This work characterises person deixis in Catalan beyond the grammatical categories of first and second person, relating it to the participation frameworks set up by Goffman (1981) and Levinson (1988).
Chapter 1 establishes the general and specific aims and the hypothesis, and outlines the pragmatic framework and the methodology used.
Chapter 2 offers a historical overview of deixis studies, from Apollonius Dyscolus’s “Syntax” to the first contemporary approaches (Jespersen, Bühler, Jakobson, Lyons), semiotics (Peirce, Burks), and pragmatics (Fillmore, Levinson, Rauh, Vanelli and Renzi, Kerbrat-Orecchioni).
In chapter 3, deixis is characterised. Where there is no agreement in the literature, the author’s position is argued (the inclusion of manner deixis as a deictic category, together with person, time and place deixis; the rejection of social deixis as a category; the distinction between deictic categories and uses — discourse deixis is included here). The main linguistic expressions that encode deixis in Catalan are classified, and the borders with other phenomena (the expression of subjectivity, information-status and anaphoric reference) are drawn.
In chapter 4, participation frameworks are described and exemplified.
Chapter 5 characterises grammaticalised, or unmarked, forms in Catalan for participant reference. We establish that the first person encodes reference to the ‘principal’ (in Goffman’s terms), not to any kind of speaker, and the second person to ‘addressed recipient(s)’, not to any kind of addressee. We also show that the distinction between inclusive and exclusive uses of first- and second-person plural forms is fuzzy when there are more than two participants. As regards vocatives, two kinds of Levinson (1983)’s calls, or summonses, are distinguished – at the speech-event level and at the utterance-event level.
Chapter 6 characterises the alternative, or marked, forms for participant reference: mainly, eight uses of the first-person plural, the use of the second-person singular for speaker reference, forms such as “menda”, “servidor -a”, and “un -a”, “vós” and “vostè(s)” polite strategies, and various kinds of lexical noun phrases (most of which are metapragmatic or express footing).
Chapter 7 suggests some ways of analysing the data: the interpretation processes followed in referent identification; the iconicity of alternative forms; and the relationship between person deixis and Brown and Levinson (1987)’s approach to politeness.
|
E-mail this message to a friend
