A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Reference Between General English And PIA

Cohesion theory has drawn attention both at home and abroad since the publication of Cohesion in English in 1976. Lots of scholars in linguistic field have done hard work on cohesion from various aspects and many of them get the conclusion that cohesion is essential in text forming. And reference, being one of the important grammatical cohesive devices, makes the expression more concise and coherent. As a result, the study of reference will obviously bring forth positive effects on language learning and language teaching.Basing on Halliday&Hasan's cohesion theory, with the aid of softwares of Antconc and SPSS, the author compares the frequency and distribution of reference in PIA and Brown corpus by way of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The major findings show that all the three types of reference are applied in inaugural address and general English texts. But, there still exist certain differences in the specific distribution of each type of reference. Generally speaking, frequencies of references as a whole in PIA corpus are larger than those in Brown corpus; specifically speaking, demonstrative references in PIA corpus is larger than those in Brown corpus, while personal references and comparative references are less than those in Brown corpus. This result implies that the use of reference is highly associated with register. The author hopes this thesis will help Chinese learners become familiar with cohesion theory, know how to put the theory into practice, and improve their competence of English reading comprehension, writing and translation.