Deixis As Pragmatic Markers: A Comparative Analysis Of The Victory Speeches Of Sharif And Trump

Abstract

In studying pragmatics deixis play an important role. With the help of deixis it become easy to interpret the meaning of certain sentence according to the context.  In simple words it is said that it simply means pointing or asserting something via language. Through the use of deictic expressions, the readers understand the speaker’s deictic centre, his language strategies in time and space, his use of personal pronouns and allusions for the particular people in variety of social contexts. In the political speeches person deixis can be significant part of the speech and can have persuasive as well as strategic political functions for constructing positive self and negative others. Keeping in view the above idea the study intends to investigate which personal deixis are used in the victory speeches of Nawaz Sharif and Donald Trump for constructing positive slef and negative others. Furthermore, it also focuses on the differences in the use of deixis by the two winners belonging to two different cultures for the re-construction of their and their party’s identities.

The data is comprised of victory speeches of both the winners; retrieved from net and then transcribed and translated. From the five types of diexis (e.g., person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, social deixis and Discourse deixis.) presented by Levinson (1983: 68-94) only the person diexis are selected for the analysis. A mixed method approach (Qualitative and Quantitative) is adopted. Expressions are sorted out accordingly.

The results show that both the speakers most frequently used personal pronouns ‘I, We and You’. The pronoun ‘I’ and ‘we’ are used to construct a positive self image. The results also reveal that in the game of politics there is no difference in the strategic use of deixis for the construction/deconstruction of identities on the basis of culture and cross boundaries. Both the winners have used the deixis in one and the same manner to achieve their goals and positive self and negative other’s constructions.