Pragmatic Variations of Deictic Word “This” in Chinese: A Case Study in Digital Social Contexts

With the continuous renewal of language media, the forms and functions of deixis have also been constantly developing. Based on the spatial deixis framework and the ideal cognitive model of deixis, this paper selected memes containing the deictic word “this” in Chinese from Baidu Images as the corpus source to explore the variation of the spatial deictic “this” in digital social contexts. This study employed qualitative analysis to investigate the variation mechanism of the spatial deictic “this” in online contexts, and used quantitative analysis to examine the quantitative indicators of the selected corpus. The results showed that in terms of deictic distance, “this” in digital social contexts broke through the original indication of close distance, and it could demonstrate the indication of distant objects. In terms of deictic boundaries, “this” shifted from indicating visible objects to also indicating invisible objects. And in terms of deictic emotion, “this” transitioned from indicating positive-emotion objects to also indicating negative-emotion objects.