Deictic Shift In ‘Jarire’, A Persian Play

Deixes are language components which define the speaker’s time, place and perspective. By default people assume themselves to be at the deictic centre of the world; but they can also assume other people’s deictic fields or in other worlds they can shift their deictic centre. In this study we’re going to introduce a new method for criticism of dramatic texts, pinpoint the mental processes of readers when reading a literary text and find out how they shift between deictic fields. For this purpose we study quantity and diversity of deictic shifts in two plays of Chista Yasrebi (Iranian playwright) with McIntyre’s (2006) approach. The results conclude 33 shifts in one of the plays and 26 in the other one, most of them along the framing and embedded fictional worlds and also between possible worlds. In simpler words there are 33 and 26 shifts from narration of the narrator(s) to roll play of the character(s), vice versa. These numbers define the process of the readers mind. Also they represent that besides narratives, we can study deictic shift in dramatic texts.