Speaker
Description
With advances in machinery manufacturing and material processing techniques in the recent decades, there is an ongoing necessity to study the pragmatic meaning construction in various genres of mechanical engineering discourse. Deixis is one of the fundamental pragmatic phenomena that explicitly illustrates the inevitable interconnectedness between the linguistically encoded and contextual parts of meaning as its semantic meaning is underdetermined and typically enriched by the context of the deictic expression use. The present study focuses on such categories of deixis as place deixis and discourse deixis and aims to explore their use in mechanical engineering discourse. The research is approached from a mixed-method perspective and implements such methods as frequency count and discourse analysis. The research type is case study. The data has been obtained from three textbooks, three research articles and three encyclopaedia chapters pertaining to the field of mechanical engineering. Each of the corpora comprises approximately 50,000 words. The findings demonstrate that the use of place and discourse deixes is relatively limited in the discourse under analysis. However, the deictic centre of the utterances that include the analysed deictic expressions can be writer-oriented or reader-oriented. Moreover, certain linguistic elements such as demonstrative ‘this’ or proximal adverb of space ‘here’ can be classified as either place or discourse deixis. It can be concluded that the frequency of the analysed phenomena also depends on the genre within the same professional domain.
Affiliation of the author(s)
Department of English Studies, Faculty of Humanities, UL
Biographical note(s) of the author(s)
Jekaterina Čerņevska (PhD Candidate, Lecturer) is currently working at the University of Latvia. Her research interests include pragmatics and the use of English in professional discourse. The PhD dissertation discusses the pragmatic meaning construction in mechanical engineering discourse. Email: jekaterina.cernevska@lu.lv
| Contact e-mail address | jekaterina.cernevska@lu.lv |
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