A Cognitive-Functional Approach To Third Person Cataphora In English And Chinese Narrative Discourse

The present study is a contrastive analysis of third person cataphora in English and Chinese narrative discourse from a cognitive-functional perspective.In accordance with the research purposes, we have raked through 5 English and 3 Chinese novels and gleaned in each language 200 authentic instances of third person cataphora. Furthermore, with a view to obtaining an overall picture of cataphora used in these two languages, a bi-directional translationally equivalent corpus is built up, containing both the English and Chinese originals with their translation in the other language.In this study, the following four types of analyses have been carried out, and interesting results have been obtained:Firstly, based on the defining nature of cataphora and a detailed examination of our data, we find that zero pronoun, null in form and information value, can function as cataphor in both English and Chinese. By adopting许余龙,贺小聃's (2007) system of classification of cataphora, we have also conducted a quantitative analysis of the three types of cataphora, namely discourse cataphora, local discourse cataphora and sentential cataphora, in our English and Chinese corpora. The statistical results show that English and Chinese share a similar distributional pattern of cataphora in terms of frequency of occurrence, with sentential cataphora being the most frequently used one and discourse cataphora the least frequently used one.Secondly, the basic patterns and prototypical configurations of cataphora in English and Chinese narrative discourse have been described in detail. It is shown that four patterns of cataphora can be identified in the English data, namely ? + NP, P + NP, ?+ indefinite expression and P + definite expression. In the Chinese data, however, we can only find two patterns of cataphora, i.e. ? + NP and ? + demonstrative expression. As for cataphora configurations, in the English data a large majority of cataphoric pronouns (including zeros) occur in non-finite clauses, and some occur in prepositional phrases and adverbial clauses. In the case of Chinese, cataphora configurations are more varied.Cataphoric pronouns predominantly occur in -le clauses, and much less so in unmarked verb clauses and -zhe clauses.Thirdly, by adopting the linguistic and content criteria for distinguishing foreground and background information in narrative discourse, we have made an exhaustive analysis of the aspect and syntactic markers in the cataphora instances in our English and Chinese data and found that narrative backgrounding is the crucial factor that motivates the use of cataphora. The verification tests based on our bi-directional translationally equivalent data also provide support for the backgrounding status of the construction types in which cataphoric pronouns appear in narrative discourse.Fourthly, based on Chafe's Activation Cost theory, we offer an account of the rarity of cataphora in general and the distributional pattern of each type of cataphora. We argue that the cognitive cost involved in interpreting different types of cataphora is in inverse proportion to the frequency of their occurrence. The exhaustive analysis of the prominence asymmetry between cataphor and its postcedent in our cataphora instances also corroborates van Hoek's Reference Point account of cataphora and this asymmetry instructs the reader to construe the zero pronoun or pronoun in the sentence initial position as the current topic or as a signal for the termination of the current topic and the start of a new one.