A Corpus-based Study Of Personal Reference In English Majors' Narrative Writing

As one important type of cohesive devices, personal reference plays a significant part in textual cohesion. With the publication of Halliday and Hasan'Cohesion in English (I976), many researchers have been working a lot on cohesive devices. This thesis strives to analyze the cohesive function of personal references in English narratives based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory.On the basis of cohesion theory, personal reference in narrative discourse and corpus linguistics, together with Biber's Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English corpus (LGSWE),this thesis devotes to study the characteristics of personal references used in narratives written by sophomore English major students in Taiyuan University of Technology (TYUT), trying to find out what differences of personal references used in narratives compared with native speakers, and the reasons lying behind. Corpus-based quantitative and contrastive analysis is the main research method being adopted.This study was conducted in Taiyuan University of Technology (TYUT). The whole instruction and experiment is conducted in their class and lasts for half a year. First, my tutor Mr. Yu Wansuo asked them to write a narrative article especially on story telling in given time and without any instruction. Second, do training on the students, which include: 1) introduce some narrative writing theories; 2) choose a sample text to make analysis, discuss with the student for errors and correction and help them master narrative writing skill. Finally, write an improved narrative story.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is the general introduction of the research, including the background of the research, the purpose and significance, research question and the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two starts with a literature review on the relevant theories such as, reference, personal reference,narrative discourse and corpus linguistics. Chapter Three introduces the methodology adopted in this thesis. As the data is selected from sophomore English major students in TYUT'and native speakers'corpus, Taiyuan University of Technology corpus (TYUT) and Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English Corpus (LGSWE) are mentioned respectively. Corpus-based quantitative and contrastive analyses are carried out. Chapter Four is the main part of the whole thesis. The data of the corpora is analyzed and the comparison is carried out. Differences and features in the employment of personal references in narratives written by sophomore English majors in TYUT and native speakers are discussed through quantitative analysis. Chapter Five is the conclusion and implication of this study. The possibility of further research will also be mentioned in this chapter.The statistics show that sophomore English majors in TYUT use first person pronoun abundantly in narratives, while native speakers also employ third personal references in addition to their frequent use of first person pronouns. The frequent occurrence of first pronouns is in consistency with the conversational feature of narratives. As far as second person pronoun is concerned, there are no significant differences between different learners. However, the study shows that sophomore English majors in TYUT use more first person pronouns than native speakers do. The reasons for this are manifold. Influencing factors include the low language proficiency in using various sentence structures and the influence of Chinese mother tongue. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), first and second person pronouns are endophoric in special contexts such as letters, and they are cohesive, but third person is inherently cohesive. The statistics reveal that native-speakers use more third person pronouns than sophomore English majors in TYUT do, and consequently, narratives written by native speakers are more coherent than those written by sophomore English majors in TYUT do. Besides these findings, the study also show some significant differences in using extended references such as proper names, full noun phrases. The study shows that sophomore English majors in TYUT have a poor mastery of these extended references. These findings give us significant implication in helping Chinese EFL to improve their narrative writing skills by using cohesive devices properly.