| At the very beginning, anaphora interested philosophers and logicians. Since 1970s it has become one of the hot subjects for linguists of different schools. In these decades, linguists have explored this subject from different perspectives including syntax, pragmatics and cognitive approach. In the meantime, the contrastive analyses of anaphora in different languages have appeared. However, few of them have done the contrastive analysis of anaphora in Chinese and English systematically. Based on this current state of research, this study is intended to conduct a systematic study of three basic kinds of anaphora in Chinese and English, which are Zero Anaphora (ZA), Pronominal Anaphora (PA) and Nominal Anaphora (NA). And the linguistic academic theses are the solid foundation for our empirical study and we have one about-180, 000-characters data of Chinese and one about-180, 000-words data of English.The overall statistical results are as follows. The total number of anaphoric chains in Chinese is 1799. Among these anaphoric chains, ZA is 523, PA 227 and NA 1049. The total number of anaphoric chains in English is 1349. And among these anaphoric chains, ZA is 226, PA 864 and NA 259. Generally speaking, the percentage of ZA and NA in Chinese is higher than that of ZA and NA in English and PA takes up dominating percentage in English while in Chinese PA takes up the lowest percentage. The detailed findings in our study would be summarized as follows. Firstly, whether in terms of the absolute number or the percentage, ZA in Chinese is used much more frequently than in English, which has further verified that ZA is one kind of anaphora which could reflect the characteristics of Chinese. On the other hand, the percentage of ZA in Chinese is not the highest one among these three kinds of anaphora as expected. Just as Xu Yulong said, in formal language people tend to avoid the use of ZA for clearness in Chinese and our data are formal academic theses, which may account for these results. Secondly, the utilization ratio of PA in English, which is 64.1%, is significantly different from that of PA in Chinese, which is 12.6%,indicating that people tend to use PA for discourse cohesion in English. Thirdly, the absolute number of NA in Chinese, which is 1049, is greatly larger than that of NA in English, which is 259. And the percentage of NA in Chinese, which is 58.3%, is significantly higher than that of NA in Chinese, which is 19.2%.Based on the data of academic theses, this study is intended to make contrastive studies of the differences and similarities of anaphora in Chinese and English. First of all, the analyses of the definition of anaphora and research background are done, and the objectives and significance of this study are generally explained. Then literature review follows, which is a brief account of the previous researches on anaphora in English and Chinese at home and abroad from several perspectives. The emphasis in this part is put on the research of Chinese anaphora and the contrastive study of anaphora in English and Chinese. Next, with the quantitative study of data, the contrastive studies of Zero Anaphora, Pronominal Anaphora and Nominal Anaphora in Chinese and English are conducted in which we present the differences and similarities between Chinese and English and then analyze the underlying reasons. Finally, a conclusion about this study is made, including the major findings and implications, the limitations and some suggestions for future study in this field. This study truly demonstrates the differences and similarities between Chinese anaphora and English anaphora, which would deepen the understanding of discourse characteristics of Chinese and English and could be applied to the fields of language teaching, translation and so on.
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