Polysemy of Proximal and Distal Deictic Adverbs in Germanic and Slavic Languages

Student: Zarifyan Maria

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 10

Year of Graduation: 2017

The current study observes temporal and proximal deictic markers of Russian (tut 'here', tam 'there'), Polish (tu 'here', tam 'there'), English (here, there), German (hier 'here', da 'here/there', dort 'there') and Norwegian (her 'here', der 'there') languages. Such deictic pairs seem to be antonymous at first glance, which is an oversimplification of the real situation. Thus, the goal of the current paper is to consider the full polysemy of deictic markers and highlight some common features. The paper shows, that proximal adverbs are strongly deictic, whereas distal ones can lose the semantics of distance and develop anaphoric function. In addition, proximal and distant adverbs retain the semantics of proximity and distance respectively even in their non-spatial contexts of use.

Full text (added May 30, 2017)

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