Pragmatic Variations of Deictic Word “This” in Chinese: A Case Study in Digital Social Contexts

Abstract

Spatial deictic expressions are an important part of pragmatics. In verbal communication, the meaning of spatial deictic expressions can only be interpreted by the speaker and the listener through the context. But with the continuous renewal of language media, the forms and functions of deixis have also been constantly developing. Based on the spatial deixis framework and the ideal cognitive model of deixis, this paper selected memes containing the deictic word “this” in Chinese from “fabiaoqing.com” as the corpus source to explore the variation of the spatial deictic “this” in digital social contexts. This study employed qualitative analysis to investigate the variation mechanism of the spatial deictic “this” in online contexts, and used quantitative analysis to examine the quantitative indicators of the selected corpus. The results showed that in terms of deictic distance, the near reference was broken and the far reference was attempted; in terms of the boundary dimension, the proportion of the invisible increased; in terms of the emotional dimension, the expression tendency of negative emotions was obvious.