Persian Deixis in the Flow of Conversation

ABSTRACT This study investigates the two demonstratives in Persian conversation, namely the proximal een , “this,” and distal oun , “that,” and their plural forms, that constitute the bulk of Persian pronominal and adnominal demonstratives functioning as anaphoric, deictic, discourse‐deictic and recognitional. The data from which these demonstratives are analyzed come from a large corpus of live conversational data occurring between participants who are native speakers of Persian. The analysis of the data is conducted on 5000 intonation units (henceforth IUs), based on Chafe's theory of information flow. The findings have shown that generally the adnominal een outnumbers oun . The analysis has also revealed that, overall, speakers prefer cognitive saliency over the anaphoric distance in the selection of anaphoric choices.