A Comparative Study Of Anaphora In English And Chinese

The study of anaphora has become a focus of many linguists in recent years. Anaphora is often defined as a relation between expressions co-occurring within a text, namely the antecedent and one or more anaphors. The former is, in principle, at least a semantically and referentially autonomous expression, while the latter is an indexical expression of some kind.This paper is mainly a comparative study of anaphors in both English and Chinese language. Following the perspective of pragmatics and cognitive theory-accessibility theory, it gives a deep analysis of anaphora phenomena existing in two languages by illustrating a large amount of examples.Put forward by famous linguist, Ariel, accessibility theory is a concept of cognitive and psychological linguistics. It refers to the degree of promptness to recalling a linguistic unit from human memory system. In Ariel' s opinion, the main characteristic of accessibility theory is its universality. Accessibility theory studies anaphors from cognitive standpoint. Cognition is possessed by all human beings. So it is universal in the study of anaphors phenomenon in various languages despite the fact that different language has different coding method. The second characteristic of accessibility theory is its diverse perspectives in studying language. It is borrowed from psychology, but it's a cognitive concept and belongs to cognitive category. So it is widely acknowledged that studying anaphor from cognitive angle is an advanced method.There exist some distinct differences in the accessibility markers of English and Chinese. In both languages, the low accessibility markers are names and definite descriptions. In English, the high accessibility markers are mainly pronoun whereas in Chinese, the high accessibility are zero pronouns. These differences are due to the different structures of the two languages. Chinese is a topic-prominent language whereas English is a subject-prominent language, so in English, pronouns are more often used instead of zero anaphors.