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This study will explore, analyze, and compare the usage of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms will be considered as well as their locative and temporal uses. In both languages, the demonstratives form a closed system and may therefore be considered “grammar” rather than lexicon (Diver, 1995). But do the individual demonstratives in Chinese have the same uses as the German demonstratives? If so, can one say that there is a one-to-one match between the members of the two systems and, at a more abstract level, that the corresponding members signal similar meanings within their own systems? Or are there differences in the number and kind of uses in the two languages? If there are differences, are these best attributed to a difference in semantics (a difference in meaning) or a difference in what the Columbia Schools would call strategies of exploitation (i.e. the speaker forms the speech differently according to the aim of the communication, the hearer's background information, and/or the environment of the communication etc.) (Garcia, 1975)? Moreover, if there are differences, how much may this be considered the domain of pragmatics, in addition to the vast differences between the cultures of Chinese speakers and German speakers?
One difference, for example, in the use of demonstratives between the two languages is worth noting. With respect to German, where demonstratives could be analyzed in traditional locative terms, with dieser signaling proximate and jener signaling distal, we must note that pedagogical and even reference grammars almost totally omit jener , since it is rare in the modern spoken language. The deictic use of articles, i.e. der , die and das , is the replacement for jener , while a combination of articles and locational adverbs, i.e. dort , da etc., is used to refer to distance in time and space. The Chinese demonstratives zhe ‘this’ and na ‘that,’ in turn, have been analyzed only in terms of the relative proximity of the referent. In both cases, the non-locative uses of the demonstratives have been more or less ignored. One purpose of this book is to discover precisely what these discourse uses are, and how similar and how different they are.
The theoretical and methodological approach to be used in this book is that of the Columbia School. Although less well-known than other approaches (such as, in formal linguistics, generative grammar; and in discourse-functional linguistics, cognitive grammar), the Columbia School has the advantages of first, having devoted considerable attention to the discourse functions of demonstratives, pronouns, verb tense systems and negation; and second, of having proposed interesting and radically non-traditional semantic analyses of these elements. It also has been shown that Columbia School analyses may be “translated” into Cognitive Grammar analyses by considering what the Columbia School has viewed as “strategies of exploitation” to be independent and conventionalized uses of a polysemous item (Kirsner, 1993; Langacker, 1987, 1995).
This study attempts to show that there are many similarities in the use of the German and Chinese demonstratives in real space and in the deictic hierarchy in the Columbia School framework. At the same time, cultural differences account for differences between the German and Chinese demonstratives both in their syntactic structures and in the messages signaled to the hearer. They affect the ways in which facts are perceived and ideas are expressed in language use.