A Cross-Linguistic Study of the English Prepositions up and down and Their Russian Counterparts (Published)
During the recent decades an increasing interest has been observed in pragmatic studies, particularly in the field of comparative linguistics. The object of our study is space prepositions up and down in English and their counterparts in Russian. We have chosen these prepositions because they present a certain difficulty for foreign learners, especially Russian students of English. Firstly, the prepositions up and down do not have direct equivalents in Russian. Secondly, their usage on the syntagmatic level is overloaded with deixis, which makes their understanding and interpretation still more complicated. We have examined these linguistic units in the framework of theory of oppositions and pragmatics, particularly deixis. The analysis shows that on the syntagmatic level the prepositions up and down display various pragmatic meanings triggered by the reference of motion to the location of the speaker or other subject in space. Both these prepositions are rendered into Russian by means of the preposition po (along) which is deictically-neutral and therefore special means are required to express the meanings of the English prepositions both on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic level.
Keywords: Deixis, Paradigmatic, Pragmatics, Syntagmatic, prepositions up and down, theory of oppositions
Discourse Pointing Devices in Newspaper Editorials (Published)
Deixis (the use of this, that and other pointing devices) in English has its discursive and referential values which are determined by the context of situation. In this study, I examined the use of the (English) deixis, as a discourse pointing device, to argue that the language situation in operation, could determine deictic usage. Using corpus linguistics methodologies, the study purposively sampled three consecutive months’ editions (January 1– March 31, 2017) of four online newspaper editorials from: Canada, Jamaica, Nigeria and the UK, where different language situations exist. In analysing the data, the newspaper editorials corpus was subjected to AntConc Concordance Tool, to identify and classify the deictic markers into types and through simple statistics determined the frequency of use on paper and country bases to show variation (if any). The major significance of the study is to help in understanding the working of language in its environment of operation and in presupposing the usage of language in the different contexts of situations.
Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, Deixis, Discourse Pointing, Editorial, context of situation