Fieldwork on deixis
Fieldwork on deixis
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DOI:
10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.003
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发表时间:
2009-01-01
影响因子:
1.6
通讯作者:
Hanks, William F.
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Hanks, William F.
This paper Outlines air approach to fieldwork on the semantics and pragmatics of deixis. Deictic expressions, such as English 'this, that, here, there,' are typically used to individuate referential objects in relation to tire indexical ground of utterance context. Drawing oil long-term research on Yucatec Maya, the paper argues that the basis of deixis is not the spatial contiguity of the referent, but rather the access (perceptual, cognitive, social) that participants have to the referent. In order to property determine the conventional meanings of deictics in any language, fieldwork should focus On the paradigmatic oppositions among deictic expressions, on metalinguistic glosses of deictics by native speakers, and on ordinary usage under a variety of socially structured circumstances. It is argued that, like other kinds of ethnogaphic research. elicitation should be conducted in the target language in order to gain access to the Contextual schemas through which speakers apprehend context. Properly analyzed. referential deixis proves to be highly systematic, tractable to fieldwork. and central to pragmatics. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.