• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.45
• /
• pp.381-431
• /
• 2016

This paper deals with Slavic discourse deixis comparing Russian, Polish, Czech and Bulgarian demonstrative and personal pronouns. In general, the Slavic proximal pronouns have precedence over the distal ones. Proximal pronouns, such as Russian eto, Polish to, and Bulgarian tova, are employed more frequently and widely than their distal counterparts to, tamto and onova. The distance-neutral pronoun to in Modern Czech was also a proximal pronoun in the past. These Slavic proximal and former-proximal pronouns function as a discourse deixis marker, whereas, in most other languages, the discourse deixis is mainly a function of distal or non-proximal demonstrative pronouns. However, the Russian, Polish, Czech, and Bulgarian discourse deixis differs in distal demonstrative and personal pronouns. In general, the Polish and Czech discourse deixis does not employ the distal demonstrative pronoun tamto or the personal pronoun ono. The Russian distal demonstrative pronoun to is actively used as a discourse deixis marker, and the personal pronoun ono can also be used to refer to the preceding discourse, though it is not frequent. In Bulgarian the distal demonstrative pronoun onova is rarely used to refer to a discourse, but the personal pronoun to frequently indicates a discourse that is repeatedly referred to in a text. The discourse deixis, which is a peripheral deixis and can be both deixis and anaphora, reveals different characteristics in different Slavic languages. In Russian, where all of the proximal, distal, and personal pronouns function as a discourse deixis marker, the deixis itself plays a crucial role in distinguishing these three pronouns from each other, revealing the speaker's psychological, emotional, temporal, and cognitive proximity to or distance from a given discourse. In Bulgarian, the most analytic Slavic language, the personal pronoun is used more as a discourse deixis marker to reveal the highest givenness of a discourse, and it seems that Bulgarian discourse deixis is more anaphoric than the other Slavic discourse deixis is.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.31
• /
• pp.309-330
• /
• 2013

This paper aims to examine distribution and patterns of Women(我們) on Chinese conversation textbook, and also suggest that Chinese class need to impose pragmatic perspective. For this purpose, this paper explores 35 Womens in 42 conversation units on three Chinese textbooks Hanyu Kouyu vol.1~3 at first. Women is more contributed on 'exclusive Women' among three categories (inclusive, exclusive, borrowed) than other two categories, is also contributed on 'symbolic usage' than 'gestural usage'. Second, this paper examines patterns of Women on the three categories. It shows: first, 'inclusive Women', 'exclusive Women', 'borrowed Women' all show up on the textbooks even though on the textbook vol.1(for beginner) surprisingly; Second, 'exclusive Women' may be a primary one of three categories in terms of the coverage of Women. Women covers those who are related with the speaker regardless of being on the spot, and also covers those which the speaker belongs to, for example, nationality, ethnicity etc. Consequently, the results show that Chinese speaking course, from now on, needs to consider pragmatic factors including existing semantic and syntactic factors, and from the pragmatic perspective, impose 'action'(including speech act, body gesture etc.) on Chinese conversation class for the learners' improvement in Chinese speaking.