Intercultural differences between German and Chinese

Fun deixis - you, me, who?

This video is from Jackie Chan's Rush Hour 3. It plays on person (you, me) and discourse deixis (that, what).

Deixis refers to understanding of linguistic expressions which anchor to a specific entities in a particular context. For example, in a sentence like 'you are here!', 'you' may mean Mary, John, Peter, etc., 'here' may mean London, Singapore or Tokyo, and 'are' may be 100 years ago or whenever the moment of utterance is. We, as a third party not involved in the conversation, do not really know. Everything depends on the context.

The above and many comedies follow the same type of word play on deixis. My professor of pragmatics (Prof. Alexander Coupe) introduced me to the original routine coming from the famous Abbott & Costello comedy - Who's first? 

What the British people really mean...

 

This is about pragmalinguistics (a type of communicative competence) for English as a second/foreign language learners. Unlike grammar, it is hard to identify all the cross-cultural deviations (especially when learners come from all corners of the world) and to pin it down in a textbook or to teach in a classroom...  Shame though, because how the language is really used (pragmatics) by native speakers should really be learnt when learning a foreign language