The pragmatics of personal deixis in the Belarusian language

This article analyzes the pragmatic potential of personal and possessive pronouns of the Belarusian language as actualizers of personal deixis in dialogical discourse as one of the main categories of dialogical discourse that participates in the formation of the structural and semantic basis of the utterance and carries a significant pragmatic load. It is revealed that pronominal markers of a personal deixis not only indicate the participants of communication, but also perform important pragmatic functions: they act as indicators of changes in the interpersonal and psychological spheres of participants in speech interaction, indicate the size of the social distance between them, established unconsciously or determined by the context of the speech act, facilitate contact between communicants, reflect their group identity. Moreover, they eliminate or introduce imaginary additional participants in the process of speech interaction, enable the communicants to produce a variety of verbal manipulation with consciousness and successfully regulate their relations in the communication process through the implementation of specific tactics and strategies. The emergence of such additional pragmatic functions occurs as a result of the expansion of the primary indexical semantics under the influence of subjectification as one of the directions for the semantic development of deictic pronominal indicators with the occurrence of new functions which reflect the speaker ’s attitude to the surrounding reality.