An Analysis of Person Deixis in E-commerce Live-streaming Advertising

Abstract

Deixis is a significant component of pragmatic study and one of its types is person deixis which plays a crucial role in people’s communication. Person deixis is the reference of a person. Flexible use of person deixis can facilitate interpersonal relationships so as to achieve the goal of communication. Live-streaming advertisers’ discursive practices are investigated from the perspective of person deixis in this paper to examine how the anchor uses the various discourse practices to attract consumers and motivate the purchase desire to buy with the way of qualitative analysis. Findings indicate that the discursive practices of first person deixis help construct the unique characteristics of live-streaming anchors and shorten the social distance between the anchors and the audiences; the discursive practices of the second person deixis is a labor-saving way to refer to every audience and make them have the sense of involvement so as to boost sales; the discursive practices of the third person deixis help anchors modify their commodities as well as lead customers’ attention. Theoretically, this paper is an empirical endeavour towards the analysis of person deixis and practically, it reveals the pragmatic realization of person deixis in virtual sales activities so as to be possibly applicable.