Personal Deixis and Types of Situation: Cognitive-Pragmatic Aspect

Abstract

The article describes the cognitive-pragmatic features of personal deixis in combination with the analysis of the types of designated situations. In accordance with the characteristics of the three main parameters of the situation — the subject, time and space on the basis of certainty/ uncertainty of their referential relations and localization/non-localization in deictic coordinates, the author identifies concrete and non-concrete situations as two main types of situations, and on this basis demonstrates and analyzes the close relationship between personal deixis and types of situations. Personal deixis refers to the cognitive and communicative behavior of a person, it reflects the results of the speaker’s cognitive construal of the designated situation and its subject, the flexible use of personal deixis contributes to the achievement of certain communicative goals set by the speaker, which is often observed in literary works. The innovation of the research lies in the revelation of strategies for cognitive processing by speakers of different types of situations in the process of personal deixis. The results of the study indicate that it is sometimes difficult to accurately determine the types of personal deixis, based only on the morphological forms of person, while the types of situations can serve as an important analytical basis for determining its types, and that the cognitive processing of designated situations by the speaker and the splice of different types of situations can bring dynamic variability of personal deixis in real speech communication. The further research prospect of this paper is to reveal the mechanism and laws of the interaction between personal deixis and other categories such as time, verbal aspect, and space in the framework of different types of situations, so as to conduct a more systematic study and description of the personal deixis.

Keywords:

personal deixis, situation, speakers, cognitive processing