| The present thesis is devoted to a contrastive study of English and Chinese demonstratives from a functional perspective and a cognitive analysis of them. The demonstratives play a decisive role in language communication, thus have always been the focus of study of many linguists and scholars. They compare English and Chinese demonstratives from different perspectives, namely, grammar, translation, and function. What they do can be said to be fruitful, providing a deep insight into the demonstratives in both languages and serving the translation and language teaching as well. However, there are still some issues needed to be further clarified.Firstly, some terms are misused, which makes language learners have but a hazy understanding. Thus, a distinction between these terms is needed. They include: text/discourse, cohesion/coherence, and reference/deixis.Secondly, as we know, semantically, this corresponds with"è¿™", both as proximal demonstratives; that corresponds with"é‚£", both as distal demonstratives. When used as exophoric reference to indicate the concepts of space and time in the real world, this/that and"è¿™/é‚£"do not have much difference between them. But when used as endophoric reference in text, things tend to be complicated. Many linguists have noticed this phenomenon and tried to give some rules to account for this. Among them, Mr. Xu Yulong's study can be said to be a striking one, in which for the first time, the concept of psychological distance is applied in the contrastive study of English and Chinese demonstratives. He points out Chinese demonstratives are more affected by psychological distance. Psychological distance, in Chinese, affects the indication of three kinds of distance: spatial, temporal and textual (here textual distance is only used in its restricted sense, that is, the distance between dialogues in text. In fact, since the three kinds of distance are made within the text, all should be...
|
PDF Full Text Request