文化特定的指示语研究

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Chapter ⅠIntroduction

Chapter I Introduction

Language and culture are intimately interrelated and there has been a long history

of academic interest in the relationship between them. “Language is a part of culture

and plays a very important role in it. Some social scientists consider it the keystone of

culture. Without language, they maintain, culture would not be possible. On the other

hand, language is influenced and shaped by culture; it reflects culture.” (邓炎昌,刘润清

1989: 3).

Language is inseparable from culture because of the vital role it plays in

constructing the effective reality for the speakers. Language embodies the conceptual

system of the speech community, and provides a frame of interpretation for the speakers

to make sense of their experience. Language makes it possible for the speakers to

transcend their immediate physical environment to develop a mental reality, which is

more than a mere reflection of the external world. It is primarily through linguistic

mediation that cultural concepts, institutional facts, and other products of human

imaginative capacity, come into existence. Language is an indispensable tool for

transmitting cultural knowledge and tradition (cf.Sapir 1949, Whorf 1956, Cassirer

1944, Grace 1987, Langacker 1976).

On the other hand, linguistic categories arise in response to the functional needs of

the speakers and language develops in the process of serving the speech community’s

needs in their social, cultural practices. That is, language forms are ultimately derived

from the experience of the language users and the perspectives vested in them

originated from the social cultural practice of the speech community. As a result,

language inevitably incorporates and reflects cultural beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives

in its system. The cultural element of a language is typically manifested in the following

ways: 1) particular classifications of experience embodied in the vocabulary; 2) specific

implications, connotations, and associations of expressions that are referentially similar

across languages, 3) grammaticalized cultural concepts and social relations; and 4)

norms and conventions for culturally appropriate use of the language (cf. Grumperz &

Hymes 1986, Giglioli 1972, and Newmeyer 1988).

In general terms, culture refers to the totality of the material and intellectual

achievements of a group of people. But what is more directly relevant to language use is

culture conceptualized as an inherited system of ideas that structures the subjective

experience of individuals, or as a system of norms, rules, and values that guides the

behavior of the members of the cultural group (Gudykunst & Kim 1984), or defined by

Stewart and Bennett (1991) as a system of assumptions, values, and patterns of thinking

Chapter ⅠIntroduction

that underlies social institutions such as economic systems, social customs, political

structures and processes, arts, crafts, and literature (Li 1999: 5). It is such underlying

cultural orientations and perspectives that are being looked at in this study as having a

significant influence on language and language use.

Given that language and culture are highly and extensively interrelated, language

cannot be adequately studied in isolation from its social and cultural context. A

comprehensive understanding can be gained, therefore, by examining both the ways

language reflects and influences the cultural perspectives and social practices of the

language users, and the ways such socio-cultural processes affect the use and

development of language.

This study attempts to explore a specific aspect of the mutual influence between

language and culture. It is part of an effort to investigate how linguistic properties

embody cultural orientations and how cultural perspectives that are implicit in language

structure and in the rules for the appropriate use of language affect the linguistic

practice of language speakers. Specifically, this study endeavors to find out how deictic

expressions embody and reflect cultural orientations and how cultural perspectives

affect the use and development of deictic expressions.

“Deixis concerns the encoding of many different aspects of the circumstances

surrounding the utterance, within the utterance itself.” (Levinson 1983: 55). The cultural

difference in the perspective of representing and constructing the aspects of the

circumstances can have a pervasive influence on the ways deictic expressions are used.

So we may say that while deictic expressions of a certain language encodes various

aspects of the circumstances surrounding the utterance, a certain cultural perspective of

representing and constructing the aspects of the circumstances is encoded.

This project attempts to reveal how this deeply embedded cultural perspective is

reflected in various aspects of the deictic expressions and how it affects the way these

deictic expressions are used. Specifically, this study endeavors to find out how Chinese

deictic expressions embody and reflect Chinese cultural orientations and how Chinese

cultural perspectives affect the use and development of Chinese deictic expressions.

An examination of how Chinese cultural perspectives affect the language use of

Chinese speakers is not only helpful in understanding an important aspect of the

Chinese language, but can also provide a useful instance to corroborate more general

claims on the mutual influence between language and culture.

This project is composed of five chapters. After this introductory chapter, Chapter

2 discusses some important concepts with regards to deixis, and its cultural relevance.

Chapter 3 constitutes a brief summary of Chinese cultural characteristics and a detailed

analysis of Chinese deictic expressions in Chinese culture. Chapter 4 deals with the use

Chapter ⅠIntroduction

and understanding of Chinese deictic expressions in speech acts. In Chapter 5 I will

conclude with remarks on the value of this study and discuss the implication of this

study for intercultural communication and language learning.

Chapter ⅡDeixis and the Related Concepts

Chapter II Deixis and the Related Concepts

Language use is always situated against a complex background with which it is

related in a variety of ways. That is, language is always used in a certain context.

And “ The single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and

context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves, is through the

phenomenon of deixis” (Levinson 1983: 54). In his classic 1954 paper “Indexical

Expressions”, Bar-Hillel argues that indexicality is an inherent and unavoidable

property of natural language, and speculates that more than 90% of the declarative

sentences people utter are indexical (Green 1989: 17). So “one of the first phenomena

that scientific considerations of language use could not ignore was …the phenomenon

of deixis” (Verschuren 2000:18). And thus deixis has constantly been a center of interest

for scholars and students of language-related subjects.

The phenomenon of deixis has ascended to a position of serious consideration

since several decades ago. The concept of deixis derived mainly from the work of Karl

Bühler who wrote (1934:94): ‘ What “here” and “ there” is changes with the position of

the speaker, just as the “I” and “thou” jumps from one interlocutor to the other with the

exchange of the roles of sender and receiver.’ The concept has been explored and

developed by writers such as Lyons, Fillmore, Levinson, etc. Scholars from different

areas have analyzed and investigated deixis and deictic expressions from different

angles and laid a firm foundation for a further investigation of deixis.

2.1 Deixis and Deictic Expressions

The term ‘deixis’ comes from a Greek word meaning “pointing” or “indicating”.

Deixis, as defined by Lyons (1977: 636), refers to “the function of personal and

demonstrative pronouns, of tense and of a variety of other grammatical and lexical

features which relate utterances to the spatio-temporal co-ordinates of the act of

utterance.” That is, deixis is the function of grammatical as well as lexical means

relating a piece of language to its context in terms of its users, the time and place of this

occurrence, and the people and objects it referred to. According to Levinson (1983):

“deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the

context of utterance or speech event (54),” “deixis concerns the encoding of many

different aspects of the circumstances surrounding the utterance, within the utterance

itself. Natural language utterances are thus ‘anchored’ directly to aspects of the

context”(55).

Deictic expressions (also called as deictics, indexical expressions, indexicals) are

Chapter ⅡDeixis and the Related Concepts

by definition words for pointing, pointing to the people, objects, time and place that are

relevant to the interpretation of a piece of language. Deictic expressions include any

linguistic element whose interpretation in simple sentences makes essential reference to

properties of the extra-linguistic context in which they occur, that is, an element that the

speaker uses to refer to some aspect of the context. Typical examples are pronouns,

demonstratives, time and place adverbs, and some grammatical categories such as tense.

But there is a point we should pay attention to: “indeed, by deictic expressions we mean

those linguistic units or morphemes that have a deictic usage as basic or central, for

most such expressions have non-deictic usages.” (Levinson 1983: 64-5).

2.2 The Egocentricity of Deixis

Since all ‘indexing’ or ‘pointing’ is done by human beings, all pointing expressions

have to be related to the uttering person, pointing in a particular place and at a particular

time.

Karl Bühler has gathered these notions in the term ‘indexical field’ (German

Zeigfeld), centered on an ‘origo’, i.e., the point of intersection of the main coordinated

of the ‘here-now-I’ system (1934:149). This origin is the base line of the system; it gives

any speaker utterance its proper pragmatic meaning in a referential context of person,

place and time: who is the ‘I’ that is speaking, where does he or she speak from, and

when, at what point of time? (Mey 2001:54)

Or as J. Lyons put it, “The canonical situation-of-utterance is ego-centric in the

sense that the speaker, by virtue of being the speaker, casts himself in the role of ego

and relates everything to his viewpoint. He is at the zero-point of the spatio-temporal

co-ordinates of what we will refer to as the deictic context…the spatio-temporal

zero-point (the here-and-now) is determined by the place of the speaker at the moment

of utterance ” (1977: 638).

But such an ego-centered organization of deixis is not always and necessarily the

case. There are various exceptions to this－sometimes deictic expressions are used in

ways that shift this deictic center to other participants－Lyons (1977: 579) calls this

deictic projection while Fillmore (1975) calls this shift in points of view.

In a sense, we can say the study of deixis is to identify this center, and the relevant

time, place, people and objects involved can be determined thereupon, according to the

distance from this center.

2.3 Usages of Deictic Expressions

It is essential for the descriptive enterprise to make a number of clear distinctions

between different ways in which deictic expressions may be used.

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摘要：

ChapterⅠIntroduction1ChapterIIntroductionLanguageandcultureareintimatelyinterrelatedandtherehasbeenalonghistoryofacademicinterestintherelationshipbetweenthem.“Languageisapartofcultureandplaysaveryimportantroleinit.Somesocialscientistsconsideritthekeystoneofculture.Withoutlanguage,theymaintain,cultur...

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