A Contrastive Study Of Reference In English And Chinese

Cohesion and coherence have been of great concern in the linguistic circle since cohesion theory was first put forward by Halliday & Hasan in 1976. Scholars at home and aboard have made the multi-level researches about this theory and many researchers found that cohesion has close relationship with coherence, and cohesion is a necessary condition in the text forming. In recent years, it is not difficult to find papers and books concerning cohesion. However, it is noteworthy that most of them in China focus on many cohesive devices in ordinary texts and seldom concern the certain cohesive device in a deep and systematic way. According to the cohesion theory put forward by Halliday & Hasan, reference, as an important type of cohesive devices, refers to the relationship between certain items in a text which can only be interpreted by reference to something else. It plays a vital role in the text forming, and it can make the expression concise and realize the discourse smoothness and coherence. Thus, research of reference will obviously bring a positive effect to the language teaching.Based on Halliday & Hasan's theory of cohesion, the thesis uses the texts in College English by Ying Huilan and their Chinese versions as corpora to conduct a descriptive and contrastive analysis of the English and Chinese reference systems (three general kinds of reference, namely: personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference). We also attempt to find out the differences of the English and Chinese reference systems through the analysis of the Chinese students'use of reference in English learning.The early researches have showed that in terms of the frequency of the use of words, English personal reference is more frequently used than that of Chinese, while in the same case, repetition of nouns is chosen in Chinese.As for demonstrative reference,"this"is less frequently used than"that"in English, but"è¿™"is more frequently used than"é‚£"in terms of the frequency of the use of words in Chinese. Moreover, the use of Chinese demonstrative reference is influenced by psychological distance deeply, while it is closer to the real distance in the use of English demonstrative reference. Only a few differences exist between English comparative reference and Chinese comparative reference. There are comparative degrees of adjectives and adverbs in English, but none in Chinese. We calculate the number of different kinds of reference in the quantitative way, using the data of 50 argumentative essays written by Business English majors of Grade 2004, in College of Foreign Studies, Guangxi Normal University, for the purpose of analyzing the English learners'use of reference. And then we make a qualitative analysis and the findings reveal that many problems exist in the students'use of English reference, especially personal reference and demonstrative reference. This implies that the use of English reference is one of the students'weak points, and it is mainly presented in the following parts.First, it is common that personal reference is shifted frequently. And as for the personal reference, Chinese students prefer using geneneralized exophoric reference to concrete personal...