| This study explores Chinese recipe characteristics and adopts sublanguage techniques to examine the use of anaphors in Chinese recipe discourse. In addition to agentless distinctions and temporal sequence distinctions, predicates in recipes tend to correlate dynamic acts and states resulting from these acts. In addition, logical objects in the left-most position of steps may perform syntactically, as inverted subjects of clauses; semantically, as patientive undergoers of processes; and discoursively as topics of subdivided discourses.;In investigating explicit anaphors, anaphoric forms, such as the pronoun qi 'it;' the numeral and general noun anaphor, such as (1) liao 'mixture (1);' the classifier anaphor, such as meipian 'each slice;' general noun accompanied by a specifier anaphor, such as cicai 'this dish' are recognized. The Chinese language does not use gender, case, or number formally to identify antecedents for anaphors, but does have a fully developed classifier system to signal coreference relations. Anaphor interpretation in Chinese recipe discourse is more conceptually than inflectionally dependent. As for implicit anaphors, zero subjects can occur in co-ordinate clauses, complement clauses and adverbial ones. No zero anaphors occur in the post-verbal position. Chinese recipe structure often reveals procedure from the 'ingredient's point of view' whereas English speakers tend to reveal similar events from a viewpoint which tends to manipulate an ingredient. In Chinese, logical objects in an event may be the syntactic subject of a processing proposition. In English, a logical object remains in syntactic object position. Consequently, Chinese recipes show zero subject anaphors whereas English recipes show zero object anaphors.;In interpreting anaphors, anaphors in recipes mirror sequential changes of the antecedent state. This study suggests that understanding coreference relations in recipe texts is a continuous mental process of recording changes in the referent, rather than a discrete co-indexing process limited to a sentence boundary. Pedagogically, Chinese language teachers should realize conceptual-cultural differences between Chinese and English. They should prescribe surface sentence rules as well as abstract conceptual organization of Chinese sentences. |
