An Analysis of Deixis in Cameroon Social Media

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the study of deictic expressions in Cameroon Social Media. It aims to find out the various types of deixis guided by Levinson’s (1983) theory of deixis composed of five types namely personal, temporal, spatial, social and discourse deixis. The study purposively uses a total of 464 francophone Cameroonian chats, 313 from WhatssAp, 118 from Facebook and 33 from. The data Messenger was collected through screenshots. To analyse the data obtained, the researcher applied a mixed method research .The findings show that the five types of deixis abound in all the selected social networks platforms. Besides, it is found that person deixis is predominant in the various posts and the that the second person ‘you’ represents the highest rate of deixis used by Cameroonians in WHAP, FBK and MSG platforms with an overall total of 104 (25.24%), 52 (42.98%) and 14 (48.28%) occurrences respectively. On the other hand, time or temporal deixis follows person deixis, being manifest through deictic words. Nonetheless, place or spatial deixis, attained via adverbs and demonstrative pronouns were also used so as to locate both writer and addressee in space. Finally, discourse deixis falls upon this, these and that, whereas, social deixis involves relational social deixis.