Distal’nyj dejksis i epistemičeskaja neopredelennost’ v russkom i kitajskom jazykach

In both Russian and Chinese there is a tendency for non-proximal deictics to correlate with lower degrees of epistemic certainty. This work will concentrate on the Russian conditional connective to and the Chinese conditional connective nà, which share a similar development from distal demonstratives and exhibit similar syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. The main question addressed by this work is how the semantics of distal deictics can account for their interaction with a range of non-factual, hypothetical or less certain environments. In order to explain the correlation of spatial distance with epistemic distance, or how the spatial relationship is transferred to the modal domain, we will draw upon Deictic Space Theory [Chilton, 2014], a cognitive linguistic theory which captures spatial, temporal and modal conceptualisations through a three-dimensional abstract space in which axes represent distance from the speaker's deictic centre.