Use of Discourse Deixis in Mechanical Engineering Discourse

The significance of deixis as a pragmatic microphenomenon can be accounted for by its central role in the discussion of the semantics-pragmatics interface. The notion serves as evidence for the interconnectedness of the linguistic units and the context in which they are applied by language users. The present study focuses on the category of discourse deixis and its application in mechanical engineering as a domain of professional discourse. The research aims to demonstrate the pragmatic meaning construction of the discourse deictic expressions in three genres, i.e., an encyclopaedia, scientific articles and ESP textbooks. The research type is a case study approached from the qualitative perspective with elements of a quantitative analysis. The paper reports on the results obtained from three subcorpora that contain 50,000 words each by the application of a frequency analysis – both manual and with the assistance of the Sketch Engine software – and discourse analysis. The findings demonstrate that the most frequently used linguistic unit that can encode discourse deixis is the demonstrative ‘this’. Moreover, ‘this’ is frequently used to indicate an anaphoric reference instead of discourse deixis. Further research can deal with the comparative analysis of the use of discourse deixis in different domains of professional discourse.