Deictic Shift Research Articles

A Cognitive Study of Deixis in TG Klune’s the House in the Cerulean Sea

This paper investigates the cognitive and linguistic features of deixis in T.J. Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea. It examines how personal, temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and social deixis can enhance narrative immersion and reader engagement. The study uses mixed method to categorize deictic elements in the book. It argues that deictic shifts improve the reader's experience and narrative structure. By measuring the frequency and impact of deictic expressions, the study highlights their role in adjusting narrative pace, deepening thematic resonance, and engaging readers both intellectually and emotionally. The careful use of deictic phrases, especially those tied to interpersonal and geographical aspects, creates strong human connections and vivid setting descriptions. This intentional arrangement forms deep emotional bonds between readers and characters, leading to a rich and engaging environment. The paper explains how language and cognition enhance immersive reading experiences through emotional involvement and narrative understanding. Deictic changes show how narrative techniques affect reader engagement and the quality of the story.

A Narrative Stylistic Analysis to Amitav Ghosh’s Fictional Narratives

Narrative Stylistics is the most recently established idea and area in contemporary stylistics. William Labov (1972), Fowler (1977, 1996) and Bakhtin (1986) were major contributions to contemporary stylistics and narratology. Without a doubt, the story has gained a bigger place in the minds of stylists, analysts, and critics. The social, historical, and cultural foundations of story stylistics are the most important, where narrative and discourse stylistics collide. It gave the best scope to study Amitav Ghosh's historical fiction in Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke with narrative and cognitive stylistics. This paper focused on the study of narrative stylistics and deictic shift theory, and how they were employed in these two novels that resulted in the cognitive effect on readers' minds.

Deictic shift in the production of direct and indirect speech

Abstract We investigated how deictic shifts and memory representation influence production difficulties in reported speech. In Experiment 1, participants read short stories, including a conversation between two protagonists. Participants then recalled the last sentence from the conversation in either direct or indirect speech. When participants had verbatim memory of the to-be-reported utterance, direct speech production was faster than indirect speech if indirect speech production required a deictic shift. If participants had verbatim memory and indirect speech production did not require a deictic shift, direct and indirect speech’s speech latencies were similar. In Experiment 2, we investigated the production difficulties of reported speech when verbatim memory was unavailable to participants. First, participants read short stories. Next, half of the participants completed an intervening task, whereas the other half did not. Last, participants undertook a sentence completion task by filling in a missing word in direct or indirect speech. When participants did not have verbatim memory of to-be-reported utterances, direct speech production was faster than indirect speech if a deictic shift was needed to produce direct speech. These results suggest that production difficulties in reported speech depend on how to-be-reported utterances are represented in memory and whether deictic shifts are required.

Refining Connection through Detachment: Deictic Shifts in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems are characterized by the observer’s detachment in the description. In her poems, the observer usually concentrates on the details of object s and tries to rise above the immediate context , thus refining a new connection between self and the world. By analyzing the spatial and relational shift s in Bishop’s poe ms, this study argues that the dei ctic shift not only presents the change of cognition in the observer’s mind but also helps the observer shape the perception and enter into the imagined world.

Читательское отождествление с образом персонажа: механизмы интегративного подхода

The article summarizes theoretical ideas from several areas of knowledge in order to form a comprehensive view of the mechanisms underlying the reader’s identification with the character’s image. By the example of the prose by B.Y. Poplavsky, the constructive importance of the deictic shift in the narrator’s narrative is emphasized, which leads to the reader’s immersion in the processes of processing explicable information, loss of self-perception. Another approach focuses on the processes of constructing the author’s message: when perceiving the narrative, the reader is stimulated to use background knowledge necessary for comparison with the state of affairs described in the text at the moment. The relationship between these sequentially activated processes is conceptualized: the deictic shift and immersion in the narrative becomes the basis for the relevant interpretation of the narrative, which precedes its impact on the reader’s emotional and volitional sphere and imagination. It is concluded that the deictic shift observed in the narrative turns out to be one of the basic mechanisms of reader text processing, explication of the mental model of interpersonal relationships between characters, fixed by the narrator. The authors believe that the processes underlying the deictic shift and the mental reconstruction of the storyline together determine the reader’s sense of immersion in the literary text. The study establishes clear relationships between the linguistic originality of a literary text and various kinds of reactions of the reader perceiving this text. The reader’s going beyond his psychological and intellectual «Self», his immersion in the text provides an alternative experience that feels as if it unfolds in the format of real everyday life. It is established that changing the character’s point of view to the interlocutor character provides a relevant understanding of the narrative scenario, functions as a simulation controlled by the author in a recreated imaginary world. Fixing attention on deictic transitions in the perception of the characters’ images by the narrator entails the reader’s experiences of strong emotions similar to those experienced as a spontaneous reaction to similar situations in everyday reality.

A. VVEDENSKY’S ‘PERSONAL ESCHATOLOGY’: POSTHUMOUS JOURNEY IN THE SEVENTH POEM

The article presents the interpretation of the Seventh Poem by A. Vvedensky in the lexical-grammatical and genrestyle aspects. It is shown that the plot of the posthumous journey of the soul unfolds in Vvedensky’s text. It has been established that each stage of this plot unity is associated with the metamorphosis of the subject, which is marked by anomalies of subject and pronominal deixis. Deictic shifts indicate different stages of the dissolution of the soul in the world, thus, the splitting of the pronominal deixis performs a compositional function, marking the turning points of the plot of the posthumous journey.It is revealed that the posthumous path of the hero is interpreted by Vvedensky as a ‘double’ regression. Thus, posthumous existence is understood as a return to a childish state and as a movement to the primary plant-animal forms of being (unstable subjectivity, disintegrating, takes on different existential forms: a man - a woman - a child - an animal - a plant). The stages of the path to the origins are indicated by comparative constructions, which vary from the dividing ‘like’ to the identifying instrumental case of metamorphosis.The topic of the posthumous journey ‘manifests’ in the Seventh Poem the genre of a two-peak eschatological vision. It is shown that the conjugation of Vvedensky’s poetic text with the eschatological genre is realized both at the structural-plot level (the composition of the plot of the vision in its main points corresponds to the composition of the plot of the poem), and at the level of the pragmatic context (the genesis of visions is associated with oneiric modes of consciousness, which, as a source of texts, are important both for a medieval visionary and for Vvedensky). It has been established that the dream in Vvedensky’s text is not only a ‘supplier’ of themes and motives, but also the principle of organizing the subject space of the poem: the splitting of the subject into many hypostases and the deictic shifts that accompany it can be explained through the classical motive of personality regression in a dream.

Spatialisation of Text Worlds: Contrastive Interpretations in P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins

Abstract Fictional situations recounted by a narrator instantaneously trigger a mental representation of a text world (Gavins 2007) which aims to explicate how meaning is achieved by readers based on salient theories of stylistics. This study examines how text world creation is established while reading Mary Poppins (Travers 2014). Crucial excerpts are explored to explain how readers perceive events that constitute the narrative. As the author recounts all events through an omniscient perspective, a discourse world is established through schematic data of all participants in the discourse based on common ground information. Deictic shift (Segal 1995) is employed to demonstrate how a mental representation is spatially situated and to achieve rich presentations of the fictional world. The present study concludes that text-world approaches to Mary Poppins could explain interpretive controversies between the novel and the film, since participants, schema and ontological distance trigger spatialisation of the fictional worlds.

Frame shifting and fictive motion in Shelley’s poetic sublime

Abstract In a key article on “Foregrounding and the sublime” (2007), David S. Miall outlined a stylistic as opposed to representational approach to the sublime in verbal art, focusing not on the object or scene that provokes sublime experience but instead on forms of poetic language that may evoke an analogously sublime experience in the reader. Miall theorized that such forms would be foregrounding devices, and his analysis of Percy Shelley’s epistolary and verse accounts of Mont Blanc identified four such devices in particular: explicit discourse of defamiliarization, deviant syntax, ultimately unimaginable images, and mind-nature blending through deictic shifts. In honor of David, this article imitates his method in order to (a) redefine the fourth of these devices in more general terms of spatial reference frame shifting and (b) nominate fictive motion constructions as a fifth foregrounding device in Shelley’s poetic sublime.

Signalling conditional relations

Abstract We investigate how discourse relations and their subtypes are signalled, extending the set of discourse signals from connectives and lexical cue phrases to the wide range of semantic, syntactic, and orthographic signals of the RST Signalling Corpus (Das, Debopam & Maite Taboada. 2018. RST signalling corpus. Language Resources and Evaluation 52. 149–184). This extension requires re-evaluating previous predictions on discourse signalling, in particular, those of Sanders, Ted. 2005. Coherence, causality and cognitive complexity in discourse. In M. Aurnague, M. Bras, A. Le Draoulec & L. Vieu (eds.), Proceedings/Actes SEM-05, first international symposium on the exploration and modelling of meaning, 105–114. Biarritz causality-by-default hypothesis, the hypothesis of uniform information density (Frank, Austin & Florian Jaeger. 2008. Speaking rationally: Uniform information density as an optimal strategy for language production. In Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 933–938. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7d08h6j4 (accessed 18 May 2022)), and the hypothesis that discourse is continuous by preference (Segal, Erwin, Judith Duchan & Paula Scott. 1991. The role of interclausal connectives in narrative structuring. Discourse Processes 14. 27–54; Murray, John. 1997. Connectives and narrative text. Memory and Cognition 25. 227–236). We evaluate the predictions of these theories on the conditional relations in the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson, Lynn, Daniel Marcu & Mary Ellen Okurowski. 2002. RST Discourse Treebank. LDC2002T07. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium), using causal relations as a control group. Informativity and continuity are operationalized in terms of semantic complexity and Givón, Talmy. 1993. English grammar: A function-based introduction, vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins dimensions of deictic shift. Our results show that the hypotheses make accurate predictions only for the relation groups in their entirety but not for the observed in-group variation, in particular, the low amount of marking for the hypothetical subtype of conditional relations. We attribute this difference to the distribution of intra- and inter-sentential occurrences across the conditional subtypes: intra-sentential relations are consistently more marked than inter-sentential ones, and hypothetical relations are special in that they appear predominantly inter-sententially.

‘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.

The Concepts of Deictic Shift Theory and Discourse Theory of Silencing

This paper aims to analyze the concepts of the deictic shift theory and discourse theory of silencing. It has been written on the basis of synchronic descriptive method in the study of the English language. For this purpose we wish to introduce a theoretical framework for the study and then we hope to present the deictic shift theory and discourse theory of silencing, to show the development of a set of questions that any reader may use to evaluate a work of fiction. It is noted in the article that while using the language in the narrative, these questions help to guide the reader to determine the context of the narrative. These questions also help the reader to determine the narrator’s point of view, his strategy for silencing characters, and discover which characters in the narrative have been silenced. It is stated in the article that deixis depends on context, situation, and relationship within a narrative and Deictic Shift Theory is a set of premises about readers and stories that grew out of research on the function of deixis in fictional narratives. The article also covers discussion of linguistic views of scientists in this field.

Лингвопрагматические сдвиги в новейшей поэзии: русско-американские параллели

The paper dwells upon the language and discourse processes in contemporary Russian and American poetry which focuses on “reformatting” the communicative situation coordinates under the influence of ordinary speech and the new media. The research suggests a linguo-pragmatic analysis of three Russian-American poetic vectors that characterize different strategies of subjectification, such as Gennady Aygi — Michael Palmer, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko — Barrett Watten, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis — Nika Skandiaka. These poetic practices manifest themselves in constructing a new communicative situation based on a referential shift along the lines of interiorization — exteriorization. Elaborating on this shift, we explore the interaction between inner speech, ordinary and poetic language, as well as the links between a poetic text and external (media)context. The unusual usage of pragmatic markers forms a new “poetic interface” and indicates the “transcoding” of the poetic subject in the coordinates of the actual communicative situation. Aygi and Palmer create different modes of poetic interface as a zone of active interaction between the addresser and the addressee, as well as inner speech, ordinary, and poetic language. In Dragomoshchenko’s and Watten’s poems, the “transcoding” of the subject manifests itself in various deictic shifts that mark complex relations of the subject with reality and language. The use of “graphic deixis” in DuPlessis’ and Skanidaka’s texts is informed by the impact of the Internet as a need to update the poetic statement in a new media-communicative situation.

Reading minds: A study of deictic shifts in translated written interaction between mental-health professionals and their readers

The practice of knowledge mediation in written texts relating to the health sciences has hitherto received limited attention within Translation Studies. The overall aim of this study is to explore writer-reader interaction in a bilingual corpus of medical leaflets published on the website of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK). In order to do this, a comparative analysis of English source texts and Spanish target texts was conducted to identify shifts in personal reference, which served to contrast patterns in knowledge transfer processes between mental health experts and their target audiences. The study is underpinned by Thompson and Thetela’s (1995) tenet that interactive and interactional features have to be considered in conjunction. It seeks to make a contribution to the relatively understudied field of how interaction patterns differ across cultural and linguistic settings. The corpus is of special interest due to the sensitivity of its subject matter, the varied constituency it addresses and the fact that the translated texts were produced and revised by mental health professionals.

The full story: Understanding how films affect environmental change through the lens of narrative persuasion

Abstract Researchers in conservation fields have recently highlighted the potential for visual storytelling to convey environmental messages to large audiences. However, an effective model for how such narratives can produce environmental outcomes, such as human–nature connection and pro‐environmental behaviour (PEB), has not yet been developed. Substantial evidence now suggests that narrative is an effective means of changing beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. This effect is demonstrated in diverse disciplines and understood within the theoretical frameworks of narrative persuasion. We propose a conceptual framework for understanding the impacts of environmental films on environmental behaviours, and connection with nature. Linking insights from the narrative persuasion field with those of conservation psychology, we identify three promising pathways through which environmental films might influence their audiences: (a) reduced resistance to environmental messages, (b) interactions with audience identity and (c) meaningful media experiences. This analysis raises key questions and illuminates priority areas for future research, with an aim to complement and extend existing calls to better appreciate the role of film in addressing environmental problems. Research moving forward should focus on understanding the role environmental films can play in connecting people with nature, promoting PEB and the relationship between the two. Specifically, more attention should be paid to the role of deictic shift in encouraging environmental outcomes, the relation between audiences and characters and the power for film to support self‐expansion. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Quotational and other opaque belief reports

AbstractIn a novel move against Russellianism, Heck (2014) has argued that reports of the form S believes that p are semantically opaque on the grounds that there are no other means in English to report psychologically individuated beliefs, such as those Lois Lane reports using the names ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent.’ I show that there are several other ways to meet this need. I focus on quotational reports of the form S believes “p,” which philosophers have overlooked or mischaracterized. I argue that reports of this form are no more metalinguistic than those using the complementizer that. In both, the meaning of the report depends on the meaning, not the form, of the complement. Some distinguishing features of non‐metalinguistic quotational reports are that their complements force “deictic shift” and have no transparent interpretation. Free direct speech and thought bubbles have the same properties. The “q‐ascriptions” McCullagh (2017a) proposed to defend Russellianism against Heck are not in common use and on his account are unsuitably metalinguistic. The fact that quotational belief reports are opaque without being metalinguistic makes the Russellian thesis that the meaning of a name is its referent untenable, thereby undermining Russellianism about belief reports.

The hit or miss guesswork figuring the deictic centre of the Russian patronymic

Abstract Set within the framework of Proximization Theory, which focuses on the construal of deixis (Chilton 2004, Cap 2006, 2010, 2013), the present study explores address terms (ATs) as used by the Russian-speaking minority in Lithuania (RuL). The collected data strongly suggest that forms of address of this ethnic group have shifted from the mainland standard Russian full name + patronymic to the full name only. Moreover, the previously consistently used polite form of address with the patronymic is now largely regarded as causing discomfort and consequently avoided, especially in mixed groups. The shift in address strategy is attributed to the deictic shift along the axiological axis in the mental representations of the speakers. The patronymic-less ATs, previously placed within the outside deictic centre are shown to be reanalyzed and placed within the interactants’ inside deictic centre. Hesitations in selecting a given AT, a potential issue between the interactants from different age groups, is indicative of the internal conflict of the speaker and their mental switching between the IDC and the ODC. The proposed analysis determines the placement of patronymic and name-only forms on the axiological axis and discusses implications for the differences in Anglo-Saxon and Russian terms for address study.

Approximating or Distancing? The Use of Deixis, Anaphora and Historic Present in Russian Translations of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”

The research presented in the article focuses on the factors, which determine deictic and anaphoric shifts in Russian translated narratives. The phenomenon of systematic change of proximals (here, now, this house) to distals (there, then, that house) or vice versa, as well as omitting or adding these elements, has been explored in contemporary researches using translated texts corpora. Approximating or distancing trends have been revealed within a corpus of translations or individual translated versions. The article aims to determine the factors influencing deictic and anaphoric shifts in Russian translations of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain. The analysis undertaken helped to reveal the following factors: the language factor (translators may use the deictic or anaphoric shifts to avoid incorrect constructions), the stylistic factor (translators prefer the elements that are widespread within a literary tradition), the strategic factor (a translator may apply an individual strategy to highlight the author's authentic style). In Russian translations of the novel about Tom Sawyer the approximating trend is dominating: the deictic centre of the narrative gets closer to the reader. This effect is achieved by condensing the deictic proximals, substituting past verb forms by historic present and adding anaphoric proximals in the focalized fragments. These changes intensify the author's original approximating strategy of the focalized narrative.

Reported speech in earthquake narratives from six Tibeto-Burman languages

AbstractThis paper is an analysis of the use of reported speech in six Tibeto-Burman languages from two closely-related sub-branches (Tamangic and Tibetic). The data come from a set of interview narratives about people’s experiences of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. The analysis begins with an examination of the relationship between reported speech, overt subjects and ergativity. We also look at reported speech and evidentiality, including grammatical reported speech evidentials. Structural features discussed include hybrid reported speech and multiple clause relationality. Interactional features discussed include the use of deictic shift, prominent subordination, and the multiple functions of reported speech forms, as well as zero-marked reported speech events. This analysis highlights the benefits of studying linguistic features such as reported speech in narrative context. We conclude with the implications of this usage-based analysis in the coverage of reported speech in descriptive grammars.

Deictic Shifting in Greek Contractual Writing (I–IV AD)

AbstractMuch attention has been paid to ‘deictic shifts’ in Ancient Greek literary texts. In this article I show that similar phenomena can be found in documentary texts. Contracts in particular display unexpected shifts from the first to the third person orvice versa. Rather than constituting a narrative technique, I argue that such shifts should be related to the existence of two major types of stylization, called the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ style. In objectively styled contracts, subjective intrusions may occur as a result of the scribe temporarily assuming himself to be the deictic center, whereas in subjectively styled contracts objective intrusions may occur as a result of the contracting parties dictating to the scribe, and the scribe not modifying the personal references. There are also a couple of texts which display more extensive deictic alter­nations, which suggests that generic confusion between the two major types of stylization may have played a role.

Deictic shifts in fiction translation: Evidence of a more marked perspective in the translated narrative

This paper explores deictic shifts in fiction translation. It studies how deictic shifts affect the spatial-temporal and psychological point of view in four Arabic translations of Jane Eyre and A Farewell to Arms. The study reveals a tendency in translation to (i) use more spatial and temporal deixis, (ii) use more proximal than distal forms and (ii) use forms that are more marked for emotional space than physical space. This points to a translated narrative with a more emphasized spatial-temporal dimension, higher emotional proximity and empathy, and more marked psychological perspectives and voices. These shifts reposition the narrator and the other speaking characters. Based on the textual data, these shifts are best seen as traces of translators’ interpretive work and their second materialization of the original voices; the traces of the translators’ efforts to re-contextualize the original story based on their mental representation of the original perspectives.