On the Pragmatic Mechanisms of the Choice of the Third Party Personal Deixis

Based on A Dream of Red Mansions, the present research sums up and analyzes the different types of choices of the third party personal deixis and finds out that the third party personal deixis is picked up on purpose rather than at random and that the principles of power and solidarity fail to provide satisfactory explanations in that the principles contradict each other on some cases and are frequently violated or get out of control on the others. The characteristics of personal deixis, including the egocentricity and deictic mapping such as pragmatic empathy and pragmatic de-empathy, provide better explanations on the pragmatic mechanisms of the choice of the third party personal deixis.