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Abstract Abstract: Pragmatic empathy is one of the psychological mechanisms for achieving mitigation. In discourse practice, pragmatic empathy can be achieved by deictic projection of person deixis. Taking advantage of a database of real scaffolding conversations from Chinese college EFL classrooms, the present study proposes an analyzing framework to reveal how deictic projection of person deixis helps to mitigate the challenge from scaffolding activity to the interpersonal relationship between teacher and students, and thereby helps to achieve the goals of communication. The analyzing framework contains three parameters: types of person deixis; types of deictic projection; and types of illocutionary acts. The result shows that two types of personal deixis are highly vulnerable to projection in classroom scaffolding context. They are first person plural and second personal plural. And the former one witnesses especially high occurrence. The projection of first person pronoun is found of three varieties and frequently co-occur with illocutionary acts of assertive and interrogative. Basing on the findings, the author concludes that the psychological mechanism behind the mitigating function of personal deixis projection is speaker’s active demonstration and defense of his/her subjectivity in social communication.
Key words: pragmatic empathy; person deixis; mitigation; subjectivity; context;
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