영어 지시사의 의미

The Meaning of English Demonstratives: The Extension of the Semantic Feature

This paper shows that all the functions of English demonstratives that previous linguists have noted, such as denoting the spatial and temporal relationship to the speaker, referring anaphorically and cataphorically in discourse, expressing the speaker’s emotion, and indicating focus or the degree of attention on the referent, can be accounted for as extension of their basic semantic features, ‘proximal/distal’. The reason why the linguists assign so many different uses to demonstratives is that they take the whole linguistic environment where the demonstratives are used as the meaning of demonstratives. However, this paper suggests that demonstratives do not have separate meanings such as expressing sympathy, solidarity, empathy, sharedness, closeness, etc. This seeming versatility of demonstratives is a result of the extension of the basic spatial meanings of the demonstratives to the discourse contexts where they are used. That is, the proper demonstrative choice can be established by the result of the interaction of the semantics of these demonstratives and pragmatics.