Abstract

The article presents a contrastive analysis of the use of English and German deictic expressions. Its focus is on the communicative role of these items, i.e., the way in which they are used by authors to communicate effectively with their readers. The analysis tries to combine a qualitative (discourse analytic) and a quantitative (corpus linguistic) perspective by making use of a small corpus containing the endings of 32 English and 32 German texts from the genre popular science. All deictic expressions present in the corpus were manually identified, counted and analyzed according to the function(s) they fulfill in their respective context. The results suggest that deictic expressions are more frequent in German than in English texts. Two (related) reasons seem to account for this finding: first, deictics figure more prominently in the German system of textual cohesion. Second, they were in many instances found to serve as an (optional) instrument for maximizing explicitness, a communicative strategy which is customary in German but not in English discourse.