The Use Of English Referring Expressions In Narratives By Chinese EFL Learners:an Empirical Study

As a means of cohesion, referring expressions play an important role in cohesion and coherence of discourse. In the past half century, influenced by Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English, many scholars at home and abroad researched on the referring expressions from the perspective of discourse cohesion. But most of the studies focused only on the improvement of the theories of referring expressions, but not on their practical application. Narrative, rich in referring expressions, need to be mastered by language learners in order to learn the target language well. Previous studies paid much attention to the generalization of referring expressions but hardly any to its use in a specific style. In addition, few studies dealt with the referring expressions between different languages.Based on the cohesion theory, the study uses multivariate analysis of variance to analyze and study the referring expressions in Chinese narratives, English narratives, and the Chinese EFL learners’English narratives, trying to solve the following three questions:(1) What are the differences of referential expressions between the native English speakers’English narratives and native Chinese speakers’ Chinese narratives? (2) Are there any specifically Chinese linguistic strategies evident in referential expressions of Chinese English narratives?(3) What are the differences of referential expressions between the native English speakers’English narratives and Chinese EFL learners’ English narratives?According to the analysis of referring expressions in36narratives, it is found that there are significant differences between the Chinese narratives and English native speakers’English narratives. For the protagonist in narratives, Chinese uses a lot of names to refer to the protagonist but do not use full noun phrases to refer to the protagonist. On the contrary, English native speakers hardly use any names to refer to the protagonist. Instead, they tend to use full noun phrases to refer to the new information, and pronouns to the given information. Chinese are likely to use few pronouns, but more zero anaphora in their Chinese narratives than English native speakers in English narratives. Meanwhile, apart from the differences of referential strategies in different languages, similar referential strategies may be adopted, that is, when referring expressions are used to refer to subsidiary characters or unimportant characters, both English and Chinese tend to use full noun phrases. The use of referring expressions of Chinese EFL learners is greatly influenced by the interaction of first language transfer effect and second language influence. Though the frequency of using full noun phrases and pronouns in Chinese EFL learners’ English narratives is much higher than in Chinese narratives, they are markedly different from the English native speakers’ English narratives.As a microscopic study of referring expressions in English and Chinese narratives, the findings of the study have both theoretical and practical implications. It also contributes to the discourse teaching in instructed settings. The study has certain limitations in that it mainly uses the quantitative analysis, the data are confined to oral narratives only, and the number of the samples is too small.