Aspects of time and place deixis în language

This paper is the product of a careful documentation in the field of deixis and of my intention to conduct an investigation of the properties of deixis in English and Romanian.

To be more explicit, the issue I am going to outline in this work is firstly to see to what extent certain contextual parameters and pragamtic factors determine deixis in natural languages.

Secondly, my work is intended as a contrastive analysis of time and place deixis in English and Romanian, trying to point out some of the similarities and differences between the uses of time and place indexical expressions in these two different languages.

The question which arises now is why deixis?

Firstly, because this is an area at the borderline between grammar and pragmatics, which is rather insufficiently explored speaking solely from a descriptive-functional prespective. It is well-known that lots of philosophers and logicians have dealt with it quite extensively. The most significant works of a descriptive nature in this area are those of Fillmore (1971b, 1975), Lyons (1977b: Chapter 15) and Levinson (1983: Chapter 2). There has been of late a flurry of studies of children s language incorporating some references to deixis.

These studies involve either an examination of how spatial and temporal information come to be encoded in the child s language, or how it is that the attention-calling function of deixis is incorporated in the child s language use (Clark, 1978b; Tanz, 1980). As I have just mentioned, the relevant linguistic studies are still scanty but the situation is even more dramatic when it comes to constrastive analysis, where few articles have been written (e. g. Faerch s account of deixis in Danish and English (1980), Barbara Kryk s The Pragmatics of deixis in English and Polish (1985)). Secondly, I have chosen this topic for a more practical reason. It must be pointed out that the problems posed by deixes both in English and Romanian may be of some pedagogical value in the area of language teaching as well as in translation work.

By resorting to a contrastive approach of deixis and by illustrating the phenomenon with examples in both languages, I hope to suggest possible solutions to many of the issues which Romanian students and translators are confronted with when translating Romanian texts into English.

To give an example, turning a sentence from direct speech into indirect speech seems to be the source of numerous mistakes made by Romanian learners of English.

For instance, in English we have got today in direct speech and that day in indirect speech, yesterday in direct speech and the day before in indirect speech, a year ago in direct speech and a year before in indirect speech, tomorrow in direct speech and the following day in indirect speech, here in direct speech and there in indirect speech, etc.

Consider the following examples.

At the theoretical level ...

BARA ELENA - "MAIN FUTURE EXPRESSIONS IN ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN" - CONTRASTIVE STUDIES IN THE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN, BUCHAREST UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1974

BROWN GILLIAN AND YULE GEORGE - "DISCOURSE ANALYSIS" - CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1983

CORNILESCU ALEXANDRA - "TOWARDS A SEMANTIC DESCRIPTION OF TENSE AND ASPECT IN ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN" - CONTRASTIVE STUDIES IN THE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN, BUCHAREST UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1974

DUTESCU - COLIBAN TANIA - "GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES OF ENGLISH" - BUCURESTI, 1983

KRYK BARBARA - "THE PRAGMATICS OF DEIXIS IN ENGLISH AND POLISH" - PAPERS AND STUDIES IN CONTRASTIVE LINGUSTICS, VOL. 20, ADAM MICKIEWICS UNIVERSITY, POZAN, 1985

SCHIFFRIN DEBORAH - "DISCOURSE MARKERS" - CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1987

STEFANESCU IOANA - "LECTURES IN ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY" - TUB, 1978

THOMAS JENNY - "MEANING IN INTERACTION: AN INTRODUCTION TO PRAGMATICS" - LONGMAN, LONDON AND NEW YORK, 1995

WARDHAUGH RONALD - "HOW CONVERSATION WORKS" - BASIL BLACKWELL IN ASSOCIATION WITH ANDRE DEUTSCH, 1985