With or without ‘it’: The role of empathetic deixis in mediating educational change

This paper probes into the discursive aspect of educational change. Drawing on the rhetorical perspective that talk is never without an end, the paper shows how two conversing parties use the deixis ‘it’ as a referent to their emotional standpoint regarding the context of a school change. After reviewing theories of ‘emotions’ and ‘deixis’, I will analyze three conversational events in which ‘it’ functions as an empathetic deixis. The paper's main argument is that in the context of educational change, ‘it’, as ‘this’ and ‘that’, may have an operative role in signifying the speaker's emotional detachment from or proximity to the above-mentioned change.