A Contrastive Analysis Of The Third Personal Pronominal Anaphora In English And In Chinese

Pronoun refers to a word which may replace a noun or a noun phrase. In this sense, because of its lack of content, personal pronoun is co-referred to a person, a personal phrase or a noun-personal phrase,which is defined as reference in traditional English grammar. Anaphora is a linguistic phenomenon that is widely used in everyday life. Anaphora is a branch of reference, and because the greatest feature of anaphora is that an anaphor must have an appropriate antecedent in the context, anaphora is text-internal.Based on this view of point, this paper aims to reveal the differences in cognitive domains to answer the following questions:(1) What are the anaphoric realization ways in English and in Chinese,especially for the third personal pronoun?(2) Does anaphora of the third personal pronoun in English and in Chinese have the same sentence structures?(3) Does anaphora of the third personal pronoun have the same inclination in English and in Chinese? What are the difference about the frequency, ellipsis and accessibility of the third personal pronoun between English and Chinese?The methodology for the dissertation is both theoretical and empirical. This dissertation is based on Ariel's"the Relevance Theory"and van Hoek's Cognitive Grammar Theory. The thesis studies the characteristics and application of anaphora at clause level, cross-clause level and discourse level. In the research of anaphora at sentence level, Cognitive Grammar Theory and the Accessibility model are applied to give a deeper analysis. Plenty of typical examples from the new reports and literary works are used in research at these three levels. By means of statistical methods, comparisons on different use patterns of anaphora at those three levels are made between English and Chinese.At clause level, there are two kinds of reference: cataphora and anaphora. Anaphora requires an antecedent, and this feature is easier to be found at sentence level. But when anaphora at sentence level is discussed, it is much complicated in several respects. According to van Hoek's"Reference Point Model"Theory, first of all, the pronoun, which is either the object of the verb or the possessive pronoun of the object, takes the preceding full name noun as the antecedent, no matter it is in English or in Chinese. But if the pronoun appears in the preposed modifying phrase, it should be discussed whether the linear order takes effect.Consider anaphora at cross-clause level. In terms of the adverbial clauses, there exist two kinds of sentence structures which use anaphora of the third personal pronoun: the form that a co-referred pronoun in the main clause following the subordinate clause with a noun considered as the antecedent and another form that a co-referred pronoun in the subordinate clause following the main clause with a noun considered as the antecedent. All the adverbial clauses of time in Chinese take the former, while in English more than half of them just use the latter. Secondly, English and Chinese have the same features in the structure of the conjoined clauses. The last but not the least, in English the special embedded clause uses anaphora in absolute structure aimed to modify the whole main sentence.When we analyze anaphora at discourse level, six literary works are selected randomly to demonstrate the difference of anaphora used in English and in Chinese. The frequency and distribution of anaphora of the third personal pronoun (including zero pronouns) in these six literary works are demonstrated in forms of data. After analyzing the data, we can conclude that anaphora is widely used in English as well as in Chinese. But since they are two kinds of distinctive languages, through the discourse analysis of authentic data, this paper tries to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and English in the using of referring expressions as Accessibility Markers.The conclusion drawn from the research has great significance in directing people to understand and use anaphora. It can be concluded easily from the analysis that Chinese and English have the different features of anaphora in clause level, as well as in cross-clause level and discourse level.