A Comparative Study Of It In English And Ta In Chinese

The comparative study of English and Chinese has become a popular andinfluential research focus in the last30years with the rapid development of globaleconomy and the fever of English learning and Chinese learning in the world.Based on the concept of grammatical functions and Halliday and Hasan’s cohesiontheory, this thesis compares the similarities and dissimilarities between it inEnglish and ta in Chinese in terms of syntactic functions, semantic features andtextual features, mostly illustrated with examples from four famous novels andtheir corresponding translation versions–围城，倾城之恋，Jane Eyre and Prideand Prejudice. The thesis also presents the manifestations of it and ta in the eightselected texts, aiming to explore the usage of it and ta in both English and Chinesenarrative discourses.The comparative study of it in English and ta in Chinese and the quantitativeanalysis of3742cases of it and636cases of ta in the eight selected texts elicit thefollowing findings:1. From the perspective of syntactic functions, both it and ta can function assubject and object of the sentence. It can also function as the formal subject andformal object and ta can uniquely be the attributive of a noun phrase. In the eightselected texts, it occurs more frequently than ta, and is more often used as subjectand object. Moreover, the occurrences of it as formal subject and formal objectand ta as attributive are not common.2. From the perspective of semantic features, it is clear that both it and ta cancommunicate subjective meaning. In terms of lexical meaning, both it and ta haveidentical core meaning, but the derived meaning differs. In terms of grammaticalmeaning, it can only refer to the singular form and ta has both singular and plural denotation. In addition, there are more cases denoting the empty reference of itthan that of ta. In the eight selected texts, lexical meaning of it and ta makes upthe most occurrences. Ta mostly bears lexical meaning, but in some cases ta canexpress both lexical meaning and grammatical meaning. However, it can conveylexical meaning and grammatical meaning separately or simultaneously.3. From the perspective of textual features, both it and ta occur in localdiscourse cataphora and sentential cataphora, but it also occurs in discoursecataphora. Both it and ta occur in anaphora across subordinate clauses, coordinateclauses and independent sentences, but only ta demonstrates examples of ellipsisin the selected texts. There are more examples of anaphora than cataphora, withanaphora across subordinate clauses as the major occurrences of anaphora andsentential cataphora as the most frequent type of cataphora.This study deepens the understanding of the functions of it and ta and ispractically significant for the translation between English and Chinese: it and tacan be interactively translated into each other, or translated into their referents forthe aim of cohesion; for the conciseness and terseness of language, it and ta can betranslated into zero.