Abstract

Second person pronouns functioning as person deixis are found to be used in both Bengali and English language to express the role relationships as well as the interpersonal relationships involved between the participants in conversation. However, the expression of these relationships through the use of second person deixis varies significantly in the two languages as it necessarily involves both linguistic as well as social aspects. Being an Asian language, Bengali has a detailed and somewhat complex system of encoding the role relationship of the participants, their interrelationships, their social status, level of formality and politeness involved, and so on by the use of second person deixis. In contrast, English, a European language, exhibits relatively simple and straight forward ways of encoding the aforementioned issues of conversation. Based on the intuitive observation of the utterances of the two languages, the present study intends to make a comparative analysis of the use of second person deixis in Bengali and English with a view to exploring the extent to which the two languages differ linguistically and pragmatically in their encoding of social information with the use of such deictic expressions.

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