Deixis, Cognition and the Construction of Viewpoint

Proposed Taxonomies:
* Paul Simpson’s Taxonomy (1993)
=He distinguishes what he terms:
* Category A Narratives= narrated by a first-person narrator who is a participant in the story he/she is telling. * Category B Narratives= narrated by a third-person narrator either from inside or outside a particular character’s consciousness. =His taxonomy pays attention to the concept of modality, with each of his categories of narration displaying different types and degrees of modality, accounting for specific viewpoint effects. Categories: Taxonomies of Viewpoint

* Perceptual and Conceptual point of view (Chatman;1990)

* Spatio-temporal and Ideological viewpoint (Roger Fowler; 1986) =covers the difference between:
* Literal Viewpoint= what someone is able to physically see. * Metaphorical Viewpoint= (e.i. someone’s opinion)

B. Encoding point of View in Language
* Third-Person Narration= the narrator of the passage is not a character in the story he/ she is telling. * Omniscient= the narrator knows everything about the fictional world and the characters that he/she is describing, including those character’s thoughts and feelings. * Restricted= the narration is biased towards the characters point of view of
the events described. LINGUISTIC INDICATORS OF VIEWPOINT BY MICK SHORT (1996)

* Verbs of Cognition in the Tex= readers are given information about the cognitive behavior of one character only. * Schema-Oriented Language= is consistent with the character’s point of view. * Event-Coding= this term is consistent with the characters perceptual viewpoint. * Graphological Deviation = can be used to reflect point of view, especially in multimodal texts. Deixis

originally comes from Greek that means “pointing” or “indicating”. Deictic Centre
>The location of a speaker in time and space.

Deictic Terms
* It indicates the po
* sition of something or someone in relation to the speaker’s deictic center. * this and that: examples of place deictics.
* That is, words that, in and of themselves: ‘pure’ deictic words Four Types of Deixis (Levinson; 1983)
* Temporal Deixis= it indicate metaphorical proximity and distance from the speaker in relation to the point in time at which the speaker makes their utterance Example: now and then, yesterday, today and tomorrow

* Person Deixis= represented by the pronoun system, and encodes the speakers and addressees within a speech event. Example: me and you
* Social Deixis= another analogous development of place deixis and encodes how close how close we feel in terms of our social relationship with them. * Empathetic Deixix= similar to social deixis and indicates psychological closeness or distance from whatever person, place or object is being described.

Deictic Shift Theory:
>a way of accounting for how the reader of a text often takes a cognitive stance within the world of a narrative and interprets text from the perspective. * Galbraith (1995)
* He explains that all fictional narration is made out of a number of deictic fields. * Stockwell (2002: 47)
* Defined as a set deictic expressions all relating the same deictic centre.