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Basic Characteristics Of Deixis

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Deixis are essentially words whose denotation changes from one place to another or from one discourse to another. They are form words such as pronouns, articles and prepositions among others. Deixis is the most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structure of languages themselves. The main examples of deictic expressions are: personal pronouns (especially first and second person pronouns), demonstratives, specific adverbs of place and time, and other grammatical and lexical features which direct attention of the hearers to spatial or temporal aspects of the situation of utterances which are critical for its appropriate interpretation. (Fletcher and Garman, 1979:241; Levinson, 1983:54)

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In this respect Anderson and Keenan (1985:529) state that the essential characteristic of deixis is that their semantic values depend on the real world context in which they are …show more content…

The term Contrastive linguistics was suggested by Whorf (1941) for a comparative study which is giving emphasis on linguistic differences. The aim of the comparison is established by the very purpose of the comparison operation. Viewed theoretically and practically, comparing languages has drawn the attention of a number of scholars and researchers as an interesting sub-field of applied linguistics. One of the merits of such kind of comparison is that contrastive analysis demonstrates the universal aspects of the languages under consideration what is language specific. Hence, the process is significant for understanding languages in general and for shedding more light that helps explore the languages compared (Johansson and Hofland,

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