The role of deixis in the interpretation of a literary text

The present study examines the role of deixis in the interpretation of the literary text in the novel Neverwhere by N. Gaiman, and how the interpretation of these language units depends on the context. Modern linguistics features a growing interest towards the problems of language modelling of the text world of fiction on the basis of deixis. Deixis is considered to be one of the key point of pragmatics. Person deixis is characterized by the notion of transiency. On the one hand, the referent of the deictic "I" changes depending on the participants' role assignment in the discourse. On the other hand, changeability can be considered from the philosophical point of view in terms that "I, here, now" differs from "I, there, then". Place deixis indicates the location with regard to the centre of the speech event, which means that it linguistically expresses the position of the speaker in a three-dimensional space, as well as his/her relation to the location of others involved in the conversation. The knowledge of the speaker's placement is very important for the reader as it helps to orientate with the help of demonstrative pronouns pointing to a proximal / distal place. Time deixis deals with deictic expressions where reference can only be assigned in relation to the time of the utterance in which they occur. It is rather problematic to determine the pragmatic component of these deictics: the reader does not know the time of encoding, so s/he cannot determine the point in real time which denotes the exact temporal reference. Discourse deixis is a piece of linguistic material that takes a referent within a discourse. It is juxtaposed with anaphora whose referent coincides with a previously mentioned entity. Unlike with anaphoric use, in cataphoric use, the pronoun precedes the expression with which it is co-referential. Emotional deixis deals with the high or low degree of the speaker's involvement in the discourse situation s/he is referring to. Emotional deixis is grammaticalized through the use of the referring expressions this and that, here and there on the basis of the neutralisation of the proximal and distal spatial dimension. The shift from distant to proximal demonstratives occurs with the purpose of showing the speaker's empathy, whereas the reverse shift occurs in order to show emotional distance of the speaker. There are also examples of social deixis in the novel. Though there is no discrimination in the system of personal pronouns in modern English, there are other ways to express subordination that reveal information about social inequality. The numerous examples demonstrate that the context limits the amount of possible interpretations of deictic expressions and facilitates the process of understanding for both the addressee and the reader and thus is a condition for correct pragmatic presupposition deduction.

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