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It is not surprising to think that at the very beginning of the human beings, there is no language, either in the form of speaking or in the form of writing, since language is not needed under any circumstances, if human beings live separately and only take care of themselves. It was not until later in the human evolution that language arose. There were several hypotheses on when, why and how human beings started to have and use language, but in any case, they were urged to use language to communicate. Taking all circumstances into consideration, we can conclude that they all fall in the following three categories: the hunting theory, the hunted theory, and the grooming theory.
For example, in the hunting theory, human beings needed to hunt for food to survive, but there were animals that were too large for a man to trap or kill by himself, lacking the convenience of science and technology. Even a modern human is not capable of conquering a beast of prey on his own. Therefore, human beings needed to collaborate and work together to tame the prey, carry it back to the cave where they lived, and share it along with other members of the group.Therefore, it is understandable that human beings were in the need of sharing information, figuring out the steps and giving orders: they needed to know where the preys were, how to get them and what to do if there were an emergency or incident. At this time, pure changing of the length of the sounds or using gestures was not enough to provide precise information on things that were abstract or not present, such as the size of the prey and the plan on how to trap it, not to mention potential ideas or plans of action. Then, it was time to have language and use it.
Another theory on the origin of language is the hunted theory. According to this theory, human beings are considered the prey of beasts, either tigers, lions or any other carnivores. In order to survive and reproduce, they had to find a safe place to live in and be able to fight against the carnivores attacking them. Again, a single or a couple of ancient human beings was not able to accomplish the task. Then, a crowd was to be formed to look for safe and fruitful places and to be organized in order to fight in dangerous situations and defend themselves. In order to show the route to a newly found place, one needed to tell other members in the group how far it was, in which direction they should go and how long it might take to get there. These pieces of information are hard to show only with facial movements or gestures, because they are very complicated. It was even harder to cooperate in a defense against a beast. Pointing to a beast may mean “throw stones to it” or “light up with a torch” or “there is a beast over there, watch out.” But there was limited chance to figure out the appropriate meaning right at the time seeing the finger that was pointing to the beast. If the person receiving orders needed plenty of time to be sure what the person making gestures was talking about, there was great chance that he might have already been devoured by the beast. This is very inefficient communication.
A third theory is called the grooming theory. The theory is about the needs of social-networking. Being an animal or human being, one cannot live disconnected from the outside world. In ancient times, human beings did not have the technology to be able to fight against the beast alone. Either in size, speed or strength, ancient human beings were disadvantaged compared to larger-sized carnivores. There is no doubt that human beings would have died away if they did not unite and defend themselves together. When gathering together, they had to be aware whether the other people joining their society would be beneficial to the society, or harmful to it. Therefore, communication was an indispensable part of the admission process. In addition to the needs of survival, according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory (see Maslow, 1943), human beings have social needs, such as love, affection, care, belongingness and friendship.It is hard to build up any kind of relationships without communicating with each other and being familiar with each other's preferences and dislikes. Admittedly, human beings were able to dance, make gestures and some noises to express themselves, but how much information were they able to share with others and to which extent were they able to make themselves understood? Take bees for example, they have all kinds of dances to show where the flowers are and how far away they are and how difficult it is to get there. They can dance in a circle to show the direction of the flower, and they can also dance slowly to indicate how long it takes to get to the flowers. But they are not able to let other bees know about their feelings: are they in love? Or are they experiencing heartbreaking moments? One may argue that bees do not have the needs to be emotionally attached to each other, but it is not deniable that human beings need more than the dance or intervals of the dance steps to show their most “intrinsic thoughts” (Heim, 2011), the abstract feelings that cannot be measured nor displayed merely by time, number or space. When human beings were forced to let others know how they felt about each other and tried to form cliques among them, they had to use language, which is capable of making clear things beyond time and space. This is known as displacement, a design feature of language (Hockett, 1960).
For any reason why human beings began to use language to communicate, they had specific meanings that were to be conveyed by either words, phrases or sentences. It is understandable that at the very beginning of language, there were only sounds but no written languages, and human beings were not able to tell word boundaries, and of course, morphemes. The sound waves (Diver, 1995) the human beings, a.k.a. the speakers, produced were the only things other human beings, a.k.a. the hearers, could receive to collect the information they were supposed to get. It is logical to make the statement that meanings are associated with sounds produced by the speakers. To be able to correctly get the information signaled by the sounds, the hearers have to have the sounds as assets or inventory, i.e. they have to be exposed to the sounds before puberty and be able to decode the sounds respectively. Among the thirteen design features (Hockett, 1960), language has the characteristics of “creativity,” which means human beings are able to make unlimited meanings from limited sounds and comprehend sound combinations to which they have never been exposed before.
It is experimented by the scientists that any new born is able to pick up any language if exposed to it after birth and kept in the language environment until puberty. There is no wonder that a Chinese baby can speak English perfectly, if the baby is adopted right after birth and transported to the US to stay with his/her American stepparents thereafter. Plenty of facts have proved that human beings have difficulties in acquiring language if they are kept away from the human society until puberty, for example, a child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age where he has little or no experience of human care, behavior, or, most importantly in this case, human language. Like a child that was brought up by the wolves can most likely communicate with wolves, but he is unable to understand human beings or make himself understood by them. It is not surprising, because human sounds are new and foreign to the wolf kid and are therefore not in his inventory, and thus do not make any sense to him.
If human beings use language to communicate with each other, can anyone talk to anyone? Many people may have the experience of successfully communicating with foreigners without knowing each other's language, such as my mom who came to the US in 2009 for my master's graduation ceremony without any English education but managed to switch seats with an American gentleman in the plane without any help.She was very proud of her ability of merely using Chinese to communicate with him by pointing at their seats respectively. It is true that people sometimes do not have to know each other's language in a conversation. But once again, how well are they able to share information with each other? Or, to which extent can they express themselves? We have to admit that in this case, the conversation cannot get further than that of animal talks: they are not able to exchange information that contains abstract thoughts, displacement or history and so forth. The reason is obvious: different languages may have different sounds. Even if two languages have similar or the same sound systems, meanings associated with the sounds are not the same. When communicating, the hearer is not able to decode the sounds correctly. Similarly, a Chinese native speaker is unable to talk to an English native speaker, if none of each has ever known the other's language. It is easy to think that the sound “tree” does not mean tree to the Chinese, because the sound “tree” is not associated with the meaning, which is: a plant with a brown chuck and green leaves. Similarly, an American cannot understand the Chinese word shu ‘tree’ without any knowledge of the Chinese language.
We should not be disappointed with the fact that there are hundreds of languages spoken in the world. Like what is conveyed by the Babel story (Genesis, XI, pp.1—9): the God creates various languages for the salvation of human beings, not for the chastisement, because human beings are saved from the tyranny of a single “totalitarian” language and ideology. This at least points out two clear facts: first, there are various languages and they are different from each other; second, one should approach to the ideology the language represents when studying a language. Ideology can be simplified to the form of culture, to some extent. An example is that there is a saying in the German language that he is not yet as tall as three pieces of cheese ‘er ist noch nicht drei Käse hoch,’ but in Chinese, since there was no cheese until it was imported from the West, the saying is he is not yet as tall as three pieces of tofu ‘ta hai mei san kuai'r doufu gao.’ Meanwhile, this example adds more evidence to Wholf's hypothesis of linguistic relativity, in which he states that a language is defined/shaped by its culture and gives the example of the Eskimo language, which has more than 70 ways to name snow flakes.
Though Whorf's hypothesis of linguistic relativity (and its strong version: linguistic determinism) is not supported by a great number of linguists, there is still some evidence that a language may be influenced by the culture it is spoken in. For example, there are three genders (here: grammatical gender) in the German noun system: male, female and neuter. When a German says that he talked to his neighbor yesterday night, he unconsciously releases the information of the neighbor's gender to the hearer, c.f. Ich habe gestern abend mit meinem Nachbarn gesprochen ‘I talked to my male neighbor yesterday night’ and Ich habe gestern abend mit meiner Nachbarin gesprochen ‘I talked to my female neighbor yesterday night.’ But it will not be the case when it is translated in the Chinese or English language, c.f. in Chinese wo zuotian wanshang gen wode linju shuohua le ‘I talked to my neighbor yesterday night.’ And in either translation, the gender of the neighbor is not mentioned by the speaker nor marked by the language. It does not mean that Germans pay more attention to the gender of human beings, because they assign genders to existing or none-existing subjects too: a table is male, a blackboard is female, a book is neuter, and an idea is female, too. They are just more used to having either natural gender or assigned gender for everything in the world. They do not have to take more time to think about what is male and who is female—there is no evidence showing that Germans speak slower than any other non-gendered language speakers in general. Nor is there evidence that Germans learn the gender of each subject just as they learn how to spell and read (see Pinker, 1994). All the facts prove that the gender is genetically programmed in the German language. There is no need to ask why there is gender in the language or when the gender dates back to. Similar to language arbitrariness, where no one would ask why the sound of “tree” means the plant that has brown trunk and green leaves, the gender system is in the German language at the very beginning of it. The genders of some nouns have changed over time or differ themselves from region to region (such as Butter ‘butter’ can be female or male, or even neuter in some southern areas of Germany), but it is not a problem for native speakers: one doesn't need to know how to speak a language in the Middle Ages, and native speakers are perfect at the current sound and meaning system.
Native speakers, defined as people with a specific mother tongue, are able to perfectly use their native language to express their most intrinsic feelings and abstract thoughts. The native language, or mother tongue, is programmed in the genes of its native speakers (see Chomsky, 1969). That means, native speakers may unconsciously reveal their innermost thoughts by their language choices: either by word order, word choice or grammar choice and so forth. For example, in German, one may either use the active voice or the passive voice to signal the meaning “there are people working here.” If the passive voice is used, Hier wird gearbeitet , it signals the meaning that the speaker is not one among the people working here. To the contrary, if the active voice is utilized, Viele arbeiten hier , then, it does not exclude the speaker from the people working here.
A language learner is not expected to use the target language as perfectly as its native speakers do for two reasons. First, because the sound-meaning association is not programmed in language learners' genes, it is impossible for them to study all the sound-meaning associations of the target language: there are too many. Not to mention that lexicon is an open system, i.e. there are new words joining the lexicon with time, and there are old words that become obsolete over time. Native speakers may have encountered situations, in which they have misunderstanding with non-native speakers due to their imperfection of the language. Also, because of the insufficient skill in formulating thought in the non-native language, non-native speakers may have fuzzy formulations, which may be understood as fuzzy thoughts (Heim, 2011). In either conversations or literatures of non-native speakers, there may be miscommunication or misunderstanding arising from the imperfect expressions or descriptions. Therefore, I will limit my study to conversations and literatures by native speakers.
According to Stevens (unpublished manuscript; see Hockett, 1960), language is a system of signs designed for the purpose of communication. In a communication, there need to be a speaker, a hearer, and the information to be shared. In order to successfully deliver the information, the speaker has communicative goals, i.e. what the speaker needs to deliver to the hearer, and communicative strategies, i.e. how the information should be delivered to the hearer (see Kirsner, 2014). As soon as the speaker knows what to deliver, he/she, in the mental process, will encode thoughts and information into language, which includes structure and word, or grammar and lexicon. The speaker makes specific choices of structures and words in order to make the hearer comprehend the utterance and recognize what is supposed to be received in the conversation. Here the speaker needs to consider how to make the utterance comprehensible especially to the hearer. In order to achieve the goal, the speaker needs to take the hearer's background knowledge into consideration and then leads his/her mental process to the joint attention. In Chafe's famous pear story (Chafe, 1979, p.160), he mentions that if a story is watched by people from different cultures, their centers of focus are different. A person from a culture, where there is no pear planted or imported, pays more attention to the pear and uses more effort in how to verbalize the fruit, which he/she has never seen before. But, to the contrast, a Californian does not have any problems identifying pear in the video clip and thus pays less attention to the pear than the person, who does not know pear.
In the process of communication, the speaker evaluates the feedback from the hearer in the interaction, and adds more hints or gestures if needed. In Levy (1979, p.187), a girl is asked what classes she is taking and how her schedule looks like. Levy postulates four steps in which the girl mentally processes as the speaker in the communication with feedback from the hearer. First, she mentally lists the points that need to be included in her utterance, i.e. the information she delivers. Second, the girl thinks about how to describe the course she takes and give further specification. Third, the girl realizes that there may be a potential ambiguity in her utterance and tries to reduce it by establishing a subsidiary goal and satisfying it. Fourth, the girl provides further elaboration to minimize the potential ambiguity at best. In this experiment, the girl clearly has the communicative goal in her mind, which is to make the hearer familiar with her academic schedule, and changes communicative strategy according to her mastery of the information and the feedback from the hearer.
In Li and Thompson (1979, pp.311—312), they admit that structure and word choice is vital, but there is more beyond the words:
Since the inception of linguistics as an empirical science, a justifiably primary concern of grammarians has been the discovery of structural regularities in language. There is no doubt that statements of such regularities are vital to our understanding of the nature of language. It is equally true, of course, that not all aspects of sentence formation can be described by rules stated in terms of grammatical or even semantic properties. Rather, there are a number of facts about sentences that can only be understood in terms of speakers' and hearers' abilities to make inferences beyond what sentences actually say. Further more, certain rules that are pragmatically based are conditioned by the perception of the speaker at the time of the utterance. The speaker's perception of the world and his interpretation of the pragmatic factors may change from instance to instance, making such rules difficult to formulate.
There is no doubt that the speaker has to take the hearer's background into consideration. Howling at the moon may still work after a long time to a certain degree, but it is not an efficient and successful communication, because first, the communicative goal is not completely achieved, and second, taking the same time and effort, the speaker should have a huge chance to provide the hearer with all the details the speaker wants the hearer to be familiar with and make the hearer completely comprehend the utterance. For example, if a country girl, say Mary, from Alabama talks to a local Los Angeles city girl, say Connie, and supposes that Connie understands that people in Alabama air dry laundry on a rack in the open air, and uses this fact as an analogy, Connie would have difficulty in understanding what Mary actually means, since there is barely anyone air drying laundry in Los Angeles: people would use a dryer to dry it, because the rent is high and no one has a yard to air dry laundry.
Similar to what has been discussed before, in Wholf's theory of linguistic determinism, a culture may have influence on how people perceive the world and how people use language to express themselves, in the case that it is possible that the German unconscientiously notice the gender of people in sight, which is most probably not in the focus of Chinese people. Besides, culture also has influence on to which part of the speech one pays more attention to. A traditional Chinese is educated not to exaggerate individual achievements and thus is interested in the praise of individual performance, which is most likely in Western people's main focus. Therefore, the speaker should take the cultural background into consideration and changes communicative strategy according to the hearer.
In addition to culture, Hopper (1979, pp.214—215) discovers that it is the sequentiality that tells foreground sentences (the “main line” events) from the background sentences (the “shunted” events):
The foregrounded events succeed one another in the narrative in the same order as their succession in the real world; it is in other words an iconic order. The backgrounded events, on the other hand, are not in sequence to the foregrounded events, but are concurrent with them. Because of this feature of simultaneity, backgrounded events usually amplify or comment on the events of the main narrative...Strictly speaking, only foregrounded clauses are actually NARRATED. Backgrounded clauses do not themselves narrate, but instead they support, amplify, or COMMENT ON the narration.
If a hearer is unable to differentiate important information (here: foregrounded events), from peripheral information (here: backgrounded events), he/she may be confused as to which information is worth giving more effort to go into details and which information can be left out. If a student misses the part in a book, which he needs to study for the final, but studies the parts that are not quite related to the test, he/she may fail the course. In a worse and more serious case, a military officer's failure to attack the right city may be detrimental to a battle. In all, if the hearer is not able to get the most important part of the conversation, the communication is bearing a failure. Ochs (1979, p.51) quotes earlier literatures that an infant at his “one word stage” in the language development at first “deletes certain highly predictable information in the utterance, which will be expressed by itself at a later stage” (Bates, 1976; Greenfield and Smith, 1976). This too adds more evidence that human beings unconscientiously tend to put unpredictable information to the focus of the utterance.
In addition to structural signs that show different levels of importance in meaning, word choice may also result in change in meaning. Taking “it” and “that” for example. Both can be used to refer to something or someone mentioned before. Say, you meet your neighbor in front of your house. And your neighbor tells you that his son is admitted to the best school in the States. You say “I know it,” for example, and mean “let's talk about it; I have more about it to share with you.”
In opposition, you say “I know that,” and you mean “that's the end of this topic, I do not want to talk about it.” This is confirmed by Linde (1979, pp.347—349). In her study, she finds out that the speaker chooses “that” to move from the event, to which “that” makes reference to, to the next event. Besides, she (1979, pp.344—348) also points out that “that” is used to accomplish the task to refer to a preceding statement taken as a statement, while “it” is used to refer to a statement that is discussed and emphatically affirmed. In addition, “that” also involves contrasting with a previous evaluation and typically refers to an item that is “not within the node of focus.” This, however, contrasts with the characteristics of the German definite articles
der
,
die
and
das
(and their inflected forms) and personal pronouns, which will be further discussed in Chapter 3.
Diessel (1999) postulates that there are three features demonstratives should possess. First, demonstratives are deictic and have specific syntactic functions. Second, they serve pragmatic functions. And third, they have semantic features. This study will be limited to the semantic aspect.
Previous studies also show that the meaning of demonstratives comprises or contains two components or features: deictic and qualitative (Lyons, 1977; Fillmore, 1982). Deictically, demonstratives can indicate a stationary referent as well as a moving referent. Qualitatively, they may indicate speaker's attitude towards the referent or the quantity of the referent (i.e. whether the referent is a single entity or a set of identical entities) (Diessel, 1999).
Most reference grammars focus only on the deictic feature of demonstratives. For these traditional grammars ( Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , 2004; Duden, 2002), deixis means to point to the referent without marking the degree of attention the speaker urges the hearer to put onto the referent. In contrast, in the Columbia School linguistic theory, there is a hierarchy of the differing levels of attention given when different demonstratives are used (Garcia, 1975). Within the school's linguistic theory, the demonstratives are recognized as instructive and urge the hearer to pay attention to the referent (Kirsner, 1993). If the demonstrative means HIGH DEIXIS, it will make the hearer pay more attention to the referent. And if the demonstrative has the meaning of LOW DEIXIS, it will tell the speaker to pay less attention to the referent. Finally, in Cognitive Grammar, demonstratives “represent a conventionalized, grammaticalized means of connecting nominal referents to the subjects of conception” and, therefore, function to provide a platform which is shared by the speaker and the hearer (Langacker, 1997). Similar to the cognitive view, Diessel (1999, 2006) argues that demonstratives do not necessarily show relative location, but rather direct the speaker's and hearer's joint attention.
The term which will be the center of the study is deixis , which is used in different ways by different people. It is a device through which every language incorporates contextual information (Weissenborn & Klein, 1982). Since deixis is the place where language and reality meet, deictic meaning shifts according to the contextual information, such as where, when, by whom, etc. Denny (1978) calls it a “relativity of lexical semantics” that refer to a “particular man-environment relations found for particular human groups” (p.72). Some other factors such as relative distance and visibility can affect the meaning as well.
There are many studies on the German demonstratives in light of their deictic force. Ehrlich (1982) examines German demonstrative adverbs, and states that there is an opposition between hier ‘here’ and da ‘there’ as well as hier and dort ‘there,’ clearly differentiating the speaker's place, reference place, and denotation place. Hartmann (1982) has written about the differences between Rhineland German and standard German. He shows that there are two definite articles in the Rhineland German with two functionally distinct paradigms; one is deictic, and the other is non-deictic. He points out further that the non-deictic mode indicates that the noun-phrase is common or known information to both the speaker and the hearer. Pasierbsky (1982) studies the development of person deixis in Chinese and posits that the original personal pronoun system has been taken over by a more socially oriented system with an account of speech participants.
As noted above, the term deixis, when used in Columbia School analyses to describe the dedicated, invariant meaning indicated by a specific signal (morphology, word order, etc.), has had a different, more technical interpretation than is given in general linguistic literature. Rather than being a description of where the referent is with respect to speech act participants, it is an instruction to the hearer to seek out and attend to the referent, and may exist in different degrees. There are analogs to this in other areas of grammar. Reid (1977) examines two tenses in French and finds out that passê simple means HIGH FOCUS, whereas imparfait means LOW FOCUS. Here the meaning FOCUS is an earlier term for DEIXIS in the Columbia School. It should be noted, however, that there has been a recent tendency among some Columbia School linguists to dispense with DEIXIS as a meaning or component of a meaning. Working on Serbo-Croatian and Spanish pronouns, Gorup (2002) and Garcia (2009) have analyzed the deictic effect attributed to these elements as a pragmatic consequence of the amount of information (nature and number of different dedicated meanings which they do signal).
Several analyses of demonstratives in various languages have been made within the Columbia School framework covering such languages as Afrikaans, Dutch, and Swahili, but little has been done on the German and Chinese demonstratives, especially beyond the syntactic level. Kirsner (1979, 1993) was the first one who studied Dutch demonstratives deze ‘this’ and die ‘that’ in the Columbia School framework. His hypothesis is that by using deze (with the allomorph dit ), the speaker necessarily urges the hearer to exert more attention to the referent, and the opposite by using die (with its allomorph dat ). Thus, the employment of demonstratives is rather a consideration of interaction.
Following Garcia (1975), Kirsner (1979) defined deixis as “the force with which the hearer is instructed to find the referent” (p.359). He further postulates three aspects of deixis: first, “...deixis, urging the hearer to find the referent, communicate[s] that the referent's identity cannot yet be taken for granted”; second, “...[deixis] provides a ‘tighter link’ with its first mention... insisting that the hearer search for the world, alerts him to it more, induces him to pay more attention”; and third, “the command to search for the referent favors the inference that effort is required to find it and, hence, that a specific referent exists—that is, that it is a localizable entity rather than a disembodied general concept” (Kirsner, 1979, pp.358—359). He anticipates that deze ‘this’ “will be used when the hearer's task is more difficult (i.e., when it is harder to select the referent in question)” and “will suggest more forcefully than die that a specific referent exists” (Kirsner, 1979, p.369).
Moreover, Kirsner (1979) gives three strategies that are consistent with the definition of deixis: first, “NOTEWORTHINESS. The speaker will direct attention strongest to entities that he, the speaker, is most interested in talking about”; second, “GIVENNESS. The speaker will direct the hearer's attention strongest to entities that are not given, ‘in the hearer's consciousness’ (Chafe, 1976)”; and third, “FOREGROUNDING. The speaker will use more than one means of drawing the appropriate amount of attention to the noun's referent, so that strong urging of the hearer to find it will be coupled with devices for foregrounding the noun in question and weak urging will be coupled with devices for backgrounding” (p.360).
Now Kirsner (1993), comparing a Cognitive Grammar and Columbia School analysis of the Dutch demonstratives, shows that it is possible to derive deictic-like effects from purely locative meanings, such as NEAR and NON-NEAR. For example, by claiming that a referent is near the speaker with deze , one can suggest to the hearer that the object is more vivid, seen in more detail, and is more zeroed in upon and perceived more precisely in the way that near objects are when compared with far objects, which in turn entices the hearer to pay more attention to deze 's referent. [1] Thus, his original (1979) Columbia School analysis could be replaced by one less radical, not postulating purely instructional meanings such as HIGH DEIXIS and LOW DEIXIS, making it actually unnecessary to postulate meanings such as HIGH DEIXIS and LOW DEIXIS. However, Kirsner (2011) argues that Afrikaans differs from Dutch in having an unmarked demonstrative dié contrasting with proximate hierdie and distal daardie and the definite article die . Since one cannot derive the deictic effect of unmarked dié from a locative meaning (since it specifies neither near nor far), it forces the analyst to postulate DEIXIS as a meaning in the Afrikaans demonstrative system. We should also note that Diessel (1999, 2006) includes the German demonstrative dies ‘this’ in his examples to support his argument that demonstratives do not always show relative location.
In addition to Diessel's analysis on dies , Hopkins and Jones (1972) review German grammar books and summarize that jener ‘that’ is mostly omitted for the sake of reducing learners' confusion, because jener is rarely used. They summarize conditions where jener, instead of article plus locative, is used. For example, the referent is mentioned before or jener is followed by relative clauses or adjectives. They also point out that jener , which is commonly thought to be the translation for ‘that,’ is not a demonstrative or deictic pronoun.
In the case of Chinese demonstratives, as stated in the traditional grammar book Xiandai Hanyu Babai Ci (Lü et al.; 1981), zhe refers to people or things that are close to the speaker, whereas na refers to people or things that are close to the hearer. Tao (1999) comments on this idea, saying that “this may be true for isolated sentences, but is not always true with discourse data” (p.72).
Since Teng's (1981) idea of freeing the referent from a spatial distant view and expanding the data to speech act, the referred distance has been expanded to a contextual or psychological level (Lü, 1985; Tao, 1999; Fang, 2002; Biq, 2007; Yang, 2007; Xu, 2008), where demonstratives are not limited to spatial distance, but rather to metaphorical distance, such as the speaker's positive or negative attitude towards the referent. Biq (2007) argues that demonstratives are going through stages of lexicalization in spoken Mandarin in Taiwan. She specifically mentions the distal demonstrative na , along with its associated phrase nazhong ‘that kind,’ which has the meaning of “approximation, vague identification and speaker's uncertainty” (p.130), while Fang (2002) describes that the proximal demonstrative zhe is in the process of lexicalization. Xu (2008) considers the distal demonstrative na as a discourse marker in spoken Chinese. He scrutinized 8.22 hours of spoken Chinese data and proposes that na enables the inter-subjectification of both participants of the discourse and thereby induces discursive and social interaction. Tao (1999) puts forth more factors which will influence the use of demonstratives. Factors such as the shift of discourse structures, discourse properties of focused referent, the building of the text, the speaker's assumption of the hearer, and the speaker's attitude towards the referent.
Other usages of the Chinese demonstratives are studied in Hayashi and Yoon's cross-linguistic research on the use of demonstratives in discourse (2006). They see demonstratives as “filler words” when the speaker fails to find the appropriate word immediately in an on-going discourse (pp.485—486). In their paper, they mention three types of functions: the placeholder use, the avoidance use, and the interjective hesitator use. This discourse phenomenon exists mostly in East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but it can also be found in Finnish. The existence shows that the use of demonstratives as “filler words” is extremely culture-related and thus, to some extent, is limited to being applied within East Asian languages in general.
[1] The following examples and explanations belong to Robert Kirsner: Compare the English expression Look closely , in which claiming the relevance to the communication of nearness tells the hearer to concentrate his or her attention on the intended referent . Furthermore, there is no converse term. (While two members of a large family can be either closely related or distantly related, there is no command *Look distantly. ) That communicating precision of location, in turn, suggests nearness and hence that the two concepts are related is shown by the sentences The pole is near you, The pole is far from you, The pole is right near you versus *The pole is right far from you.
The theoretical framework that will be mainly utilized in this study is the Columbia School Linguistic theory, which holds the idea of one-form, one-meaning (Diver, 1969, 1995). Distinct from traditional grammar, the Columbia School theory (a framework within functional linguistics, which is opposed to formal linguistics), is sign-based and postulates that there are different meanings if the messages are different (Huffman, 1997, 2006; Reid, 2006). In the Columbia School framework, the main purpose of language is to communicate and there are extra-linguistic (i.e. psychological, strategic etc.) factors. That these factors may affect linguistic forms and should be taken into consideration is a tenet of Columbia School and not necessarily other linguistic schools. Take ego-centricity, for example, which means human beings generally consider their own experiences the most interesting ones (James, 1950; Kirsner, 1979). As people strive to be the center of attention, the words urge the hearer to put more attention on the speaker. Also, human beings tend to give more information when speaking about things in which they are interested (Reid, 1977; Diver, 1969, 1995).
Instead of language structure, this study emphasizes language use (i.e. how speakers/writers exploit the resources of their language). Hence, it is reasonable to study language use in real-world texts (i.e. in corpora), rather than in artificially created sentences (non-natural sentences) for qualitative and quantitative study. Therefore, corpus linguistics will play a significant role in this study. That is to say, this is a study of real texts, as opposed to Chomsky's splitting of performance from competence (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 2002; Chomsky, 1965). The goal of using corpora is to obtain the probability of certain language use in specific situations, in order to give a more explicit meaning of the demonstratives in both languages.
There are written languages and spoken languages. Spoken language, the informal-unplanned discourse in communicative situations, bears the following characteristics, which written language, a.k.a. literatures, does not have (Givón, 1979): first, COMMUNICATIVE STRESS: in a conversation, the speaker may be under communicative stress, where the speaker does not have time to plan before talking, and thus may not have the best communicative strategy and express him-/herself perfectly; second, TIME PRESSURE: in case of emergency, the speaker may not be able to take the best word choice under time pressure; third, DEGREE OF PLANNING: in a real-time conversation, a speaker does not have time to plan the utterance to a higher degree as a writer does (and of course, a writer can also go back and polish his/her writing before final submission); fourth, FACE-TO-FACE MONITORING: in a conversation, the speaker and the hearer have eye contact and gestures can be involved, which make the information sharing less dependent on the words; fifth, SHARED GENERAL PRAGMATIC BACKGROUND: in a conversation, there are several factors that are obvious and do not need to be signaled by utterance, such as topic familiarity, mood, context and so forth (p.105).
Based on the aforementioned characteristics, only written data will be analyzed in this study. There are two reasons why spoken data are not examined. First, unlike written data, spoken data does not provide background information of the speaker and the hearer. The relationship between the speaker and the hearer is not clear. We do not know their communication strategies and goals. In short, the lack of contextual information makes it difficult to account for extra-linguistic factors. Second, although speakers do not have the privilege of planning and editing their words during the discourse, they can use their intonation, gestures, and complexions to express themselves. Therefore, it is very likely, that not all the information is contained in the language. Consequently, there is a less precise description in the spoken data, which will inevitably affect the result of this study.
Due to the aims of this study, there are three main considerations when selecting the data sample. First, there should be two major texts. One should be in German and the other, in Chinese. It is necessary that both texts possess adequate instances of deictic and qualitative features of demonstratives in the target language. Second, both texts should involve discourse, culture, and social settings. Since language is for the purpose of communication, language content should not be taken away from reality; thus there is no ideal speaker or hearer, and there are special language uses, which may only be applied under this circumstance. In other words, language in both texts has to sound natural to native speakers and hence possesses a high degree of “communicative fidelity,” “a one-to-one correlation” between the sign and the message (Givón, 1979, p.108). Third, for the sake of a comparative study, it would be preferable to have parallel samples from both target languages with an official translation in the other language (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1987; Christensen, 1994, 2000; Li & Thompson, 1987).
Qualitative and quantitative studies will be conducted on both texts. Qualitative studies are supposed to explore the nature of demonstratives in the target languages. Note that, even in reproducing Chafe's pear stories (1980), a movie in which a set of consequent and simultaneous things happen while a farmer is harvesting pears, which contains strikingly small cultural differences among east and western countries, German speakers tend to use only one sentence to summarize the story. On the other hand, Chinese speakers tend to include moral judgments in the narration. Therefore, it is important to take cultural factors into consideration, because culture influences speakers' attitude towards facts and thus affect their word choice. Hence, in this book, for each example, the context will be given first and then the sentences will be analyzed based on the culture. In addition, the goal of the communication will be considered in order to uncover the meaning conveyed by the message. Moreover, examples will be compared to their counterpart sentences, which do not have a special communicative goal and are plain declarative sentences.
Quantitative analysis is necessary to this study as well. We would expect that human beings are rational and would make decisions based on their best interests. But in reality, we should not suppose that human beings are all ideally rational and well-behaved; first, human beings may not behave in the most rational or ideal manner; and second, human beings may be affected by various factors, either physical or emotional, and might not behave in the way they claim they would. Therefore, in this study, we need to “supplement subjective with objective data, specifically statistical observations” (Kirsner, 1979, p.361; cf. Contini-Morava, 1976). Therefore, in the quantitative part, this study will not declare which demonstrative will be used under which circumstance, without exception, but rather will identify general tendencies. A prediction is not expected regarding which one is used more commonly in real language, since language itself is creative and thus impossible to predict.
It is, however, not favorable to use translations (i.e. parallel texts, in cross-linguistic studies). Generally, using translation is recognized as biased, because translations from the original language into the target language cannot avoid being influenced by the translator's understanding. A translator must either be a native speaker of the original language or of the target language, as it is not possible to be a native speaker of two languages. Even if the translator is truly bilingual, the more frequently used language will override the one used less often and so the less-used language will be below the level of a native speaker. If a translator's understanding is inevitably added to the translation, the original meaning may be misunderstood or not be signaled in the translation.
However, using parallel samples (here the word parallel should be taken in the sense that the genre of text would be the same in the two languages, such as a German novel and a Chinese novel or a German essay on evolution and a Chinese essay on evolution) is a good way of having control of the usage of demonstratives in both the German and Chinese discourse. By the definition we have just given, parallel texts will likely contain the same or similar propositional contents. This enables a comparison of how demonstratives in the target languages operate within similar or the same propositional contents. In this way, differences between the target languages can be easily located and extra-linguistic factors largely controlled (Wu, 2004, pp.25—26).
The term “demonstrative” is considered a semantic category rather than a word class. It is defined as a deictic word that indicates which entity the speaker refers to and thus demonstrativeness is intrinsic to its linguistic meaning. It encodes a sense of pointing, which involves a speaker, an entity pointed to, and a hearer. The pointing process starts from the speaker, or the speaker's ego, goes through the speaker's perception of the referent (and the way in which the speaker orients the hearer's attention to the referent), and ends with the hearer's recognition of the referent.
With the application of the demonstrative, the speaker fulfills a communicative goal through the following several steps: he/she relates the referent to himself/herself, shows their relationship and distance, and urges the hearer to follow the meaning conveyed by the signal to investigate the relative position from the speaker, in order to locate the referent. In the following pages, I will analyze each component of the referring event.
The speaker is the starting point and the final deciding agent. He also fills a role that is important to the referring action, because it is the speaker who picks out an entity from other entities to refer to and whose point of view decides the specific method of the referring. The reason why the speaker selects an entity and the way in which the speaker perceives the referent are both subjective. There is no objective standard to follow for choosing an entity. Nor is there an absolute rule to describe the conditions whereby referents should be defined as either physically or emotionally close to or far from the speaker.
It is hard to set boundaries regarding the vicinity of the object to the other actors. One's vicinity can be out of another's sight and reach. We cannot judge that one individual's perception is correct and the other one's is wrong, since it is impossible to stand in someone else's position and to know exactly what he is thinking or wishes to convey. It depends on the speaker's ego, which is the speaker's self. Education, background, likes and dislikes, and everything that defines the speaker make up the ego. The speaker, as the source of the pointing action, points in the direction of the referent, and perceives the physical or emotional distance relatively, based on the speaker's position at the moment of the utterance. Therefore, the demonstratives equip the speaker with an orienting power that embeds a deictic guide in the utterance that is perceived by the hearer. They are encoded with the speaker's point of view and are thus relative and dependent on the speaker's perception of the distance. The main issue is that the objectivity of the speaker is encoded in the demonstrative based on the relative contexts of the speaker and the referent at the time of communication. The concept that the speaker is an indispensable part of the pointing activity is supported by the egocentric and orientational features of the demonstratives.
The pointing process, graphically, is “the arm and finger gesture of a man” that directs the attention to a place or an entity (Bühler, 1990, p.93) and represents the speaker's egocentricity, which implies the speaker's position at the moment of the utterance, which “serves as the deictic center” (Wu, 2004, p.33). The pointing is generated from the deictic center, or the speaker's ego, and signals demonstrativeness, which can be regarded as a deictic force, which the speaker uses to urge the hearer's attention to the referent. The difficulty of the pointing activity is related to the relative distance from the speaker's ego to the referent.
There are two steps involved in the pointing: first, locating where the deictic center and the referent are; and second, referring the referent from the deictic center. Here there is a dual sense of subjectivity entailed in both steps. On one end, locating the referent cannot be separated from the context the speaker is in and it changes along with the moving of the deictic center. On the other end, referring from the deictic center depends on the speaker's perception of distance to the referent and how the speaker prefers to direct the hearer's attention. As discussed earlier, the pointing process involves the speaker's intentionality and also needs to take the speaker's individuality into account.
The demonstratives usually take place in the process of pointing, have the entailment of the deictic reference-signaling power, and serve as the determiner that aids in providing more clues to locate and identify the referent with which the speaker is concerned. In both steps of the activity of pointing, the demonstratives not only are able to locate and refer to the referents, but can also track the referent from the speaker's position at the moment of the utterance (Nunberg, 1993). If the speaker changes location, the change of demonstratives which refer to the same referent will also track the relative distance between the speaker and the referent.
The opposition between the proximity-signaling and non-proximity-signaling demonstratives entails what is called contrastiveness ; there is no proximity if it is not contrasted against non-proximity. The reason for this is that either physical distance or emotional distance is relative and there is no clear boundary that separates proximity from non-proximity.
The referent, or the potential target of the pointing process, can either be a place or an entity. It may be found in the vicinity or non-proximity of the speaker's position. It is the final destination of the demonstration. The pointing process can be regarded as successful only if the referent is recognized or identified by the hearer. This means, the referent, either a place or an entity, cannot be indefinite (Lyons, 1977). If the referent were indefinite, there could not be any demonstrativeness in which definiteness is presupposed; there would not be any intention, since an intention can only be directed to a definite destination.
As stated in Lyons (1991), “there is an ontological distinction to be drawn between entities and places,” because “places (as distinct from spaces) are ontologically secondary, being identifiable as such by virtue of the entities that are located in or near them” (p.142). This shows the distinction between the place-referring and entity-referring demonstratives, given that the entity-referring demonstratives “encode relation to both entity and location in a broad sense from the speaker's point of view” (Wu, 2004, p.31). For example, the English entity-referring demonstrative this signals the meaning that the referent is in vicinity of the speaker, a.k.a. here , which is the English place-referring demonstrative. An NP made of an entity-referring demonstrative, for example “this” and “book,” can be glossed as “the book here,” or “the book which is relatively close to the speaker” (Brown, 1995).
Moreover, Kirsner (1993) claims that “the ‘imperative-like character’ of the English demonstratives apply equally well to the Dutch ones (p.94; Wierzbicka, 1980, p.37 fn. 20). The “imperative-like character” of the demonstratives is not limited to the locative information of the referent, but rather a “directive force” which makes the locative information “more immediate” than in “putative paraphrases” (Kirsner, 1993, p.94). In order to find out whether the same holds true in German, I carried out a survey among six native speakers of German at UCLA. I presented the following sentences to them, and asked them which one they would use if they want to sell this car in question.
My informants state that they all would use the first sentence, because they feel that the second sentence sounds strange. It is because not only the repetition of “das Auto” is confusing, but also sentence 2.1b sounds as if it were a pure description rather than a promotion or a piece of exciting news. If we replace das Auto with das andere ‘the other one,’ informants claim that sentence 2.1b is still not a promotion.
In German and Chinese, there are proximity-signaling and non-proximity-signaling demonstratives to refer to both place and entity. Thus, each of the three languages has four different demonstratives for the combinations: a proximity-signaling and entity-referring demonstrative, a proximity-signaling and place-referring demonstrative, a non-proximity-signaling and entity-referring demonstrative, and a non-proximity-signaling and place-referring demonstrative. The table below is a summary of the demonstratives in the three languages (cf. Wu, 2004, p.31):
As shown in the table above, the Chinese demonstratives, either place-referring or entity-referring, start with the same syllables or, more clearly, with the same characters: all proximity-signaling demonstratives start with zhe ‘this’ and all non-proximity-signaling ones start with na ‘that.’ As such, the Chinese place-referring demonstratives can be seen as a combination of zhe ‘this’ or na ‘that’ and a possible word with the meaning “place”: either er ‘place’ or li ‘place’; and the entity-referring ones are either zhe ‘this’ or na ‘that’ by themselves, or a combination of zhe ‘this’ or na ‘that’ and a classifier or measure word, such as xie ‘some’ signaling plurality in the table (with its English cognate ‘these’ and ‘those’).
The pointing action will not be considered successful until the hearer is able to obtain correct information from the conversation or the demonstrative used in the utterance, and locate the referent that is pointed to. To be able to follow the speaker's orientation, the hearer needs to share a joint platform with the speaker, for the reason that the demonstrative used by the speaker signals the relative distance between the speaker and the referent at the moment of the utterance. Therefore, the distances, as well as the demonstratives, are temporal and only valid for a limited time until the speaker's position changes. In this sense, proximity-signaling demonstratives signal temporal proximity and non-proximity-signaling demonstratives signal temporal non-proximity. As for emotional distance, it can be interpreted as the speaker's attitude towards the referent (cf. Lyons, 1977, pp.100, 647). If the referent is emotionally close to the speaker, it indicates the speaker's intimacy to the referent. If the referent is emotionally detached from the speaker, it shows that the referent is definitely not to the speaker's liking. Adamson (1994a, 1994b, 1995b) also points out that in English narratives, a substance that is temporally or spatially remote but is preceded by a proximity-signaling demonstrative that has the empathy of the speaker.
The hearer, in addition to having to decode the meaning conveyed by the demonstrative, has to locate and identify the referent in the speaker's concern (cf. Janssen, 1995a, 1995b, 1996). Note here that a referent associated with a non-proximity-signaling demonstrative does not necessarily mean that the referent is out of the speaker's sight. Nor does it mean that the referent is within reach of the speaker's vision if the referent is referred to by the speaker with a proximity-signaling demonstrative. Again, the relative distance is not objective but subjective, perceived by the speaker, and thus should not be judged by the reach of one's vision. Also, adding emotional distance into consideration, the proximity-signaling-demonstratives denote a more immediate focus on and a stronger interest in the referent; whereas a non-proximity-signaling demonstrative indicates that the speaker is less interested in or indifferent to the referent.
It may be more difficult for the hearer to locate a referent associated with a non-proximity-signaling demonstrative, because a referent is easier to physically identify if it is closer to the speaker. There is an asymmetry as a referent within the reach of the speaker's vision can be either referred to with a proximity-signaling demonstrative or a non-proximity-signaling demonstrative, but a referent beyond the speaker's sight is most likely referred to with a non-proximity-signaling demonstrative. Despite this asymmetry, a referent associated with a proximity-signaling demonstrative is more accurate and explicit than a referent associated with a non-proximity-signaling demonstrative. For example, in English:
2.2a) Don't take this! Take this !
2.2b
Don't take that! Take
that
!
The second sentence in the example sounds ambiguous in the sense that the hearer is not necessarily able to figure out which object is supposed to be taken. In the first sentence, both referents are referred to with ‘this’ and are in the boundaries of the speaker's immediate focus and better knowledge; they are easier for the hearer to locate and identify. In contrast, in the second sentence, both referents are referred with ‘that’ and are both outside the boundaries of specificity. As discussed earlier, a referent has to be definite to be identified. Neither referents in sentence 2.2b are familiar to the speaker, nor are either of a higher specificity, which would serve as “a facilitating factor in locating the referent,” both references in sentence 2.2b would require other information or other actions, such as pointing to the referent or providing more detailed information, to enable the hearer to locate them and then fulfill the communicative goal of the conversation (Wu, 2004, p.42).
What can also be derived from the example is that the opposition of the proximity-signaling and non-proximity-signaling demonstratives is not exclusive, but inclusive.
Admittedly, stating that an entity or a place is not in the proximity naturally entails non-proximity in the entity or in the place. But by stating that an entity or a place is not ‘there’ does not mean that it is ‘here,’ given that non-proximal demonstratives do not carry the strong sense of contrast that proximal demonstratives do (Lyons, 1977; Brown, 1995).
To make it easier, an entity or a place that is not in the vicinity of the speaker is not close to the speaker, but an entity or a place that is not in the non-proximity of the speaker does not necessarily indicate that it is near the speaker. ‘Here’ is practically limited because it is tied to a speaker. On the other hand, the concept of ‘there’ must be infinite.
Some languages, such as Korean and Armenian, make a three-way distinction among demonstratives, which serves as evidence of the notion that the concept of there can be finite. A demonstrative, in such languages, can either signal proximal (referent close to the speaker), medial (referent close to hearer), or distal (referent not in proximity of either). In these languages, it is clear that an entity or a place that is considered proximal is neither medial nor distal . However, an entity or a place that is considered either not medial or not distal does not necessarily mean it is proximal , but may be distal (not proximal ) or medial (not proximal ). To illustrate the inclusive opposition, another example can be provided here:
2.3a) The bag is not there, but there !
2.3b
The bag is not here, but
here
!
Sentence 2.3b does not communicate its meaning well unless the speaker points to the bag since ‘here’ refers to a finite space whereas ‘there’ refers to infinite space. Therefore, negating an entity that is ‘here’ automatically bears the fact that the entity is ‘there.’ On the other hand, negating an entity that is ‘there’ does not necessarily mean that it is ‘here.’
Just as it is the speaker who decides the boundaries of the vicinity, whether an entity or a place is close to the speaker, depends on how the speaker perceives the spatial or temporal or emotional distance; or, how the speaker naturally or intentionally conceptualizes the referent: the speaker's point of view, or the deictic center, a.k.a. the speaker's ego. And Wu (2004) maintains that
[T]he egocentric point of view involved renders the relationship between the perceiver and the entity perceived and conceptualizes it into one between the observer and the observed. (p.41)
This provides evidence for the above argument that the relative distance does not depend on the actual distance between the speaker and the referent, but rather depends on how the speaker perceives and conceptualizes it.
It seems that “one cannot perceive the ‘real world as it is’”; rather, people perceive the real world as they want to perceive it and as they are conditioned to perceive it (Jackendoff, 1983, p.26; cf. Garcia, 2009). Of course, one would not “see a horse out of a deer” (cf. Sima, 91BC). But it is undeniable that one may perceive a diamond out of a square. One may argue that this perception may be because one has not encountered a square before and a diamond matches more closely to the prototypical representation of the shape from one's prior experience. However, it still provides evidence that different people may have various perceptions of the same entity.
Similarly, human cognition plays an essential role in the assessment of distance between one and the entity or place involved and is mostly contributed by the mind (cf. Langacker, 1987, 1995). In some situations, one may ignore some characteristics of a referent, but in other situations, one pays more attention to other features of a referent (cf. Talmy, 1983). And because of ego-centricity, when people measure the distance between themselves and the entity, there is an “egocentric viewing arrangement,” in which “the natural interest that most people have in themselves” and “the relations they bear to entities around them” are accommodated in building the meaning that will be reflected in the semantics of the utterance, i.e. the use of demonstratives (Langacker, 1985, p.12). Hence, demonstratives encode the spatial conceptualization of the speaker, and “represent that part of language which maps onto the innate properties of human cognition” (Wu, 2004, p.41). And, demonstratives are part of the “rather deeply seated, innate properties of the human organism and the perceptual apparatus, properties which determine the way in which the world is conceived, adapted, and worked on” (Bierwisch, 1967, p.3).