This paper explores the relationship between the use of demonstrative pronouns in deixis and anaphora in the framework of the functional-cognitive theory of language. Part of the international literature suggests that deixis and anaphora cannot be separated from one another (see, in a formal pragmatic framework, Lyons 1977Lyons /1989Levinson 1994), whereas other authors think that those two pragmatic/text linguistic processes are not connected in this manner (see, e.g., the cognitive-functional approach of Marmaridou 2000). The way Hungarian demonstratives work does not support the latter claim. Along with universal characteristics, it can be observed in Hungarian that, in the non-attributive (independent) use of these pronouns, event deixis (a subtype of spatial deixis) exhibits properties that it shares with discourse deixis, whereas discourse deixis leads on to the anaphoric use of demonstratives. In Hungarian, the switchover between the two types of use is clearly associated with perspective; in particular, with the shift from the referential centre to a neutral vantage point.

The paper explores the referential interpretation of narratives through a case study of computer-mediated narrative discourse, a thread of Hungarian stories on an online discussion site. In particular, we are looking to find out what directs the addressee’s attention and how as she attempts to interpret such stories. Adopting the perspective of social cognitive linguistics, we interpret narrative discourses as joint attentional scenes whose interacting participants contribute to the intersubjective construal of referential scenes (including narrative ones) by directing and following each other’s attention. The main results of the investigation are as follows. 1) In the construal of the physical and social worlds of these stories, a key role is played by the deictic relation based on spatial and temporal contiguity which connects the world of the story to the world of the narrative discourse, interpreted as a joint attentional scene. 2) These narrative discourses frequently objectivize, in the form of metapragmatic reflections, both the situatedness of the referential centre (which lies with the storyteller), and the narrator’s subjective attitude to the narrated events.

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This paper offers an investigation of signals of metapragmatic awareness on the basis of the background assumptions of functional pragmatics. In this framework, metapragmatic awareness means the reflexive attitudes of discourse participants to various linguistic constructions and to the cognitive processes and socio-cultural expectations related to them. By employing a variety of metapragmatic signals, speakers can reflect on their own or their interlocutors’ current activity as message senders and/or addressees, or that of third parties, as well as on the organization of the discourse. The paper focuses on the types of metapragmatic signals. The empirical material is provided by two genres of computer-mediated Hungarian communication: thematically unrestricted and thematically restricted topics. As a result of an analysis of two connected samples of 200 and 500 contributions, respectively, fourteen types of metapragmatic signals have been differentiated, depending on what the given reflections are aimed at, and proportions of their types have been compared across the two samples. The analysis confirmed the claim that metapragmatic signals operate in narrative discourses as background items and reflect on the organization of the referential scene in the largest number of cases, whereas in spontaneous written conversations, they are far more in the foreground of attention and tend to refer to some aspect of the shared scene of attention.

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