Investigating Deixis in Medicine Leaflets

Abstract

Within the field of linguistics, pragmatics is a subfield that focuses on the utilization of language. This article focuses on the ways in which the transmission of meaning is dependent not only on the linguistic understanding of a language user but also on the context of an utterance in terms of the speaker's intention. This research therefore intends to describe the application of deixis in the process of developing medical leaflets. In this research, the questions that need to be addressed are as follows: 1) what kinds of deixis are realized in the medical leaflets? 2) What are the pragmatic meanings of deixis that are used in the medical leaflets, and 3) Which types of deixis are used the most frequently in the data that has been collected? Consequently, the aim of the study is to determine the deixis forms and meanings that are utilized in the medical leaflets. A number of pragmatists, including Levinson, Yule, Mey, Leech, and others, are utilized as a model of the study. With regard to the description of the utilization of deixis in written medical leaflets, this research makes use of both a qualitative and a quantitative approach. Through a random selection process, forty medical pamphlets are selected for collection. It was postulated in the study that the two types of deixis that are most significant in the process of composing medical leaflets are the person and the time. This research comes with a variety of findings that provide evidence that supports the hypotheses that were tested.