Third, dubbed the “Queen of All Media”, Oprah Winfrey is regarded as one of the most influential women in the world. Her eloquence and passion win herself great applause in the six commencement addresses. Studies on her speech style in using person deixis, to some extent, provide reference for other speakers in delivering an effective speech.   

On the basis of the above considerations, the following research questions are generated:

(1) What are the conventional and unconventional uses of the person deixis in these speeches? 

(2) What features can be found in the commencement addresses of Oprah Winfrey in her choices of person deixis for unconventional use? 

(3) How are Oprah Winfrey’s intentions realized in the unconventional use of person deixis?

This thesis does a case study of Oprah Winfrey, a famous talk show host in the United States. The studying content includes six speeches delivered in the six commencements she has attended, respectively at Wellesley College (1997), Salem State College (2000), Howard University (2007), Stanford University (2008), Duke University (2009) and Harvard University (2013). With a time limit of 20 minutes, the average number of words of each address is 3500. Qualitative analysis is carried out to differentiate the conventional use from unconventional use. After that, quantitative analysis is to calculate the number of sentences that contains the unconventional use of person deixis so as to reveal the features of the addresser in her choice of person deixis for unconventional use. Specific examples are given to illustrate their actual references and pragmatic intentions.

This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter one presents the research background, significance, research questions, methodology and organization of this thesis. Chapter two gives an overview of previous researches on deixis, person deixis and commencement address home and abroad. Chapter three is a detailed analysis of conventional and unconventional use of person deixis with specific examples to explore their pragmatic intentions. Chapter four sums up the major findings and limitation of the present study and put forward some suggestions for further studies.    

 2. Literature Review

2.1 Previous studies on deixis and person deixis

“Deixis” is a technical term borrowed from the Greek word meaning for “pointing” and “indicating”. Definitions provided by Levinson and Fillmore are considered relatively advanced. Levinson (2001: 54) holds that deixis “has as prototypical or focal exemplars the use of demonstratives, first and second person pronouns, tense, specific time and place adverbs like “now” and “here”, and a variety of other grammatical features tied directly to the circumstances of utterance”, while Fillmore considers deixis as “some lexical and grammatical units that can be understood only when they are related to social context to identify the speech participants and when the spatial-temporal orientation of the speech event”(qtd. from Li, 2008: 12).  

Taking different factors into consideration, classification of deixis varies among scholars. Bühler classifies deixis into three types: objective, imaginative and anaphoric deixis (qtd. from Cheng, 2013). Yule (2000) simply makes a three-part pision of person, spatial and temporal deixis. Based on the categories of Fillmore and Lyons, Levinson (2001) puts forward a more complete and influential classification of deixis including person, place, time, discourse and social deixis.

Compared with various interpretations of the definition of deixis, that of person deixis seems to be more consistent. It “concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event in which the utterance in question is delivered; the category first person is the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself, second person the encoding of the speakers reference’s to one or more addressees, and third person the encoding of reference to persons and entities which are neither speakers nor addressees of the utterance in question” (Levinson, 2001: 62).