A Pragmatic Analysis of Place Deixis in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”

Abstract

This paper discusses the practical roles of spatial deixis in the story, Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway. Despite the fact that the story has been widely examined in terms of symbolism and dialogue, little attention has been paid to the role of spatial deictic expressions in meaning construction in a particular narrative context. The research aims at answering the following question: How does place deixis work outside physical reference to inform interpersonal relations and the thematic structure of the text? It is going to determine the types of spatial deixis and examine their uses in the story pragmatically. The paper is based on the qualitative descriptive method with little frequency analysis, which relies on the proposals of deixis put forward by Yule et al. and Levinson et al., the results indicate that spatial deictic expressions are not only applied to denote location but also to create psychological distance, interactional positioning and symbolic opposition. Distal forms are used more often in conflictual dialogue, which is an expression of the emotional disengagement of the characters. The analysis proves that the concept of spatial deixis is a discourse-organizing tool, which adds ambiguity and tension to a minimalist narrative style.