, wil, moet and kan are regarded as the most common modal auxiliaries in Afrikaans. Recent literature has acknowledged that gaan, a lexical verb denoting ‘movement away from a deictic centre’, has acquired modal functions resembling those of sal in specific contexts. This article aims to explore the development of the grammatical functions of gaan and the interchangeability of sal and gaan as modal auxiliaries within the scope of grammaticalisation theory. A corpus study is undertaken to identify and analyse the nuances in the modal functions for which these auxiliaries compete when expressing modality in order to establish the extent to which gaan has grammaticalised. Similarly, the degree to which gaan and sal can be used as synonyms is explored in the formal register of the Taalkommissie’s newspaper sub-corpus and the informal register of the News Commentary corpus.

Tomorrow I’ll go (a) shopping: on the history of the Expeditionary Go construction and its relation to the absentive

Abstract Work on Construction Grammar and Diachronic Construction Grammar has foregrounded the idea that constructions are organized as a network of interconnected form-meaning pairs. This article explores the history of the construction exemplified in the title, henceforth referred to as the Expeditionary Go construction, and its relation both to other members of the small family of English go-constructions and to the prepositional be-progressive (e.g., 1700, They were a hunting). The analysis traces the development of expeditionary go since Old English times and argues that it was a device conveying the Subject’s remoteness from the speaker-oriented deictic centre. This function has remained basically unchanged over the course of the history of English, but the form of expeditionary clauses has been adjusted as a result of profound language-internal and language-external developments; these developments have brought expeditionary clauses and other members of the network of go-constructions, most especially admonitive clauses (Don’t go peeping like that!), closer together.

КОМУНІКАТИВНА ЕМПАТІЯ В ПРОПОВІДЯХ АНТОНІЯ РАДИВИЛОВСЬКОГО

The paper deals with empathy as a category of communicative linguistics. Generally speaking, empathy is an interpersonal phenomenon that determines the ability to project one’s personality onto the object of contemplation and thus fully understand it. Verbal empathy is defined as the speaker’s identification, which may vary in degree, with a person/thing that participates in the event. Linguistic empathy is a phenomenon that goes beyond grammar. The speaker’s identification with a certain position is represented in the utterance through the unconscious/automatic choice of one of the normatively correct options, which convey a pragmatically different attitude. Such related to empathy concepts as point of view/viewpoint/perspective and deictic center are briefly discussed in the paper. They all are similar with what S. Kuno names “camera angle”; their meanings are overlapping, but not identical. The relationship between psychological empathy and linguistic/communicative empathy is defined in different ways: linguistic empathy is designed only to formally identify the speaker with a participant in the event referred to in the utterance, or linguistic empathy inevitably verbalizes the empathy and sympathy of another. When preaching, the priest must understand what his congregation feels (cognitive empathy) and convey these experiences accordingly (communicative empathy), and while conveying, mentally relate to the parishioners (affective empathy). In the sermons of the Baroque homilet of the 17th century Antonii Radyvylovskyi, perhaps the most important expression of the speaker’s empathy towards his interlocutor-listener is the Old Ukrainian language. Other markers of communicative empathy, such as translation, interpretation, localization, folklore element use, have been identified in the sermons of Antonii Radyvylovskyi. Undoubtedly, among his listeners there were people of various backgrounds, educations and types of activity, since not only the brothers of the monastery were present during the service, but also “ordinary people” who came to pray to the Pechersk miracle workers. Therefore, the author strives to compose sermons that would appreciate the first and understand the second. These sermons were to be accessible and popular.

Understanding and evaluation: A cross-linguistic study of the evaluative collocates of English and Armenian verbs of understanding

The paper studies the correlation between understanding and evaluation in the light of social interactions, and aims at exploring the metaphorical mapping of the process of understanding in the English and Armenian languages. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the two cognitive processes, based on the contrastive study of verbs of understanding in terms of the evaluative meaning of their collocates, thus explaining the dynamics of understanding-evaluation relations, fully manifested in the metaphorical patterns underlying the sense of the verb. It is shown that the evaluative meaning of the collocates plays a pivotal role in shaping how understanding is emotionally and rationally assessed. A corpus driven analysis of the English and Armenian factual material reveals the collocations that metaphorically confer different dimensions to the process of understanding and points out a clear tendency to mark understanding as positive when evaluated rationally and negative when evaluated emotionally. The research detects and determines three types of evaluation in the axiological system under study and classifies them as emotional, rational or orientational. Their relative positioning on the axiological scale correlates with the accepted norm viewed as the deictic centre (reference point) of the whole process. The main findings of the research make a novel contribution to the study of understanding-evaluation correlation, offering insights into the metaphorical nature of how understanding is perceived and evaluated in both English and Armenian.

Articulating the “Self”. Referring to clients in reflection sequences during Finnish psychotherapy sessions with client-made videos

Using data from Finnish psychotherapy sessions with client-made videos, we examine the linguistic and interactional construal of the “Self,” drawing on conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. We analyze references to clients in reflection sequences, during which the therapist and clients make observations about client-made videos. Our analysis shows that referential shifts during the reflection sequences' different phases are connected to the interactional goals of the therapy. When a client is addressed using second-person forms, the deictic center of the interaction is placed in the here-and-now of the therapy session, in contrast to the client-made video. When the focus is then shifted to a client in a video, the therapist initiates a third-person perspective, which often results in clients presenting their observations using third-person forms. The reflection sequences end with a constructive discussion in which clients typically return to the use of first-person forms but so that the reference expands to cover both the past and present selves, in contrast with the reflection sequences’ opening. Our study demonstrates that the choice of the referential expression in different local structures of interaction enables clients to phrase their experiences from varied vantage points and, consequently, see themselves from different perspectives.

The role of reported speech in the evaluation of arguments from expert opinion

This paper discusses how grammatical aspects of direct and indirect speech affect the evaluation of the argument from expert opinion. Direct speech is often characterized by having two different discourse acts and, consequently, two deictic centres; and indirect speech is regarded as one discourse act with one deictic centre. These grammatical structures have different pragmatic effects, mainly because in direct speech, the reported content is assumed to be faithful in form and content. In contrast, in indirect speech, the current speaker embeds the reported content in their speech. Considering these features, this work provides a comparative analysis of the types of reported speech and their relation to Wagemans’ (2011) argument scheme and critical questions and offers modifications in the existing argument schemes to allow a more precise evaluation of arguments.

Integrating deictic co-speech gestures in demonstrative forms

Abstract Deictic co-speech gestures (DCSGs) are commonly regarded as intimately related to exophoric demonstrative forms; yet, no account is available that formalises this relation. This paper proposes that DCSGs spell-out part of the internal structure of exophoric demonstratives: concretely, they contribute the spatial coordinates (direction and distance, syntactically encoded by the Demonstrative ‘Dem’ head and by a Measure Phrase ‘MeasP’ that modifies it, respectively) that identify the location of the demonstrative’s referent and the deictic centre. This naturally captures the intuition that exophoric demonstratives and DCSGs are related, under a multi-modal spell-out approach to demonstrative forms. Further, this proposal is compatible with independent facts regarding both the grammaticalisation of demonstrative forms and their acquisition.

Acquisition of L2 English spatial deixes by Arabic-speaking children.

Deictic words are considered the earliest words which children acquire at the stage of two-word-utterance. However, mastering them like adults may take more time. This paper investigates how L2 children comprehend and produce English spatial deixis 'here', 'there', 'this', and 'that' by observing and documenting their responses and reactions in hide-and-seek game. It also aims to find out the children's obstacles in acquiring these words, such as proximity bias and egocentrism. The subjects are Arabic children of ages four, five, and six who acquire English as a second language in international schools in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They performed two types of tasks: comprehension task and production task. Both tasks contained two trials: same perspective and the different perspective. Based on the results, children did better in comprehending the spatial deixis than in producing them. Moreover, the results showed that there was no proximity bias happened with children in this study. In addition, the results of the two trials in both tasks illustrated that changing the deictic center improves with age. Although the study provides some significant results, there should be an increase in the number of the samples in order to make the results generalized.

‘I would never…’: Deictic shift and moralizing in anti-immigration reader comments

Abstract This paper studies how readers respond to a counterfactual request inviting them to imagine themselves in the shoes of an immigrant in a corpus of online reader comments to a Yahoo article on Latino immigration. We initially considered 7,000 comments and for our corpus and analysis selected those in which the commenters perform a deictic shift, i.e. assume the deictic center of the immigrant using the first-person pronoun I and the adjective my, which totalled to 452 comments. The discourse of the comments, however, turned out to be very moralizing – i.e. while managing to assume the spatial and the temporal position of the immigrants, they refused to share the same moral grounds as them, which resulted in a series of I would… and I would never… propositions, which frame the commenters as vastly morally superior to the immigrants. The commenters occupy the legality, good parenting, patriotism and gratitude moral high grounds and often revert to moral grandstanding.

Ingroup Vs Outgroup Categorization of Pronouns, Words and Phrases Discourse Analysis of Prime Minister Imran Khan's Speech at the UNGA, 74th SessionIn-group

In-group positive presentation and out-group negative presentation is one of the key components of almost every political speech. The inclusion of the groups, people, and countries in the in-group and out-group depends on the interests of the politicians. They use the discursive practice to highlight their positive actions and others’ negative actions. The present study has analyzed Prime Minister, Imran Khan’s speech he made at the 74th Session of UNGA in 2019. It aimed to see how he employed pronominal and other linguistic devices to achieve his political targets. The Deictic Space Theory Model was used to analyze the speech. The results reveal that Imran Khan presented the people of Pakistan and Kashmir, Islam, peace, human rights, climate, and poor nations as insiders of the deictic center (IDCs) and India, Western countries, terrorism corrupt politicians as outsiders of the deictic center (ODCs). The excessive use of the first-person pronouns by Imran Khan indicates that he attempted to present himself as a representative not only of the people of Pakistan and Kashmir but also of the poor people of the third world countries. The results of the study are based on the analysis of one speech made at an international forum and may be confirmed by including more speeches made at similar platforms.

Analysis of Proximization in Russia Public Discourse

Based on President Putin’s over 10,000—words speech on the Russia-Ukraine conflict which was delivered on February 21, 2022, this study analyzes the construction of legitimacy in Russia public discourse from the perspective of Proximization Theory. The results of the present study are as follows. First, Putin used spatial proximization to identify the elements of the deictic of the DS(IDCs) and the elements outside the deictic center of the DS(ODCs) to highlight the process and influence of proximization of ODCs to IDCs in order to create fear among the audience and to prove the legalization of military operations. Second, in terms of temporal proximization, he used lots of the past simple tenses and present perfect tenses to generate contrasting discourse so as to construct threats from past events to the future, as well as the use of modal verb phrases to build the continuous influence of ODCs on the present and the future to reflect the urgency of the current situation. Finally, in light of axiological proximization, it underlined Russia's positive values in response to external threats. contrasting with the antitheses’ negative values. The defense of national interests and the necessity of the waging war were emphasized. The present study provides insights into the application of Proximization Theory in Russian-Ukrainian discourse, as well as the characteristics of Russian political language styles.

Is it narration or experience? The narrative effects of present-tense narration in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both

Present-tense narration has become a prevalent narrative style in English literature over the past few decades. This narrative style tended to be considered unnatural and odd in narrative theory in the late twentieth century (Cohn, 1999; Fludernik, 1996), since using the present tense to describe events at the story level of narrative was regarded as incongruous with the traditional story-telling convention of ‘live now and tell later’, in which the present tense is generally associated with the narrator’s deictic centre at the level of discourse. In contemporary present-tense narratives, however, the present tense is often employed as a narrative tense that develops the narrative plot-line, making the unmistakable demarcation between story and discourse impossible by means of tense. As a case study, this paper examines the narrative effects of using present-tense narration in Ali Smith’s How to Be B oth (2014). It demonstrates how in this novel, the unique handling of the narrative present tense serves to achieve the particular effects of blurring levels between experience and narration as well as past and present. These effects can only be appreciated by reconsidering the relationship between story and discourse and by clarifying the connection between the functions of present-tense narration and the novel’s central theme, being both. Suggesting that the narrative present tense has varied functions in this novel, such as figural and retrospective, this paper illustrates that the diverse usage of the narrative present tense adds to the unclear distinction between narrative levels.

ON THE RELATIONAL NATURE OF UNDERSTANDING

Based on the assumption that understanding is a goal-directed abstract movement the paper argues that the process of understanding shares some deictic characteristics: it is relative to a reference point, the so-called deictic centre. We claim that understanding is projected at and determined by the intersection of the spatiotemporal, social and axiological dimensions which have as their reference points the truth, the participants of the communication process, as well as the generally accepted norms and standards.

ВАРИАТИВНОСТЬ В УПОТРЕБЛЕНИИ УКАЗАТЕЛЬНЫХ МЕСТОИМЕНИЙ В ШУГНАНСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

This article provides an overview of the main features of the Shughni system of demonstratives and their deictic functions. The study is based on the fieldwork data, namely an experiment during which the informants responded with Shughni demonstratives. The data obtained are presented in the form of tables with subsequent discussion. The study uses diverse theoretic approaches: on the one hand, a bicentric approach to deixis, examining it through the relations of the participants in a speech act, on the other hand, the idea of the opposition between person- and distance-oriented systems following the mainstream thinking about deixis as remoteness from deictic center, that is, the speaker. In this vein, this article seeks to combine the achievements of both. As a result, an updated understanding of the variability of Shughni demonstratives is provided.

DISKURZIVNE STRATEGIJE U SVETLU KOGNITIVNOLINGVISTIČKOG PRISTUPA: DIHOTOMNA KONSTRUKCIJA DRUŠTVENIH ULOGA U MEDIJSKOM I (MEZO)POLITIČKOM DISKURSU

This paper examines discursive strategies in two genres of public discourse whose common goal is the delegitimization of the other socio-political factor, ideologically opposed to the deictic center. The research was based on the cognitive-linguistic approach to discourse analysis. The corpus consists of two thematic units: the July protests (2020) (media discourse) and the relationship between the government and the opposition (2018-2021) (mesopolitical discourse). The research involves the identification of discursive strategies and a description of the underlying cognitive operations that evoke the desired content on a conceptual level. Research has shown that structural configuration and framing (metaphorization or categori- zation) are the most common strategies for achieving the intended effect, and that differences in ideological reproduction arise from the manipulation of entity positioning strategies in the discourse space.