Establishing the Effect of Deixis  in Translation

Ubeis Dueim Al-Azzawi, Qassim

	Establishing the Effect of Deixis in Translation
Journal of University of Babylon
Article 1, Volume 19, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 585-605
Author
Qassim Ubeis Dueim Al-Azzawi
Abstract
Deixis is viewed as it introduces subjective, attentional, intentional as well as context-dependent properties into natural languages. It can be viewed as a much more pervasive feature of languages than normally recognized one. This may lead to a complicated treatment within formal theories of semantics and pragmatics. Deixis is also critical for our ability to learn a language, which philosophers for centuries have linked to the possibility of comprehensive definition. Despite this theoretical importance, deixis is one of the most empirically understudied core areas of pragmatics that we are far from understanding its boundaries and have no adequate cross-linguistic typology of deictic expression. This article does not attempt to review either all the relevant theory (see, e.g., the collections in Davis 1991, section III, or Kasher 1998, vol. III) or all of what is known about deictic systems in the world's languages (see, e.g., Anderson and Keenan 1985, Diessel 1999). Rather, the researcher attempts to pinpoint some of the most tantalizing theoretical and descriptive problems, to sketch the way in which the subject interacts with other aspects of pragmatics, and to illustrate the kind of advances that could be made with further empirical work. Deixis is reference by means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the (usually) extralinguistic context of the utterance, such as who is speaking the time or place of speaking the gestures of the speaker, or the current location in the discourse.

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