A Cognitive Study on Anaphoric Usage in Time and Space of Demonstratives “zhe” and “na”

Abstract

In all languages around the world, every language necessarily has demonstratives. The demonstratives are important to describe thing in languages. In this paper, we will do a study on the usage of discourse demonstratives in Chinese languages in time and space. In Chinese language system, there are two series of discourse demonstratives, which are "zhe (this)" and "na (that)". The previous studies have paid most attention to the usage of discourse demonstratives. The usage of "zhe (this)" discourse demonstratives is described as "approximate", and the usage of "na (that)" discourse demonstratives is described as "distant". The usage of those discourse demonstratives is to be decided by the speaker. The speaker processes the uses of them by his/her cognition. This paper has not only pointed out some problems in the previous research, but also have explored the cognitive aspects of the usage of the discourse demonstratives to argue about the actual uses by demonstrating the cognitive models.