A Survey and Description of Deictic terms Usage and Understanding in the language of blind Persian speakers

Document Type : Research

Authors

Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanity, Ferdowsi university of Mashhad.

Abstract

The present paper is to study the usage of Persian deictic terms in the language relation of whole-blind and seeing people from a pure linguistic viewpoint. To do this, deictic terms and their types are firstly presented. Deictic terms as language instrument, have several usages. Because in a language communication between blind and seeing people, one of them has certainly no visual sense and blindness affects language relationship between them, especially usage of deictic terms. On this basis and in order to separate objective deictic terms from non-objective ones, Levinson (1983) category about types of deictic term is used in this paper. Moreover, the Persian deictic terms in language relation between whole-blind and seeing people and potential problems in this regard is described after a 5-month observation of 5 educated blinds. This study shows that all spatial deictic terms, some objective personal, social and temporal deictic terms create problems for blind listener in some aspects. Furthermore, the blind needs to have pre recognized the referent items by touching or listening sense. Since there are some limitation in this regard and specially in recognizing new objects, the blind prefers to less refer its around objects using deictic terms.
 

Keywords

ZABANPAZHUHI (Journal of Language Research)
Volume 3, Issue 5
October 2011
Pages 1-24

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