A Contrastive Study Of The Single Form Of Demonstratives In Chinese And English Versions Of A Dream Of Red Mansions

Taking M.A.K.Halliday's systemic functional grammar,pragmatics and cognitive linguistics as theoretical foundation,the thesis examines and compares the single form of demonstratives(SFDs) used in China's classical novel A Dream of Red Mansions and its English version from the sides of semantic features,pragmatic functions,grammaticalization features and asymmetry of frequency of demonstratives in English and Chinese.It explores the reasons,and probes into the underlying causes of the differences and its theoretical and practical implications.Although they belong to different disciplines,systemic functional grammar, pragmatics,and cognitive linguistics are all on the basis of the principle of utility and meaning of the language,which are on the practicality.Based on the theoretical foundation- "the language in use",this thesis aims at providing an transdisciplinary contrastive study of the single form of demonstratives(SFDs).What's more,this study has an important significance,that is,this research applies the parallel corpus (Hongloumeng Parallel Corpus) to support the systematic comparative study of English and Chinese demonstratives.With the corpus data-A Dream of Red Mansions,the arguments are more practical.In the last three decades,the contrastive analysis in demonstrative pronoun develops very fast,with hundreds of articles focusing on the discussion of deixis.But only few articles concern with the aspect-the relatively more important and wide-spread-the single form of demonstratives "this/that" and"è¿™/é‚£",not to mention the study of the single form of demonstratives used in China's classical literary works A Dream of Red Mansions as an example.All in all,the thesis carries implications for functional,pragmatic and cognitive study and for comparative study of English and Chinese theoretically.Meanwhile,it is an effective attempt of a contrastive analysis of China's classic literary works from the transdisciplinary approach.