The Application of Deixis in Advertising English2012812059杨光The English word “advertise” derives from the Latin word "advertere”, which means “to attract the attention of the public on something and induce them to act in some way”. Albert Laser, generally regarded as the father of modern advertising, defined advertising as “salesmanship in print, driven by a reason why”(Xu,2002:1). Though the definition was given long before the advent of radio and television, and the nature and scope of advertising were considerably different from what they are today, this frequently quoted definition indicates that the central purpose of advertising is to sell with skills. According to Webster‟s New World Dictionary, to advertise is to tell about or praise( a product, service, etc.) publicly as through newspapers, handbills, radio, etc., so as to make people want to buy the promoted stuff. Encyclopedia Britannia Dictionary defines advertising as follows: “The techniques and practices used to bring products, services, opinions, or causes to public notice for the purpose of persuading the public to respond in a certain way towards what is advertised Most advertising involves promoting a good that is for sale, but similar methods are used to encourage people to drive safely, to support various charities, or to vote for political candidates, among many other examples. In many countries, advertising is the most important source of income for media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, or television stations) thro ugh which it is conducted” (Encyclopedia Britannia Dictionary, 1985:96) Harris and Seldon (1962:40) define advertising as “a public notice designed to spread information with a view to promoting the sales of marketable goods and services”. Dyer (1982:2) be lieves that “in the simplest sense the word …advertising‟means …drawing attention to something‟, or notifying or informing somebody of something”. Advertising is the most effective form of salesmanship for most consumer products and services,” says Leonar d Matthews, president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. It is the least expensive, most effective way to put our sales story before a potential user (Rotzoll et al., 1986:40). Russell et al. (1988:22) define advertising as “a method of d elivering a message from a sponsor, through an impersonal media, to many people.‟ And according to Merit Students Encyclopedia, it is “a way of bringing information to the public for the purpose of selling a product, a service, an idea, or an event”.So far the most widely accepted definition is the one given by American Marketing Association (AMA): the non-personal communication of informationusually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media (Bovee & Arens, 1989:7). This definition can be analyzed from five respects：First，advertising is a type of communication. It is a very structured form of applied communication, employing both verbal and non-verbal elements. The mass media nature of advertisement creates a communication environment where the message is not delivered in a face-to-face manner.Advertising is typically directed to groups of people rather than to individuals. Thirdly, most advertising is paid for by identified sponsors. Fourthly, in addition to promoting tangible goods such as telephones, cars, and hamburgers, advertising helps publicize the intangible ideas and services of bankers and insurance companies. Lastly, most advertising is intended to be persuasive----to win converts to a product or a service.Today advertising has influenced us pervasively in our daily life and it has aroused the interest of many linguists from both home and abroad. These linguists have explored advertising from many perspectives such as semiotics, stylistics, and so on, but this paper will analyze it from a different perspective------from the angle of pragmatics. So next we will talk about deixis in pragmatics in detail.The term deixis comes from the Greek word for "pointing" or "indicating". It is one of the important elements in the field of pragmatics. The single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves, is through the phenomenon of deixis (Levinson, 2001:54).Deictic expressions or simply deixis "refer to certain aspect of their contexts of utterance, including the role of participants in the speech event and their spatio-temporal and social location" (He Ziran, 2003: 44).One of the first phenomena that scientific considerations of language use can not ignore is this `anchoring' of language in a real world, achieved by `pointing' at variables along some of its dimensions. This phenomenon is called deixis, and the `pointers' are indexical expressions or indexicals (Verschueren, 2000:18).Deixis is a technical term (from Greek) for one of the most basic things we do with utterances. It means `pointing' via language (Yule, 2000: 65). Any linguistic form used to accomplish this `pointing' is called a deictic expression. When you notice a strange object and ask, `What's that?'，you are using a deictic expression (`that') to indicate something in the immediate context.Deictic expressions are also sometimes called indexicals, "expressions whosereference is a function of the context of their utterance" (Green, 1989: 17).Every language in the world has deixis, which identify objects, persons and identification of persons, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatio-temporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance and the participation in it, typically, of a single speaker and at least one addressee ”. （Lyons, 1977:637）Louise Cummings(2005:22)said，in his Pragmatics :A Multidisciplinary Perspective, deictic terms, which include expressions from as diverse grammatical categories as pronouns and verbs, describe entities within the wide social, linguistic or spatial-temporal context of an utterance. Generally speaking there are person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, discourse deixis, social deixis, and so on(Brown &Yule，2000:183)Bar-Hillel speculates that more than 90% of the declarative sentences people produce are indexical in that they involve references to the speaker, addressee, time and place of speaking (Jiang Wangqi, 2000:12). In regard to its definition, scholars have stated their views in different studying fields.In 1954, the Israeli philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel first puts deixis or indexical expressions under the study of pragmatics. He regards deixis as “ the demonstratives or demonstrating sentences with meanings closely relatd to their context” （Suo Zhenyu,2000:39）.According to Levinson, “Essentially deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammatical features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterance depends on the analysis of that context of utterance” (Levinson, 2001:54).C. Fillmore says, “deixis refers to some lexical and grammatical units, and the understanding of these units should satisfy the following condition: the sentences containing these lexical and grammatical units must relate to the social context in order to determine the participants of speech events, the referential relation of their spatial-temporal orientation of realizing the speech events” (qtd, He Zhaoxiong, 2003:175).Langacker sees deix is as “ one that includes some reference to a ground element within its scope of prediction” ( Langacker，2001:126).K.M.Jaszczolt holds that “Deixis is the phenomenon of encoding contextual information by means of lexical items or grammatical distinctions that provide this information only when paired with this context. In other words, it means lexicalizingor grammaticalizing contextual information , that is making it into obligatory grammatical or lexical distinctions” (Jaszczolt, 2004:191).Jiang Wangqi interprets deixis as “ the function of grammatical as well as lexical means relating a piece of language to its context in terms of its users, the time and place of its occurrence, and the people and objects it refers to” (Jiang Wangqi, 2000；11).A Russian linguist puts forward more detailed definition of deixis: “Deixis relatively indicates persons, objects, phenomena and events in context, and the deictic centre of persons, objects, phenomena and events. The referential meaning of deixis refers to all the semantic components of people, space and time relative to their references in context within their lexical meanings. Referential meaning is a kind of complicated structural meaning, which is generalized to indicate the relation between the speaker and the objects in reality indicated by the speaker, and the relation between a certain reference point and the referential objects” (Guo Yukai, 1995:4).These definitions show that scholars agree that deixis is a demonstrative word for pointing, a nd such a form of reference is closely tied to the speaker‟s context. However, up to now there has not yet been a most complete definition of deixis acknowledged by all the scholars. Obviously, it is no easy to generalize the definition of such complicated phenomenon as deixis with one sentence. Guo Yukai (1995:4) points for the understanding of deixis:1.Deixis is meaningful in linguistic system. It is not used to indicate concept, and it has no referential objects. Deixis is just used to indicate a certain relation relative to communication context;2.The determination of the relational relation of deixis in actual utterance is dependent on the contextual factors centered on the speaker;3.The referential factors with which the referential relation of deixis is determined are；1）communicative subject ( the speaker )，2) utterance time, 3)place of utterance, 4) context of utterance;4.All (or part of) the semantic content of deixis shows its indicative feature.The author will not go deeper into this issue since it is not our concern to decide which definition is most proper. This issue is put forward here for the readers who are interested in this topic to make further research on.Different scholars have different opinions about the classifying of deixis. The more rough classification of deixis includes subjective deixis and objective deixis. Subjective deixis has such factors as the speaker, addressee and utterance time as itsreference; while objective deixis has other factors as its reference. Based on the degree of abstractness, K.Buhler (1934) divided deixis into three types: objective deixis, imaginative deixis and anaphoric deixis. Some scholars classify deixis according to the word classes, such as J.Lyons (1977).In Lyons' opinion, deixis can be classified into personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and adverbs, polite wording and form of verbs indicating time. It is possible to categorize deictic words according to sematic criteria such as person reference, place reference and time reference (Grundy, 2000: 27). The more influential classification is made by C.J.Fillmore. According to Fillmore (2003:178), deixis is divided into four types: place deixis, time deixis, social deixis and discourse deixis. Levinson (1983) made some correction on Fillmore's division of deixis, which is regarded as the most popular and complete classification of deixis up to these days, i.e. person deixis, time deixis, place deixis, discourse deixis and social deixis.However, some different ideas arise about the necessary division of social deixis. Social deixis refers to the proper application of social expressions in different situations, such as different addressing forms, expressions to show gratitude and request, etc. This dissertation confines its research to the most familiar deictics, that is, personal deixis, place deixis and time deixis. Deictics may refer to the speaker, the place the speaker in and the time the speaker utters the sentence.References:[1]GeorgiaM.Green.1989.Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers[2]Goddard，A. 1998. The Language of Advertising:written texts.London and New York:Routledge[3]Tanaka,Keiko.1994. 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