Deictic Expressions In Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale And The Rose

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The analysis is conducted on the basis of the short story written by Oscar Wilde titled “The Nightingale and the Rose”. The subject matter of this paper concerns the deictic expressions occurring in the aforementioned story which are further investigated by the quantitative research taking into account their categorization, strictly speaking, person deixis, temporal deixis, and finally, the spatial deixis. 2. 2 . The analysis The analysis in this paper concerns the frequency of occurrence of the deictic expressions in relation to the whole text, that is to the non-deictic phrases. The data are shown in the form of the numbers presented in the tables, as well as in the form of the percentages in the pie charts. 2.2.1. Deictic expressions alluding to person The subject of the research, that is the Oscar Wilde’s story, includes various person deixis, which may be further divided into subject and object pronouns, possessive pronouns and determiners, and lastly, reflexive pronouns. The first group, that is subject pronouns, contains words as I used twenty nine times, you that reoccurs twenty one times, he appearing nineteen …show more content…

In comparison with the indexicals pointing to the person, there are exactly sixteen deictic expressions emphasizing time in the Wilde’s story, however, those indexicals reappear markedly less often. The first deictic term occurring the most frequently pertains to the will with its twenty three repetitions. Another is all night repeated three times. Subsequent phrases occur only twice, namely, night after night, now, and tomorrow night. The rest deictic words are repeated once, that is, then, suddenly, when, before, this year, would, still, after a time, morning, and at noon. The frequency of usage is presented in the table two below due to the better

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